Mother City

This is my personal ‘Driving home for Christmas’. I think everyone has a special relationship with the place they grew up. Because that’s when we form our understanding of the world, the place we grew up is what we think the world is like. It is reality, normality, and we probably read those expectations onto everywhere else. I think of it like the start of Civilisation II, or Command and Conquer, when your one man stands in a patch of light on a king size duvet of darkness. By the end of the game, you may have opened up the whole world, but no other patch is as special as your first city, your first bit of ground. My first city is Southampton.

It’s not a big city and it’s not a small city. You can count our famous sons on one hand:
· Isaac Watts (wrote a brilliant song, when I survey the wondrous cross),
· Harry Hill,
· and Craig David (who I saw playing goal keeper in the newsletter of the dodgy boys school over my road).

A lot of the city was bombed flat in World War Two (we invented and built the Spitfire), so there’s hardly any interesting old buildings; or even tall buildings. The main marks on the skyline are 60s tower blocks, like giant grey arrows marked ‘for Poverty, see here’. I sometimes felt like half the city was a council estate. Most of the yuppies and upper middle families travel in from suburbs all round, over the M27 ring-motorway.

I tried to give some friends a guided tour once. In less than 2 hours we were in John Lewis coffee shop watching them try to screw together IKEA; and I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. To me, it’s the sort of place you live, making your own entertainment; not a holiday destination. Our football club have always been a bit rubbish; history and culture are thin on the ground; we’ve got broken families and teenage pregnancy and unemployment, substance addictions and functional substance addictions (‘living for the weekend’), 20000 Poles scraping a living (apparently ‘Polish shop’ isn’t a place to take your shoes), an official roads department policy called ‘managed deterioration’... but ‘the best shopping in the south.’

Hm. As I’ve said, where you grow up defines your view of the world, but I do feel that this is basically what our country is like. So, I may be singing to Southampton, but I’m also singing for your hometown. Even if it’s Pompey.

Just so you know I’m not slagging like a stranger, but like a member of the family: I was in Sydney with my great friend Matt when the massive cruise liner Queen Mary 2 slid into dock beneath the Harbour Bridge. Thousands came to see and snap. ‘What an amazing ship.’ ‘What wonderful place could she have come from?’ I looked up at the white letters on her prow and grinned. SOUTHAMPTON.

You know you're from Southampton when...

Christmas is for life, not just for Christmas. The new album: www.myspace.com/thescatcat