Monday, July 16, 2012

Music Monday: Hilly Fields Songs

Brockley Central has noted what I failed to spot before - that the 2010 video for Stornoway's Zorbing single features a shot of Hilly Fields. In fact the white house that the singer is sitting outside early on is on Hilly Fields Crescent SE4. Much of the rest of is filmed around Surrey Canal Road (SE8) round the back of Millwall. You can see the incinerator on Landmann Way and I assume the cafe is J's (corner of Surrey Canal Road and Juno Way), as you can see the outside of it in one shot. The band are from Cowley/Oxford but the song does include the line 'Send my body out to work but leave my senses, In orbit over south east London' - maybe they met at college and one of them's from round here?



Hilly Fields has at least two songs of its own. Nick Nicely's 'Hilly Fields (1892)' from 1982 is a slice of psychedelia now recognised as a cult classic. As mentioned here before, in an interview at the time he said: '"Hilly Fields is a large park in South London, close to where I live. It's a beautiful place. And the area where I live still retains a lot of the atmosphere of the 1890s - all late Victorian houses, really wonderful. All the songs I wrote are situated in this part of London, Brockley. And Hilly Fields... I used to go there a lot in various stages of high, stoned, tripping, and that's where the song comes from. It's about someone who goes to hilly Fields and then disappears.... and that someone could very well be me, tripping out".


Then there's Lucky Soul's Upon Hilly Fields (2011):



Also from 2011 and filmed on Hilly Fields is the video for My Tiger My Timing's lovely Endless Summer.

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