Meander City

Meander City

VOCALS: GERRY KING SOUND: ADAM BLACK STEWART 2026

A journey, a drift through London with a nod to the situationists. The starting point is London Bridge. I’d arrived at my shift on Sunday 4th June 2017, as agency staff in a museum near Borough Market. It was the morning after the first terrorist attack. I was asked if I was ok to work that day, due to the proximity of the previous night’s violence. Regardless, I had to stay as I was only paid for the hours I actually worked.

Terrorist outrages in London this century echo TS Eliot’s Wasteland ‘April is the cruellest month’. London Bridge in June and November present the cruellest months in Meander City. This spectacle, this brutality, very much being the nature of a city, passes and we endure.

Over time the words started to take a life of their own, a rhythm and a constant scratch for a soundtrack, listening for a soundscape to fold into. From the Scanner of Robin Rimbaud to the ambient Americana of Phil Geraldi and the proclamatory delivery of Gil Scott-Heron, all this fed into and coalesced with the particular feel of the Brian Jonestown Massacre track Anemone. That was the sound I suggested to my long time collaborator and friend Adam Black Stewart.