The Family Cat - Lean On Me I Won't Fall Over

It’s a good job that there aren’t many songs about Cambridge. Or about anywhere else I’ve lived, for otherwise there’s a good chance that they’d have driven me mad. Not because I think they’d be played too much in those locations, but because my brain would perpetually be playing them to me in my head.

London suffers from this problem, or should that be “I’d suffer from this problem if I lived in London”? So far I’ve managed to avoid it by not spending extended periods in the big smoke, but there have been a couple of close calls. First was when I spent a week working in the west end, and stayed in the Sherlock Holmes Hotel. So for five days, I was haunted by Gerry Rafferty performing an endless Baker Street gig.

Since then, I’ve picked up a few other location-associations in the captial. If I alight at Waterloo station then I get a Waterloo Sunset, regardless of the time of day; but I think that’s better than being defeated by ABBA. On another hotel stay I was round the corner from Berkeley Square, so I could continually hear nightingales singing. Thankfully I’m not tormented by nursery rhymes if I’m in the vicinity of London Bridge…

Whilst I can keep the duration of the affliction short, I quite enjoy it. It’s nice to be reminded of favourite tunes just because of where you’re visiting, so for now at least, the start of the tube journey at Kings Cross (having just arrived from Cambridge) is brightened by the song surrounding the thought that I may be “stuck in a tunnel on the Hammersmith and City line”.

For those of you who aren’t fans of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, the line is from their song Lean On Me I Won’t Fall Over, and they very generously provided this cover by The Family Cat on their Glam Rock Cops single. Better than their own version, I’ve always thought.