The Green Line

The Green Line insert

For all of my secondary school education I travelled to and from school on the 715 Green Line coach. It was also the service I used to get to my first concert, seeing Motorhead at The Hammersmith Odeon, and many other shows at the Hammy Odeon. For these reasons The Green Line has a place in my heart.

Becuase of all of that I have to admit that I bought Gilroy Mere’s “The Green Line” almost entirely because of nostalgia, helped by the glorious packaging it came in (even if I haven’t had the heart to cut up and build the bus). The fact that it was on Clay Pipe pretty much assured the quality of the music so it wasn’t at all a risky purchase. The music is as beautiful as the packaging suggests.

• Gilroy Mere - The Green Line (bandcamp)
• Gilroy Mere - The Green Line (Clay Pipe Music)

The Green Line is an instrumental album inspired by the buses that once linked central London to country towns. Established by the London General Omnibus Company in the 1930s, with their striking green livery they were a common sight in the outer London suburbs. Between 1957 and 1960 there were 36 million journeys made a year, but by the 1970s numbers started to decline, and in 1986 the service was deregulated for privatization and the buses disappeared from our streets.

As the timetable makes clear the striking green livery mentioned above was rather tamed down by the time I was a regular - but I still have a nostalgic fondness for The Green Line.

The Green Line timetable