50 songs of the British Isles

Oops

If we're going the punning way then:

"Kent get you out of my head"
"Happy Perthday"
"Better the Devon you know"
"Avon is a place on Earth"
"Under Cheshire"
"Cumbria mi lord, Cumbria"
"It's my Fife"
"We don't Orkney more"
"Mollusc in Tyrone"

Da Doo Durham

Kent (by Salad)

Cumbria on feel the Noize

The Red Dorset

It's Grim up Northumbria

*subject to the popular will

"Norfolk tha Police"

"Go West Midlands"

"Warwickshire - what is it good for?"

"Another Brick in the Cornwall"

Young, Dumfries and full of Cumberland"

Too drunk to Suffolk
Bedfordshire Davis Eyes
Devon Knows I'm Miserable Now

What non-puns other than "Cumberland Gap" are there?

I think dropping the -shire from Shropshire is a bit much, Madchen.

I wish Robin or Daf Moore would pop up with lots of folky nonsense that would might answer the question properly.

No need to worry about the "-shire" bit, e.g. any song with 'cardigan' in the title will do for Cardiganshire.

Pinefox - I suppose I haven't got anything against music about the British countryside in principle. I just haven't heard much evidence that it's very popular. And I used the term 'rock and roll' to emphasise my point. I mean rural rock's fine when it's going on about Highway 61, but the A24? As I'm not the first to point out, this doesn't have quite the same resonance. No doubt you're going to tell me you've recently recorded a song suite about the home counties entitled 'Albion Matters' or something.

There was a reason this question was posted on ILE and not ILM, but I've forgotten what it was now.

"Brecon Up Is Hard To Do" - Neil Sedaka
"The Ayr That I Breathe" - The Hollies
"Essex Dogs" - Blur

However, do marches count?

Sussex by The Sea? The Licolnshire Poacher?

But prolly won't work as I am a poor learner

I'm fairly sure that this isn't true, though the Flint thing does ring a bell. I'll do some googling in a minute. Still, Cambridgeshire, Warwickshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Somerset, Staffordshire and Gloucestershire also changed their borders at that time and no-one saw fit to change their names.

Serious answers.

Where Norfolk Meets Lincolnshire - Trembling Blue Stars

End Of The Surrey People - Vic Godard

William Derbyshire - Billy Mahonie

Thankfully Not Living In Yorkshire It Doesn't Apply - Dexys

Or if we can ditch the -shire then there's Bob Dylan's "Oxford Town" (cheating) or Smart Went Crazy's "Wilt" (really really cheating). Speaking of cheating, Braid have a song called "Collect From Clark Kent".

More painfully bad puns: Suffolk Little Children, O Cornwall Ye Faithful, Nights In Isle Of Wight Satin, Somerset Babe, Devon Is A Place On Earth, and anything by Devon Townsend, Chris Cornwall, Lee Dorset, or WolfsBANES ha ha haaarrrr *sound of gunfire* *thud*

Don't mind me, I'll learn to read one day.

Pinefox: I hear what you say though I don't like the term "rock'n'roll" anyway. Mind you, given where Dastoor earns his money and the amount of unqualified shite presented as truth on Page 5 of the tabloid supplement thereof today, can anyone really be surprised? I rather took his comments as another attempt to wind me up, and by those criteria, he can count them as a success.

There's a song (Fairport Convention did it, that's all I know) called "The Hexhamshire Lass" - Hexham in Northumberland surely never had a county centred around it?

checks for unqualified shite....

... appears to be a story about the World Toilet Summit.

... [thinks: hmm.. that's odd. I'll take Robin's word for it]

[clicks] A-ha! His comments were written yesterday and he's not complaining about the accuracy of the toilet report at all. Hmm, yesterday's p.5 G2 has the continuation of a story about Marjan the Kabul lion, the Tamworth Two and Blackie the donkey For which I did some research, so I hope it isn't all 'shite' (though I don't quite see how it could be qualified). Maybe he's talking about the other thing on the page: some columnist pontificating about anti-urban responses to 9/11 from the likes of Robert Crumb. Ah yes - this must be it:

"Rural paradise lies in the past. The anonymity of the metropolis creates space for uncontrolled adventures, beyond the bounds of custom and tradition. Country life, on the other hand, is based on continuity, and those who set themselves up as guardians of tradition, authenticity, and purity of blood or culture, hate the city as the sink of rootlessness, material greed, sexual wantonness, and cultural artificiality."

Oooh - you don't want to say that Mr Buruma! To be fair, Robin, I think what he's doing here is characterising a certain approach to the countryside rather than the countryside itself. It's not far from my mum's approach, for example. You might not like it but that doesn't mean it isn't emo doesn't exist.

I rather took his comments as another attempt to wind me up

Not at all. I am still interested as to why there seem to be so few rock/pop songs with British counties in their title (or even lyrics).

i. Maybe the nations of the union are more equivalent to US states. But are there even that many rock songs banging on about Wales and Scotland? Maybe there are I'm thinking of that dreadful Catatonia song. ii. More importantly, is is fair to say that even if we ignore the county names red herring, songs set in rural Britain are very rare compared with rich heritage of songs rooted in rural America? And if so, why?

The size thing comes into play here again as well: a big city is never far away in Britain and there are no wide open wildernesses. Any rural bands migrate to cities quickly here and British countryside they might have left behind seems small and twee compared to the American version, and very very un-rock and roll. So the lyrical themes in the US songs seem ridiculous when transplanted to the UK and stripped of their glamour of otherness, and so the songs don't get written.

This is of course arrant toss, unless I'm restricting my argument to England. The whole of the Scottish Highlands fall under the category of wilderness and have a definite granduer about them. Perhaps this explains the existence of yer stereotypically blustering big Celtic rock (where Celtic always = Scottish/Irish but oddly not Welsh).

Much of the US isn't wilderness of course, it is awning non-stop farmland. Large scale but not altogether different to much of our farmland. After all the notion of places being near one another only really counts post-railway revolution.

"(Hood) write a hell of a lot of rural songs (and then get some Anticon guys to rap on them)" - I think Ricky's just made the point for me. "Any rural bands migrate to cities quickly here" - not always, but the point is that they're culturally urbanised from the beginning, as you yourself prove. "inward looking folk rock scene" - get your point but you can't tell me the Pentangle didn't have a Wilsonian modernism right at their core.

Dastoor - "a certain approach to the countryside": I'm not arguing with this, just wondering why the press often acts as though it is the only approach out there. To be fair, though, the smartbombs should be going straight to Kensington and Canada Square. Farringdon Road remains a heartland of intelligent modern thinking by comparison with all other UK papers bar the Independent.