This was the first piece that I wrote for George W.Welch, a group initially formed at Goldsmiths out of postgrad and undergrad students, and which, like several other young ‘postminimal’ new music groups of the early 80s, played its own repertoire of players’ pieces and arrangements. All of my compositions for GWW were named after underground stations, commencing on the (old) Jubilee line (northbound), with Charing X, Green Park, and Bond Street, followed by a deviation to Hobbs End (fictitious tube station of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit), British Museum (obsolete), Columbus Circle (in New York), and finally Monument. If you’re stuck for a name for a piece then underground stations offer a lot of possibilities.

Like a lot of my music the material of this piece evolves out of very small musical seeds - a single piano chord that crunches out at the beginning of the faster outer sections, and a quietly pulsing piano chord that sets the scene for the central slow section. Scraps of 80s pop surface - sample-like repeats of small phrases, unsubtle backbeats, abrupt edits from one section to another; also recollections of TV music from my childhood, particularly Edwin Astley and his exciting incidental music for The Saint; and a chachacha cadence straight out of weekend TV light entertainment programmes. The slow motion music in the middle of the piece without a doubt stems from my childhood fascination with listening to long playing 33 1/3 records turned down to half-speed (and an octave lower) on the turntable, at 16 2/3 RPM. Twenty eight years later this might all sound like rather arch postmodernist whimsy, but the 24 year old composer of this piece was seeking to discover a style that might acknowledge the lineage of his actual listening experience - lowbrow, middlebrow, highbrow - and, filtered through GWW’s slightly awkward instrumentation, to find an alternative narrative tone and voice to the abstract expressionist earnestness he heard in many currents of new music at the time.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/8637