London Underground in Popular Culture - Music

Music

• The Who's song Who Are You included, "I took the tube back out of town" and "I staggered back to the underground."
• Nick Drake's song Parasite included, "Sailing downstairs to the Northern Line, watching the shine of the shoes."
• Duffy wrote a song about love set at Warwick Avenue station on the Bakerloo line. Lines in the lyric include "meet me by the entrance to the tube" and "it's departed, I'm broken hearted"
• Amateur Transplants has written and performed a song, also called "London Underground", which deals with many of the gripes commuters encounter while taking the Tube. This has also been incorporated into a flash animation.
• Paul Weller of the band The Jam wrote the song "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight".
• Cry, the second single from Alex Parks, features scenes from Charing Cross and Green Park stations in its video.
• The system features heavily in the video of Howard Jones' hit "New Song"
• The 1950 song The Underground Train written and performed by Lord Kitchener describes the practical difficulties faced by post-war Afro-Caribbean immigrants to London in understanding the complexities of the tube network.
• The song Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks features the line, "Millions of people swarming like flies round Waterloo Underground".
• Donovan's song Sunny Goodge Street, on the album Fairytale, opens at Goodge Street Station.
• UK 60s band Mood Reaction had a hit with the song "All Change For The Bakerloo Line" as did The New Vaudeville Band with "Finchley Central", both using tube station names in the title.
• Before renaming themselves Edwards Hand, the late-60s pop duo made up of Rod Edwards and Roger Hand went by the name of Piccadilly Line.
• The inner cover of the album Modern Life is Rubbish by Blur features a painting of a dejected looking Blur sitting inside London Underground 1983 Stock with its famous spring grab handles hanging from the roof.
• The song Clark Gable by The Postal Service contains the line "I was waiting for a cross-town train in the London underground when it struck me".
• The song Lean On Me I Won't Fall Over by Carter USM contains the lines "Causing chaos and delay on the underground" and "Stuck in a tunnel on the Hammersmith and City line". The Final Comedown by the same group contains the lines "I've looted and I've begged / on the tubes of The Bec and Broadway".
• The song Dirty Epic by Underworld contains the lines "All I could see was Doris Day/in a big-screen satellite/disappearing down the Tube hole on Farringdon Street."
• The Bloc Party song Waiting For the 7.18 appropriately declares the Northern Line as "the loudest."
• The video for the Feeder single Suffocate was filmed in Monument tube station
• The intro to the song "Deadwing" by Porcupine Tree features a synth line played over ambient noise recorded from the London Underground. At 0:35, it is possible to hear the phrase "Mind the gap" in the background before the guitars start playing.
• The Mika song Blue Eyes contains the lines "Your heart got broken, On the underground, Go find your spirit, In the lost and found."
• The video for the Suede song Saturday Night was filmed at a disused Piccadilly Line platform at Holborn station.
• The video for The Prodigy's Firestarter song is filmed in an abandoned tunnel on the Aldwych branch of the Piccadilly Line.
• The closing track of Belle & Sebastian's album The Life Pursuit is called "Mornington Crescent".
• The song Fifty Two Stations by Robyn Hitchcock states that "there's fifty-two stations on the Northern Line". The correct number is actually fifty.
• "A Poem on the Underground Wall", a song about a graffiti artist in the Underground, was featured on Simon & Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
• 853-5937, a 1987 single by English Pop group Squeeze contains the lyric "She's in Mill Hill, I'm in Bermondsey, it's the end of the Earth on the Northern line".