Bleak regions and inclement skies (3 disc mix)

Beware of near-endless liner notes!

It's finally finished! I don't remember when I started this mix, sometime during late summer, I think, and it's been excrutiating trying to find songs, but it's all done now.
The idea is quite simple, songs with names of British towns (or cities) in the title.

Rules:
* The songs doesn't have to BE ABOUT the town but...
* It does have to feature the town name in the title. No allusions, not even mentioning it in the lyrics. It has to be in the title.
* Only one song per town/city. Even London.
* Songs where the town name is part of a word (and not a word itself) are not accepted (such as The Small Faces Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire).
* It cannot be an artist with the same name as a town. (No Belinda Carlisle etc.)
* Even if the songs is about a different town (or other place) of the same name, it's alright (Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square, Exeter, Rhode Island). Not accepted: New York substituting York.
* Football chants/songs are not accepted.
* In cases where the name of the town can also mean something else, it has to be pronounced the same as the town name (Arabian Derby is okay, Reading Time With Pickle is not).
* "Live in/at..." doesn't qualify.
* The song (and title) has to be in English.
* Finally, they have to fit in. Most of the songs not included here are left out for that reason.

All songs feature names of towns/cities in England, Scotland, Wales and on the Isle of Wight.
There are no songs on here from the Orkeys, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands, reason being I couldn't find any songs. I excluded Northern Ireland simply because I didn't feel like including it (it's my mix and I do what I want).

Disc 1.
1. Indigo Girls - Leeds
2. Josh Rouse - Sparrows Over Birmingham
3. As Tall As Lions - Ghosts of York
4. Crowded House - Newcastle Jam
5. Jennifer O'Connor - Exeter, Rhose Island
6. Bedouin Soundclash - St. Andrews
7. Jethro Tull - Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square
8. Nouvelle Vague - The Guns of Brixton
9. The Loud Family - Inverness
10. John Williamson - Salisbury Street
11. Robyn Hitchcock - No, I Don't Remember Guildford
12. Joanna Newsom - Swansea
13. Catatonia - Arabian Derby
14. Patrick Wolf - Penzance
15. John Vanderslice - Plymouth Rock
16. Chumbawamba - Hull or Hell
17. Simon & Garfunkel - Rose of Aberdeen

Disc 2.
1. Val Doonican - Durham Town
2. Arab Strap - The Beautiful Barmaids of Dundee
3. Telepopmusik - Brighton Beach
4. Kina Grannis - Cambridge
5. Pink Floyd - Southampton Dock
6. Gordon Lightfoot - Ballad of Yarmouth Castle
7. Hue and Cry - Mother Glasgow
8. Dolly Parton - Down From Dover
9. Eels - Manchester Girl
10. Badly Drawn Boy - Stockport
11. Pinetop Seven - Ten Thousand to Carlisle Came
12. Focus - Elspeth of Nottingham
13. Marianne Faithfull - Scarborough Fair
14. Eliza Carthy - Worcester City
15. Eric Johnson - Bristol Shore
16. Daniel Wylie & Cosmic Rough Riders - Glastonbury Revisited
17. Ooberman - Angel of Bradford
18. Martyn Joseph - Cardiff Bay

Disc 3.
1. The Proclaimers - Sunshine on Leith
2. Mark Gorvenor - Dorchester Girl
3. Patrick Wolf - Teignmouth
4. Jarvis Cocker - From Auschwitz to Ipswich
5. The Waifs - London Still
6. Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians - Winchester
7. Honeybus - She Sold Blackpool Rock
8. The Fall - Edinburgh Man
9. Godspeed you! Black Emperor - East Hastings
10. Waterson : Carthy - The Oxford Girl
11. June Tabor - The Battle of Otterburn
12. Karen Mulcahey - The Learning of Lancaster
13. Pants Yell! - Southend-on-Sea
14. Doves - Shadows of Salford
15. Poachers Too - Kirkcaldy
16. Monkey Swallows the Universe - Sheffield Shanty
17. Cilla Black - Liverpool Lullabye

http://s3.amazonaws.com/lefora-attachments/site/42352/attachments/20081218/Britain.jpg

Things I learned while making this:
* There are more songs with London in the title than there are of all other British towns put together.
* Surprising: apparently Coventry has no songs written about it. Not surprising: apparently neither does Middlesborough.
* In the Oxbridge battle of songs (number of songs), Oxford won hands down.
* Nearly all towns in England have the suffix -mouth, -ster (especially -chester and -cester), -ich, -bury -ford or -ton.
* There are fewer hyphem-towns (Southend-on-Sea, Weston-super-Mare, Stratford-upon-Avon) in Britain than I thought. That is a shame.
* There are many times more songs - though none fit here - with Carlisle (population almost 72,000) in the title than Newcastle(-upon-Tyne, population almost 190,000).
* The same is true for Blackpool (population 142,000) vs. Manchester (population 458,000).
* Sunderland AFC have a lot of chants. So do Newcastle United, Glasgow Rangers and Leeds United.
* Despite being home to the two largest music festivals in the country, Glastonbury and Reading aren't very popular with songwriters.

I wanted to include Joanne Crabtree's Portsmouth Dock, Tom Giordano's Gloucester Cove and Tall Poppies' St. Ives but unfortunately couldn't get any copies with good sound.
Nearly all songs that did make it on here have been edited in some way (usually cutting part of the end).

Special thanks (as usual) to my knights in shining armour: doowad, avocadorabbit and barrydali.
I don't think Britain's got bleak regions and have no problems with the weather there, the title comes from Phillis Wheatley's poem To a Gentleman on His Voyage to Great-Britain.