south london songs Archives

Featured local business - Clubtek

Forest

SE23

Hill

I was already a regular visitor to Clubtek’s DJ shop when it was in Penge, but now they're even handier in Stanstead Road, just a few doors down from Shannon’s Garden Centre - another old favourite. It’s by no means just for DJs and bands...

Light Perpetual – remembering the New Cross V2 disaster

Feb

2022

An eye catching, if slightly storm frayed billboard advert in New Cross Road announces the paperback publication of Francis Spufford's novel 'Light Perpetual'. Spufford has been teaching creative writing at Goldsmiths since 2008 and the novel is directly inspired by events in New Cross Road. As he explains in the book, 'for the last twelve ...

Joy Crookes – South London Songs

Nov

2021

Joy Crookes at Queens Road, PeckhamSinger Joy Crookes has a new album out, Skin, and very good it is too. She's been compared to Amy Winehouse, but she has a great voice of her own and her songs are rooted firmly in 2020s London. Joy grew up at Elephant and Castle and her songs reference ...

Music Monday: The Battle of Lewisham 1977

Aug

2021

Long time New Cross balladeers Ceri James and Mark Sampson have collaborated on a new single, 'The Battle of Lewisham 1977', released last week on the anniversary of the historic anti-National Front demonstration in New Cross and Lewisham (see lots of previous posts here for background to this)Syd Shelton's iconic image from the 'Battle of ...

Music Monday: Elephants and Castles – Song for the Birds

May

2021

We've featured some of Elephants and Castles' South London-tinged songs here before, including Concrete Love (filmed in the now vanished Elephant and Castle subways) and The World's Greatest Complainers, filmed in Jenny's cafe in Deptford.Their latest single, Song for the Birds, was inspired by hearing birdsong down Deptford High Street during lockdown 'so we wrote ...

Music Monday: Down on Deptford Creek by The Alan Tyler Show

Dec

2017

Alan Tyler was the lead singer of The Rockingbirds, who in their early 1990s indie/country rock hey day put out a couple of albumns and a series of singles and EPs on Heavenly then Cooking Vinyl records. A couple of years ago the Alan Tyler Show recorded their song 'Down on Deptford Creek':The water’s rising with ...

Cutty Sark – Camberwell Now

Apr

2017

Last weekend 40,000 people including both myself and the world's greatest endurance runners ran round the Cutty Sark in the course of the London Marathon. The week before thousands more were in the area for the Tall Ships festival. Since the ship was first put in in dry dock in Greenwich in 1954 it has ...

Music Monday: Steven Ball – Collected Local Songs

Jun

2015

Steven Ball's Collected Local Songs, released in February, is an album that is as local as it gets in terms of Deptford. Ball describes it as 'a collection of songs of quotidian and local reflection, mostly constructed from everyday language, observations, overheard conversations, encounters, signs, community notices, announcements, phrases from historical texts about Victorian social ...

Lewisham McDeez

Nov

2014

Lewisham McDonalds gets its dues at last in this grime track from Novelist - 'I wanna sit down with my fillet-o-fish bruv'

Knocked ‘Em in the Old Kent Road

Feb

2014

Former Hollywood child star Shirley Temple (1928-2014) died this week. Once upon a long time ago she sang a South London song in 'The Little Princess' (1939), loosely based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Fallen on hard times as a servant girl, she searches the Veterans Hospital for her missing father, entertaining the ...