This week, Tony and I Hit the North (stay tuned for more on that)! Lancashire is a ceremonial county in North West England, and is bordered by Greater Manchester. Cumbria, North and West Yorkshire, Merseyside, and the Irish Sea. The county has a long tradition of music making, and has been an important centre for both folk music and popular music. On the show tonight, we explored some of the best that Lancashire has to offer. (Note, we have included Salford as a part of Lancashire, despite the 1974 creation of Greater Manchester and subsequent boundary reorganisation).
Gracie Fields & Ewan MacColl
If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked A Cake is a song written by Al Hoffman, Bob Merrill, and Clem Watts and published in 1950; Eileen Barton‘s recording from the same year peaked at number one on Billboard. In the same year, the song was recorded by Rochdale native Gracie Fields, whose version was used on a TV ad campaign for Rightmove in 2007. Fields was a British actress, singer, and comedian. She was born Grace Stansfield over a fish and chip shop owned by her grandmother in Molesworth Street, Rochdale, and went on to become the highest paid film star in the world in 1937. She reportedly never lost her strong Lancashire accent, and was known affectionately as Our Gracie and The Lancashire Lass.
Ewan MacColl (born James Henry Miller) was a British folk singer-songwriter, folk song collector, labour activist and actor born in Broughton to Scottish parents. MacColl was one of the originators of the 1960s folk revival in the UK, and collected hundreds of traditional folk songs, including the version of Scarborough Fair later popularised by Simon & Garfunkel. As well as Dirty Old Town, the song that MacColl is best known for is The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, which became a major international hit for Robert Flack in 1972. MacColl wrote The First Time in 1957 for singer Peggy Seeger, with whom he recorded the song in 1962. Ewan was also father to Kirsty MacColl, who was his daughter from his second marriage.
Jethro Tull & The Fall
Locomotive Breath was released by Jethro Tull on their fourth album Aqualung in 1971. The song was written by principal composer, singer, and flautist Ian Anderson, and is meant to conjure the chugging rhythm of the “runaway train of population growth and capitalism”. Locomotive Breath was recorded largely via overdubs, as according to Anderson it didn’t “work” when the band attempted to play it live during rehearsal. The song initially did not chart upon release in 1971, but a later 1976 single release reached number 59 on the Billboard charts and number 85 in Canada. Jethro Tull were formed by Anderson in 1967 in Blackpool, Lancashire, and take their name from an eighteenth-century British agriculturalist.
The Fall were an English post-punk band, formed in 1976 in Prestwich by founder, vocalist, and Broughton-native Mark E. Smith. The band emerged outy of the late ’70s Punk movement, but underwent nuymerous personnel and stylistic changes until Smith‘s death in 2018. The Fall never achieved mainstream success beyond a handful of minor hit singles in the late ’80s and ’90s, but maintained a strong cult following. The band were incredibly prolific, and released 31 studio albums, plus dozens of live albums and compilations. Hit The North was one of the few Fall singles to chart (no. 57 on the UK Singles Chart), and was released in 1988 during the ‘Brix Smith years’ – the period after guitarist Brix Smith joined in 1982. The song was produced by Simon Rogers, who made use of a new Sequential Circuits Studio 440 (a combined drum machine and sampler), and written by Rogers, Mark E. Smith, and Brix Smith.
Chumbawamba & Maimuna Memon
Chumbawamba were formed in Burnley in 1982, and disbanded in 2012. They are best known for their 1997 single Tubthumping, and for their anarcho-communist political leanings. Pass It Along from their ninth album WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mocks gated communities and the lack of public spaces, as well as Microsoft and Microsoft founder Bill Gates; the chorus is based on the Microsoft slogan “Where do you want to go?”. The band recorded an alternative mix of the song entitled “MP3 Mix“, which is essentially a sound collage that samples from and critiques artists who opposed file sharing including Metallica, Eminem, Dr. Dre, The Beatles, and Madonna. In 2002, General Motors expressed interest in using Pass It Along in an advertising campaign, and offered a reported £70,000 for the rights. Chumbawamba, although notably resistant to such approaches, agreed. The band then donated all the proceeds to two charities, who in turn used the funds to finance an aggressive information and environmental campaign against General Motors…
Maimuna Memon is an actor, singer, composer, and playwright born in Preston to an Irish mother and a Pakistani father. She spent her early childhood in Darwen, Lancashire, before moving to Australia; Memon returned to the UK aged 18 to study at the Oxford School of Drama. She has won a Laurence Olivier Award for her performance in the musical Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, and was previously nominated for her role in Standing at the Sky’s Edge. Insomnia (2023) is a song that features in Memon‘s self-written one-woman show Manic Street Creature, which follows Ria, a young musician who moves to London.
Jethro Tull vs Eagles
Our soundslike this week explored some harmonic similarities between We Used To Know by Lancashire locals Jethro Tull (1969) and Hotel California by Eagles (1976) – both also feature extended guitar solos! As usual, however, the similarities are coincidental.
Lancashire Quiz
For our quiz this week, you heard famous songs written by at least one Lancastrian – guess the artist and song!
As always, find the show and blog at joebennett.net/5live, with occasional Instagram extras at @joebennettmusicology. With a new show comes a new Spotify mega-playlist, which contains all songs featured on the show:
And you can still listen to our old mega-playlist here.
- Words: Joe Bennett, John Pierce O’Reilly
- Audio production: Joe Bennett, Rafi Waters
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