In Popular Culture
Dire Straits songwriter Mark Knopfler said in a television interview that the Spanish City held special significance for him as the first place he ever heard loud rock 'n' roll. Dire Straits refer to it in their 1980 song "Tunnel of Love": "Girl it looks so pretty to me / Like it always did / Like the Spanish City to me / When we were kids." For years the song was the unofficial theme song for the fairground, played every morning when the park opened.
Sting (Gordon Sumner), who was born near Newcastle, wrote in his memoir that he whiled away afternoons and evenings in the Spanish City's amusement arcades when he should have been studying for his A levels.
Spanish City (2002) is a novel by Sarah May, set in the fictional north-east town of Setton, home to an amusement park called the Spanish City. Sections of the Spanish City fairground feature in the video that accompanied Tina Cousins's song "Pray" (1998). It also makes a brief appearance in the film The Likely Lads (1976).
Read more about this topic: Spanish City
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)