Does This Train Stop on Merseyside? - the song that saved singer-songwriter Ian Prowse's life

Following the end of his earlier band, the cult indie-rockers Pele, Prowse had formed Amsterdam.

They’d self-released two albums, but by 2004 they “couldn’t get arrested.”

It was the song Does This Train Stop on Merseyside? which turned out to be the catalyst for a change of fortune, and is now being marked with a tour celebrating its 20th anniversary – and a rerelease of its parent album, The Journey.

And of course that tour is coming to The Wedgewood Rooms in Southsea – a venue Prowse has played more times than any other touring artist.

“This song saved my bacon,” Prowse explains to The News, of its importance to him. “It saved me from whatever world was opening up for me.

“I was facing an existential crisis before I wrote the song. With early Amsterdam, at the start of the century, we couldn't get arrested. We couldn't get a record deal. “And it wasn't because the songs weren't very good. We'd written some really good songs, but we just couldn't get it over the line.

“It felt like none of my Pele fans had really come on the Amsterdam journey with me. So I'd kind of, in life and in music, painted myself into a corner.

"If I don't write songs and sing them and earn at least just a little bit of money to have any sort of living, then I'm kind of not me – I’m just a pale shadow of who I'm supposed to be – what my job is here on this earth.

"If I'm not singing and songwriting, I'm just a shell - who am I? What am I? And how are you going to cope with that?

“All of my publishing money had run out from my Pele days so I'd limped back into the local job centre with no money and they were always on my case: ‘We don't care about you being a musician or what you've done, we want you to take this job in a warehouse, or somewhere down the shops’.

“I was coming under pressure from all sides. It felt as though all my eggs were in one broken-down basket.

“You just blithely have a blindfold on and keep going forward, hoping something will give. And of course it might not, because you don't know. Nobody knows what the future is.”

"We recorded this song, Does This Train Stop on Merseyside? and we still couldn't get a deal. We played it to a couple of people, but it still hadn't opened any doors.

“And at the height of all of this misery – I’m not saying I was depressed, but it was like, wading through treacle, trying to get something going – one of my band members, who was also my long-term girlfriend she buggered off with some fella she met at work.

“So that was heartache on top of the deep upset that I couldn't get my music career going anywhere.

“I will never forget it, but about a week after this happened I was in the local pub, literally crying in my ale.

"This guy came into the pub, I knew his face, but we weren't mates or anything. As he came in, he shouted across the pub to me: ‘Hey, Prowsey! You've just been played on Radio One. John Peel's just played this song of yours on his show. It was a song about a train and he got really emotional when he played it’.

“I just looked at this fellow like he was an alien, aghast. Eventually, when I spoke, I said: ‘That's not possible, mate. That isn't possible because we haven't got a record deal. This song hasn't been released’. But then, obviously, my mind's working 100 miles an hour, thinking, but how would this guy know that I've got a song about a train? He described the song, and it was clearly Does This Train Stop on Merseyside?

"It felt at that moment like this door had closed in my life, my relationship and my music life was just slammed shut. I was an emotional, drunken wreck.

“And then this other door just mysteriously and beautifully opened in front of me – there's going to be a little change now in your life. Something is going to give for you, almost cosmically. And that's what happened because Peel had such a reaction, within a year, we had a new deal and I was back inside the music industry.”

“We released the album, The Journey, which Does This Train... came off which has been re-released as well at this time, 20 years later, with all the songs on that we felt like should have happened first time around. “That song had just done its little bit of magic.”

It transpired that after Prowse had given a CD of the song to Liverpool music scenester Phil Hayes. Hayes had then included it on a 20-track CD of local acts and sent it to his friend, the legendary Radio One DJ John Peel.

"Phil gave it to Peel and Peel ignored 19 of the songs and just started playing ours all of the time. He had this extreme emotional reaction every single time he played it – I have all of the recordings of when he introduces the song live on the radio, seven or eight times. And he does, he cracks up every single time.

“And then, of course, when he passed away, his wife Sheila played it on Radio One as the one song she would have wanted him to play. She said, even at home, if he played it, she had to go and give him a big cuddle because he was just an emotional mess.

“So that is why that song is worthy of a tour, why it's worthy of a re-release. It's worthy of everything because it saved me, my arse, my life, maybe, I don't know.”

The song has gone on to be covered by Irish folk hero Christy Moore among others, including Elvis Costello, Damian Dempsey, Mick Jones of The Clash and The Stranglers' Jean Jacques Burnel.

And it resonates closely with Liverpool fans for its references to the 1989 Hillsborough disaster where 97 of the club’s supporters died.

"I had nothing to do with Christy Moore doing a wonderful cover of it or all of the other people who covered it. They just picked it up somewhere along that line.”

How does he feel when people tell him how much it means to them?

“I can't put it into words how much it means. We'll play the song and at the merch store afterwards, I'll go out and speak to people and somebody will pull me to one side and they'll say to me: ‘Thank you for that song. It has helped me down the years because I was there’. And what they mean is they were at Hillsborough – they were one of the 24,000 fans who came home who had PTSD, they didn't even realise it at the time.

"A lot of people thought because they weren't dead and injured, they thought they'd gotten away with it. But they hadn't really.

"For my generation, and certainly my generation in this area, Hillsborough was the central event of our lives. The actual moments on the Saturday afternoon, but also what happened two or three days later when there was a cover up by the British media and the British establishment for their role in what happened.

“The city suffered a double blow when they were being told that it was their own fault.

“In the song itself, it's only the last two lines which refer to the Hillsborough disaster, but it would be fair to say that they're the lines that people have picked up on down the years, the most powerful ones which people focus upon.

“Who knows where the poetry and the songwriting comes from? But I'm thankful that they visited me on that day.”

Following one more studio album for Amsterdam, Arm in Arm, Prowse has gone on to release five critically acclaimed solo albums, which have seen him dubbed ‘the Scouse Springsteen’ (although his live shows often remain credited to Ian Prowse & Amsterdam).

While ...Merseyside may be his best known song, it’s not the only one to elicit such strong emotional reactions from his fans. Here I Lie, the title track of his 2019 album was written for Prowse’s daughter, a musical comforter for when he ultimately dies, but has also become a firm fan favourite.

“Your songs will outlive you, and as a songwriter, one of the things about writing songs is that you are looking for some sort of immortality in your music, so that you, as an artist, a part of you carries on after you've gone,” he explains.

“If you're lucky enough to capture something from the ether like that, with that particular line on that particular song, then you are kind of guaranteeing that you're going to be around even when you're not physically here. And what an amazing thought, that is!

“Here I Lie has become a mainstay in the set – I couldn't not play it now. People refer to their own family, their own children, their own parents. It’s the idea that we're all connected in life and in death, and it never goes away. And music is the conduit for that.

“Music is the only thing that has the power to kind of defeat death and connect us way into the future. I don't know how I came up with that concept.

“In a way that song is like a functional folk song, like in the old days when they'd write folk songs to sing in the fields to help them pass the time of day or when they were doing the canals. This is a song I wrote for our Rosie to use functionally if she's having a bad time in the future and I'm not here – she can come and sit by my grave and tell me about it. And because she knows the song exists, then it makes a full circle.

“And it might be cosmic. And maybe people might say it's fanciful but who the hell knows? Life is strange and it's worth a connection...”

Work is now well underway on a new album, the follow-up to 2021’s One Hand on The Starry Plough.

“Basically my producer, Tony Kiley, is hard on me,” says Ian of the process. “And he he's like: ‘We don't start recording a new album until you've given me at least 10 or 11 really strong songs’.

The last two records, Here I Lie and One Hand on the Starry Plough have been as good as albums as we've ever done. So he's like: ‘We're not letting down this run of records. We're going to do another really good record’.

“I have to be at the top of my game as a songwriter in order to impress him! I can't kid him with it, or beg him, he just won't have it, and I appreciate that.

"I know enough songwriters, and plenty of my heroes, who I think could have done with somebody to say: ‘That that ain't good enough’ in later years albums. But he does that and I know that he's going to do it, so I keep the level high.”

Ian Prowse & Amsterdam return to The Wedge on Saturday, May 10, supported by Rob Clamp & The Ashmen. Tickets £18. Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.