Geordie: A Song Itinerary

A doomed poacher travels through time and space

At the start of this year, as I reflected on where Songs and Objects had been in its first couple of months and where it might go, I identified ‘Song Itineraries’ as one of the strands I’d like to pursue. As I wrote then, ‘This is where I take a particular song and follow it on its journey through multiple performances, recordings, reworkings and other objects it might bring into being’.

It’s an idea I’ve long been drawn to and several of my previously published texts have included song itineraries. I’ve also used the idea in classes I’ve taught, taking students though different historical contexts by following the thread of a song’s journey through time and space. Here, on Songs and Objects, I’ve used the idea in my posts on ‘These Foolish Things’—a song I approached from several angles to sketch out the parameters of what my current writing is mostly about—and the afterlives of ‘Jolene’ (a thread that needs updating thanks to Beyoncé).

That January post also contained a song itinerary of sorts as it switched into an account of ‘January Man’ as part of another of my planned series, ‘A Song for Every Season’. I had planned to do another seasonal post in early April, just over three months from the last and with so many songs I’d like to talk about in relation to April, Easter and Spring. That moment passed, firstly because I went away over Easter and put writing aside for several days; secondly because I found myself wanting to write another song itinerary; finally, and happily, because I put writing aside again in mid-April while I got married and went on honeymoon.

Now I’m back, and back on the song itinerary idea. This one’s about ‘Geordie’, the traditional folk ballad that, depending on which historical account one reads, has its origins in England or Scotland around three to four hundred years ago. It’s a song I’ve known in many forms over my listening life, mostly coming from folk and folk-adjacent music. It came back to me powerfully in late March of this year as I listened to the box set of recordings by British psych-folk band Trees

I often get the urge to write about songs while on the move: walking, running, driving, being a passenger. A drive to Edinburgh during the past Easter weekend, taking in the beautiful Northumberland landscape and the dramatic England-Scotland border country, was entirely soundtracked by the Trees box set, which includes two different mixes of the band’s 1970 recording of ‘Geordie’.

I’ll come back to Trees below, along with the sample of their recording of ‘Geordie’ that added an interesting new chapter to the song’s itinerary in the twenty-first century. First, I’ll go a bit further back and mention some earlier recordings of the song.

Geordie

‘Geordie’ appears in many collections of English and Scottish folk song, including Francis Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (it is Child 209), Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L. Lloyd’s The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, and Steve Roud and Julia Bishop’s The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (it is no. 136 in the book and no. 90 in the Roud Folk Song Index). These accounts of the song attest to its long history in England. Scotland and North America.

In the ‘English’ versions that I’m going to focus on here, the song tells the tale of a nobleman named Geordie or Georgie who has been sentenced to death for stealing deer belonging to the King and selling them on. The song begins with a narrator encountering someone close to Geordie—usually his wife, sometimes a lover or his mother—at which point the first-person narrative is taken up by the lamenting woman. In classic folk ballad style, some of the narrative is constructed through dialogue, whether the dialogue between the wife and the song’s initial narrator/singer or between the wife and the judge who has passed sentence on Geordie. The wife pleads for Geordie’s life to no avail, for Geordie has already been hanged by the time she reaches the court. The timeline of the song, like the switching of the first-person narrative, can be a bit confusing. One curious detail that survives most versions is that the judge orders that Geordie be hung in ‘golden chains’ as a reflection of his noble lineage.

There are many variations to the story even in the versions collected in England, including who is doing the lamenting, what Geordie/Georgie stole, where he sold what he stole, what material his chains are made of, and whether he has already been executed by the time the dialogue with the judge takes place. Most of the versions I’m covering in this song itinerary stick to the version above. The Scottish broadside tells a completely different story set north of the border; I’ve included examples of this version by Maddy Prior, June Tabor and Lindsay Shaw in the YouTube playlist that accompanies this post.

I’m not going to provide the full history of the song here as there’s already a lot of information available about its origins, along with chronologies of its appearances in various texts and recordings. The Wikipedia page on ‘Geordie’ has most of the pertinent information, while more detailed histories (with links to lyrics and videos) can be found on the Mainly Norfolk website. There are also the folk song books I mentioned above.

I’m also not going to provide a long list of versions, let alone attempt any kind of completist reckoning. Instead, I’ll select several which I find interesting as stops along the way of the journey that the song—and, more specifically, the song as a series of sound recordings—has taken so far. My list is a subjective one because, as well as wanting to flag the journeys that songs make in general, I’m also interested in the journeys that we make with songs and the ways that songs inhabit our lives in varying ways and in different forms over the course of a listening life.

Our encounters with pieces of music take the form of what I’ll call a phenomenology of listening experience. What I mean by that is how we experience music, and different versions of a piece of music, in the order we experience them, though our own chronologies and biographies rather than through the historical chronology of the piece of music. If I become familiar with a performance of ‘Geordie’ by Richard Dawson (an actual Geordie¹) before I hear one by Trees, then Dawson precedes Trees in my phenomenology of listening regardless of the half century that has elapsed between the performances.

For an encyclopaedia article or a historical overview in a folk music forum, it’s necessary to use objective historical chronology. But subjective time is just as interesting. Much of my writing, especially when freed from the necessary constraints of historical accounting, finds me blurring the boundaries of these temporalities.

Sometimes with song itineraries I’m more interested in the text, what changes and what remains stable in each new version. Sometimes it’s the context, what new worlds open and how new stories become possible when the song appears at different places and different times. My recent re-engagement with ‘Geordie’ has been a combination of wanting to think about the different versions I’ve enjoyed in my life and reading up on the song and its journeys more broadly.

Where the song found me

I believe Joan Baez’s version of ‘Geordie’ would have been the first I took notice of. This would have been when I was expanding my knowledge of folk music beyond the Devon folk clubs my parents would sometimes take me to (who knows, perhaps I heard it there, but I don’t remember most of those songs) and the folk-rock I’d got into as a teenager via groups like Fairport Convention. This would have been at some point during the second half of the 1980s, when the recordings I was listening to were already at least a couple of decades old.

‘Geordie’ appeared on Baez’s third album, In Concert, in 1962. This live recording would also appear on various Baez compilations, including 1970’s The First 10 Years. Liner notes for In Concert were provided by Maynard Solomon, the founder of Vanguard Records. Solomon writes that this version of ‘Geordie’ is derived from a Scottish broadside which was subsequently rewritten and passed back into oral tradition, becoming ‘the most often-collected form of the ballad in the US’. Solomon also picks up on the use of the first-person narration at the start of the song, describing it as an ‘unusual’ choice for such a ballad, one which may have originated as ‘a device for a male singer to tell a woman’s story’. This is interesting in that it makes the story the narrator’s rather than the protagonist’s; it’s not the story of Geordie, but of his wife or lover (and, in some versions, his mother).

After Baez, I’d have heard other versions of ‘Geordie’ as I listened to folk music from the UK and North America. The song would have stayed in my head as a kind of known quantity, part of my folk unconscious. But I don’t think it would have been one I’d jump to if discussing folk music with friends or, later, with students.

It was Shirley Collins’ versions of ‘Geordie’ that really brought the song home for me in more recent years. I’ve long enjoyed Collins’ music, but I became more intensely fascinated with it during the four years I lived and worked in Sussex, the county Collins has spent most of her life and whose music she has championed.

Collins first recorded the song in London in March 1959 and it was released as one of four tracks on a 7-inch EP, ‘The Foggy Dew and Other English Songs’.

At this point, Collins was part of the London folk music scene and had been living with the song collector and folklorist Alan Lomax. The EP was recorded prior to the pair’s field recording trip to the southern US, a period Collins writes about in her memoir America Over the Water.

The performance style that Collins employs on these early recordings is akin to what she (and Lomax) would often find in song collecting trips at home and abroad: minimal adornment to both vocals and instrumentation, with Collins’ high clear voice relating the story of the doomed poacher Geordie in a tone that is charged with emotional restraint. The emotion is always present, but kept in check, a clear sympathy on the part of the singer for the ‘tender hearted girl’ whose sad tale she’s telling. Collins’ banjo accompaniment offers a sparse but dynamic bedding to the tale, driving it forward to its conclusion.

Because I was all ears and in all eras while listening to Shirley Collins’ music in Sussex, I would just as often hear the more ornate arrangement of ‘Geordie’ that she recorded with her sister Dolly and an ensemble of artists involved in the 1960s early music revival. When I say ‘ornate’, I mean in contrast to the earlier Collins take on ‘Geordie’, because Love, Death & The Lady, the 1970 album on which the group version appears, is starker in its tone and arrangements than its predecessor, Anthems in Eden (1969). Both albums appeared on Harvest—EMI’s subsidiary label for ‘underground music’ and home to artists such as Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and Kevin Ayers—and employed the collected talents of Musica Reservata and the London Early Music Consort.

Again, Shirley’s vocals are the clear central line, around which swirl Christopher Hogwood’s harpsichord, Dolly’s flute organ, Alan Lumsden’s sackbut, Terry Cox’s percussion and the rest of the consort. Despite Shirley’s dominance, there are moments here where we can detect the song becoming one in which melodic lines associated with other instruments take on nearly equal importance in the mix, something that will come increasingly into play at other stages of the song’s itinerary.

Context: what has ‘Geordie’ done?

Switching from my personal listening history back to a more historical chronology of ‘Geordie’, it’s worth reflecting on the context of the recordings I’ve mentioned so far. Joan Baez’s version is clearly part of the American folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, appearing at the point where much of her and other revivalists’ repertoire consisted of traditional songs that had been collected in Europe and North America. While Baez would also celebrate the music of other parts of the world—a trait she shared with Pete Seeger and with other artists not always associated with folk revival, such as Nina Simone—much of the material on the early Vanguard albums highlighted the journeys of ballads that people had brought to the US and passed down the generations.

Shirley Collins represents a similar moment in mid-twentieth century folk music revival as it played out in the South of England, whether in the environs of Cecil Sharp House and the London folk clubs, in Collins’ home county of Sussex, or in the songs she would bring back from her field trips with Lomax in the Southern States. Through her collaboration with members of prominent early music ensembles, her recordings of the late 1960s also remind us of other revivals taking place at the time.

The recordings by Baez and Collins are stops along a path that had been cleared before them, with recognisable precursors in earlier recordings by A.L. Lloyd, Paul Clayton and others. They are also points of origin for later versions of ‘Geordie’. Before getting to some of those, I’ll flag up two curious versions from the 1950s as a way of recalling what other musical worlds were in the mix at that time.

The first is a version of ‘Geordie’ by Alfred Deller, the English countertenor singer who was, by most accounts, largely responsible for re-introducing the countertenor voice to mainstream music audiences in the twentieth century. Deller’s approach to repertoire also paralleled the early music revivalists in that he would use period instruments for his performances and recordings. Deller’s take on ‘Geordie’ can be found on one of several collections of folk songs and ballads that he recorded with his group The Deller Consort.

The Cruel Mother And Other English Ballads And Folksongs was released in 1961 by Vanguard, the same label that Joan Baez was recording for. As with Baez’s early recordings, Deller’s have been rereleased in various forms over the years, including a 7-CD compilation of folk songs and ballads in 2008.

‘Geordie’ is again called into service for purposes that exceed its ‘mere’ continuation as a storied song. It becomes an example of historically informed performance, an opportunity for the (re)attachment of singing to lute playing, the promotion of the then-unfashionable countertenor voice. In the hands of the Deller consort, we become aware again of one of the many things that folk song can become, in this case art music. At the same time, Deller’s work, like that of the early music revivalists, blurs some of the distinctions between art and vernacular song in its reimagination of history. One of the things I find myself thinking when I listen to a performance like this is how little we really know of the way songs sounded in the centuries before sound recording erected the more or less rigid divisions between genres and styles that we’ve come to rely on in the last century or so.

Another unexpected take on ‘Geordie’ comes from the jazz-pop singer Mel Tormé, who included an abbreviated version of the song on his 1957 album Tormé Meets the British. The four brief verses offered here look to be based on versions popularised by American singers. The stark closing lines—‘I wish I was on yonder hill / Where kisses I've had often / I'd stab myself with a pointed blade / Beside poor Geordie’s coffin’—are similar to those sung by Jean Ritchie, as recorded by Alan Lomax in 1949. (Ritchie’s beautifully austere ‘Geordie’ draws the tragic tale out over several verses and marks an important point in the song’s itinerary: I’ve included it in the YouTube playlist at the end of this post.)

The cropped image of the album sleeve in the YouTube clip above doesn’t do full justice to the designer’s decision to load the image with stereotypes of ‘the British’, so here is the full sleeve.

Where Frank Sinatra’s Sinatra Sings Great Songs From Great Britain—released five years after Tormé Meets the British—would settle for a shot of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, here we have a larger menu of Big Ben, suited and bowler-hatted businessmen (one inexplicably bringing a bulldog to the meeting), and a blurry but distinguishable Routemaster bus in the background. I mention this merely because it’s worth thinking what ‘Geordie’ is representing at this point in its journey. Not perhaps one of the ‘positively ripping English yarns’ that Will Friedwald mentions in his one-line summary of the album (in A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers), but certainly a sense of Britishness, tradition, history, folklore and the ways these things travel.

A photocopy of a photocopy

The British folk-rock group Trees released just two albums at the start of the 1970s before disbanding. They are weird, wonderful records, clearly in sonic debt (as band member David Costa has long been happy to admit) to Fairport Convention but also taking some of those same American rock influences that Fairport had started with and expanding them into something heavier and more psychedelic than Fairport normally attempted.

When I finally listened to Trees properly—having been inspired by the reissues of the two albums by Fire/Earth, first as standalone albums and then as a box set with additional tracks—I immediately felt a strange combination of familiarity and the thrill of the new. I’d been aware of the albums for a long time—as a record collector and browser of prog/folk/psych sections in record shops and online of many years standing, it was hard not to know the title of The Garden of Jane Delawney (released by CBS on 24 April 1970) and the cover of On the Shore (released by the same label in January 1971)—but had always held them off ‘for another day’ for reasons I can’t explain. Yet here was a band I now felt I should have been listening to for years, a vital piece of whatever puzzle it is that my time spent chasing sounds has been working towards. At the same time, it’s lovely to be introduced to new things—especially new-old things—so I was also pleased to be starting a new journey.

That sense of the familiar and the new is described well by Andy Cush in a Pitchfork review of the Trees box set:

‘The Garden of Jane Delawney, Trees’ debut, and On the Shore, their final album, arrived within nine months of each other. The band itself didn’t last much longer than that. The two albums have long been cult items among a certain sort of listener, for whom stumbling on Trees for the first time may feel like wish fulfilment from an alternate universe. What if Fairport Convention went fully psychedelic? Or the Grateful Dead formed in Norfolk instead of the Bay Area, and put their cosmic touch on the Child Ballads instead of American bluegrass and R&B? In highlights like “She Moved Thro’ the Fair,” from Jane Delawney, and “Sally Free and Easy,” from On the Shore, Trees achieve communal interplay on par with the Dead’s, using the songs’ simple modal melodies as scaffolding for elaborate spontaneous compositions in which no one voice holds the lead for too long. Bias Boshell, primary writer of Trees’ few original songs, is the rare rock bassist whose style seems to follow Phil Lesh’s. Rather than adhering to any recognizable pocket, he fills the low end with circuitous melodies, lending the music a feeling of unsettled searching in even its heaviest moments.’

And that old-new uncanniness that I felt also seems to map on to what Stewart Lee, in his liner notes to the Trees box set, calls the ‘odd, opaque music’ of On the Shore, the band’s second album and the one that contains their version of ‘Geordie’.

Lee quotes David Costa as saying, ‘I was hugely influenced by Martin [Carthy] but my real love was for American versions of the basic British folk ballads. That's the joy of the oral tradition—it becomes like a photocopy of a photocopy. It becomes convoluted, it folds over itself so many times you get surreal, distorted lyrics and accidents simply as a result of mishearing or poor memory.’

That’s a pretty good description of any song itinerary in my view. How, then, did Trees go about their photocopy of a photocopy of ‘Geordie’?

As with other Trees recordings, I’m struck here by the glacial stillness of Celia Humphris’ voice against the roiling guitars and restless drums. I say ‘glacial’ because of a certain neutrality that suggests a ‘cold’ narrator—something Humphris may have picked up from precursors like Ritchie and Collins, but equally from some forms of late sixties rock— and because the voice is always moving while appearing to linger.

The tension builds throughout the song, always threatening to do what many Trees and Fairport Convention performances do and gear up to a full-on instrumental jam. Folk ballads are full of power abusers—judges, lords, ladies, cruel parents—and you might fancy that the tension and suppressed power bubbling under the surface of Trees’ ‘Geordie’ is most active, most likely to break free, at those moments in the story when power is being wielded, notably the chugging power chords accompanying ‘the judge he looked over his left shoulder and he said “Dear girl, I’m sorry …”’.

Yet, throughout, the volume quietens after each almost-explosion and we sink back (fatalistically?) to the subdued, lamenting, minor tones of what I’d call, after the French theorist Roland Barthes, the song’s ‘studium’. Much of this scene-maintaining soundwash is created by what Stewart Lee calls the ‘ethereal and atmospheric playing’ of guitarist Barry Clark and drummer Unwin Brown.

That haunting sound—most notable in the mid-point of the song where an extended solo might otherwise be expected—would form the basis of a sample used by soul/hip hop duo Gnarls Barkley in 2006 for the title track of their album St. Elsewhere. The folk-modal wah-wahing studium of the Trees track becomes the base for Danger Mouse’s production and the melody for the lines that CeeLo Green sings. This is as much a jazz technique as anything, as Green takes his cues from the Trees instrumentation before developing the melodic and harmonic aspects of his own song.

To return to my phenomenology of listening, it was because of Trees that I learned about the Gnarls Barkley sample, even though I heard St. Elsewhere years before I listened to On the Shore. I suppose I just wasn’t listening to the album’s tracks closely enough to follow up on the source material at the time.

At this point, clearly, we are looking at the journey made by a particular sound on a particular recording rather than the whole of the song ‘Geordie’. But I still like to include this example in my song itinerary because these releases are linked and because, as object-containing objects, songs are made up of parts that, no matter how small, are all vital to the song’s survival.

Un privilegio raro

At this point of the story, we go on another international journey, but not between Britain and North America. For more than half a century, ‘Geordie’ has been carving out its own itinerary in Italy, under the same name but in different garb. This is due to a translation of the song performed by the prominent cantautore (singer-songwriter) Fabrizio De André and released as a duet with Maureen Rix—an English teacher who introduced the ‘antica ballata inglese’ to De André—on a 1966 single.

This first Italian outing for ‘Geordie’ finds the song being delivered at a brisk pace with a distinctive percussive backing. The translation of the song—which would henceforth be attributed to De André in Italy—sticks mostly to the narrative of the versions I’ve mentioned above, but with some interesting flourishes such as a plea to the judge to defer the hanging rather than call it off completely: ‘ Save his lips, save his smile / He's not twenty years old yet / Winter will fall over his face / You can hang him then’.

This recording would appear on several compilations as De André’s fame built, establishing the song as part of a repertoire that was otherwise dominated by the songwriter’s own compositions. De André continued to perform the song in concert and a live version captured shortly before his premature death in 1999 finds what, by this time, had become a standard arrangement for the Italian ‘Geordie’, with a slightly slower pace than the 1966 single and the addition of keyboards and a signature melodic line typically left to a woodwind instrument. In this version, the singer duets with his daughter Luvi.

The addition of the woodwind does for the Italian ‘Geordie’ what Shirley and Dolly Collins’ version had done for the English song, providing both a reminder of the kinds of instrumentation that accompanied songs of earlier eras and transferring some of the focus of the song from the words and the melody of the lyric to countermelodies that sit before, between and after the verses and refrains, offering the possibility for further journeys that the song might take.

This may help to account for the number of cover versions of De André’s ‘Geordie’ to be found on YouTube. The duet below by Gregorio Imparato and Giulia Ursano, and featuring Andrea Imparato’s flute, is modelled on the later arrangement of ‘Geordie’ by De André and labelled as a cover of the Italian song.

Similarly, a version uploaded by Marcello Zappatore in May 2020, shortly before the loosening of Italy’s initial Covid-19 lockdown, deploys both recorder and flute to highlight the now-obligatory melodic line.

As the shift in authorship to De André has become such a feature in the many versions to be found on YouTube, many commenters have felt the need to point out the history of the ballad on which De André’s version was based. In response to this cover of the song, someone writes that they ‘haven't heard an english version so far’, bringing about the inevitable corrections from others.

Some of the Italian arrangements have been accompanied by visual recreations of Geordie’s story. Here’s an example of one of these, by Coro Full of Life (I’ve included another choral arrangement, by Coro Aspis, in the YouTube playlist at the end of this post).

There’s a story video, too to accompany one of the odder stops on the song’s itinerary. This came in 2002 when Gabriele ‘Gabry’ Ponte—Italian DJ and producer and former member of the dance band Eiffel 65—released a cover/remix of Fabrizio De André’s ‘Geordie’ and which became a hit in Italy. This version features vocals by Italian singer Stefania Piovesan and has what, to my mind, is a quite bizarre video attached to it, in which computer game graphics depict the Geordie character, axe-wielding soldiers, a marching band and what appear to a group of white-bearded wizards involved in some kind of chase that eventually turns into a hoedown/dance-off.

The events being depicted take an even stranger turn with an English version of Ponte’s ‘Geordie’.

The comments under this video show the kind of confusion that takes place when recordings become unfettered from time, place and context. That’s not to argue that there are correct or incorrect versions of the song or to demand the unlikely and anyway impossible protection of a particular way of doing the song; that would indeed be what the Italian version calls ‘un privilegio raro’. I can want to never listen to Gabry Ponte’s versions again and still want interesting new things to happen to ‘Geordie’. (For evidence of a more appreciate audience, see this video.)

Then, suddenly, ‘Geordie’ was downstairs

There are other non-English language versions which I might spend more time on had I not already written such a long itinerary. Also included on the playlist below is a French version from 1965 by pop-chanson singer Claude François, who tells the tale from the perspective of Geordie’s mother. There’s no mention of stolen animals in this tale; instead, Geordie is to be hanged merely for loving the King’s daughter. There’s also a Catalan ‘Geordie’ by Roger Mas and Núria Graham, which I take to be an adaptation of the Fabrizio De André version given the prominence of the keyboard melody, the staging of the song as a male-female duet and the recorder solo. ‘Pocity’ is a version of ‘Geordie’ from 1985 by the Czech folk band Nezmaři; the song title translates, if Google is serving me well, as ‘Feelings’. Then there’s a 1971 take from Danish rockers Gasolin, which features some brooding guitar work that sits nicely alongside Trees’ contemporaneous take (Gasolin’s approach is bluesier, which also brings in new resonances). A more recent Danish rock cover comes courtesy of Junkyard Drive. This, too, has some connections with the Trees template inasmuch as the electric guitars are a crucial part of the narrative arc; here, though, the metal-influenced vocals and instrumentation lead to a more extreme example of dynamic build-up as the story reaches its tragic moments.

In his book Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, Mark Katz writes that ‘when music becomes a thing it gains unprecedented freedom to travel’. Sound recording doesn’t mark the origin of how sounds travel; songs as old as ‘Geordie’ serve as potent reminders of that. But recording and what it fed into—notably, here, the spread of music on platforms such as YouTube—has accelerated the speed and perhaps extent of those journeys, taken songs to fascinating new places, and led audiences and researchers down deep and twisting rabbit holes.

And then, suddenly, as I was working on the final section of this song itinerary in my office at Newcastle University, I heard, from the floor below, a familiar line and melody. One of my colleagues was singing ‘Geordie’ for a group of students. Amazed at the coincidence, I listened in. It was a beautifully sung, unaccompanied rendition. Then, just as suddenly, it was gone again. No recording to capture it, just a wonderful happenstantial moment of musicking as ‘Geordie’ journeyed on.

I’ve created a playlist to illustrate this song itinerary on YouTube and another on Spotify, both also embedded below.

1. I haven’t mentioned, in the main text of this post, the use of the word ‘Geordie’ to describe people born in the north east English city of Newcastle upon Tyne (where I live and work) and its environs, as well as the dialect used in this part of the world. While there are several collected versions of ‘Geordie’ that refer to Newcastle, there’s no strong evidence to suggest that the song is using the word to refer to someone from the area by anything other than their first name. All uses of ‘Geordie’, whether as a person’s name, a name for a group, or the language spoken by that group, derive from the name ‘George’ as far as we know. Suffice it to say, however, that when a Newcastle singer like Richard Dawson performs ‘Geordie’, there are additional resonances to the performance, especially if it takes place in the north east. The regional meaning of ‘Geordie’, as well as the places the song has been attributed to or travelled to, were things I was keenly aware of as I worked on this song itinerary during a period that saw me travel between Newcastle, Edinburgh and Rome.