Hundreds of songs have been written about travelling by rail. The best, I contend, is Tony Joe White’s “The Train I’m On”: “Sometimes a train sounds lonesome…”
“Midnight Train to Georgia”, “Marrakesh Express” and “Last Train to Clarksville” are among many others. Yet performers spend their time on the road, not the rails. One exception: singer-songwriter Jaz Delorean. He frequently performs with his band, Tankus, whose chosen form of transport is a Mercedes Sprinter. But when touring solo, the pianist prefers trains.
The performer is just back from a one-night gig in St-Etienne, southern France, and told me about the experience on his long and winding rail journey from London St Pancras International.
“I found myself in the Eurostar queue with about 150 bedraggled and long-suffering parents and guardians of a riotous gang of Disney-fied youngsters,” he says. “I’d totally forgotten about the early train [6.01am] being popular for families heading to Disneyland Paris.” Fortunately, he was on the departure an hour later.
“I had requested the organisers who had booked me that I travel by train instead of flying, because I really try not to fly shorthaul, and France is also still experimenting with a ban on shorthaul flights if a high-speed train goes to the same place.
“I do this journey a lot, in different variations, sometimes to Brussels, sometimes to Paris, and wander about writing songs in tiny bars in Pigalle, obnoxiously living up to my itinerant artist moniker.
“I have travelled around working as a musician, for two-thirds of the year, for over a decade, content to live out of a suitcase with not many possessions to think about.”
He had booked a forward-facing window seat “because I like to watch the Kent countryside flow like a wave under us”.
For the transfer from Paris Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, he recommends “an hour’s walk, through some great streets, but it helps to know exactly where you want to go because the area around Gare du Nord can be plagued with rogues looking for lost tourists”.
On this occasion Jaz took the RER (suburban express), though: “There wasn’t much time for things to go wrong, and this was the only way to get to the gig on time for a soundcheck, travelling all on the same day.”
The next leg was on an Ouigo train. “This is the budget version of the iconic TGV high-speed train, so there were no power sockets, buffet car or empty seats.
“There were still toilets and a great view, which I relished as we powered through the slightly less grey Île-de-France countryside. The trip from Paris to Lyon was just over two hours, covering 393km.”
The train whizzed past Migennes, in previous centuries a great rail junction – but now a forlorn station of which Jaz sings: “The only thing that passes here is time.”
At Lyon Part-Dieu, he had 25 minutes to transfer – and did not waste time.
“I found a decent piano on the station concourse and played ‘Autumn Leaves’ since the lyrics were written by [French poet] Jacques Prévert.
“Sure enough, a passer-by approached and started playing some licks on the top end of the piano – which sometimes I find annoying, but there I was in a social setting and he was really good.
“We shook hands at the end and walked in opposite directions, as I heard someone else sit down at the piano and start some Chopin.”
About 30 minutes on the journey to St-Etienne, “everyone on board, including me, received a text message saying that the train would be cancelled due to an unidentified package on the platform at a station down the line”.
Luckily the driver said it was a false alarm and to get back on.
By 3pm French time – seven hours after leaving St Pancras – he was in St-Etienne. A car was waiting to take him up the valley to the venue, where a baby grand had been hauled up just hours before.
“I played the gig, admired the lights in the valley, from our piano-crested peak, and left at the crack of dawn, to sleep most of the way back to London.”
Perhaps the experience will inspire more railway songs. Meanwhile, a few more lines of journeys and longing from “The Only Thing That Passes Here Is Time”:
“The moon is swollen and staring/Drowning in a slingshot of stars/And you are a whole hemisphere away.”
