Wednesday, 18 May 2011

80s Life In A Northern Town

This 1980s YouTube video by Dream Academy shows some fascinating footage of Hebden Bridge in the 1980s. The video featured in an interesting post on the Blog: There are Places I remember Songs About: Life in a Northern Town. Geoff, the writer of the piece, includes the following paragraph about Hebden Bridge:

In 1985 there was a hit by another one-hit wonder act, Dream Academy, also with an apparently generic 'northern' theme : Life in a Northern Town. It is a strange song, very oblique and perhaps not about the north at all. The original video accompanying the track was shot in Hebden Bridge, definitely a northern town: a former mill town in the Pennine hills of West Yorkshire and now a haven for artists, writers, New Age-ists, alternative practitioners, a literary treasure trove at the Book Case bookshop and a town once described by the British Airways in-flight magazine as the '4th funkiest town in the world'. The lyrics also start off as though placing the song in a northern setting, with the image of a Salvation Army Band and children drinking lemonade. However, by all accounts, Life In a Northern Town was written as a tribute to singer/songwriter Nick Drake, mainly associated with Warwickshire and Cambridge, so the exact meaning of the lyrics remains obscure.

There follows a long thread about the post, including more discussion of our town.

Thanks to Felicity of The Book Case for drawing our attention to this