Amsterdam frontman Ian Prowse and the song that saved his life

He is on the road with it for dates including the Ropetackle Arts Centre, Shoreham on Friday, May 9 and The Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth on Saturday, May 10.

The track famously journeys through the Merseyside’s remarkable history including the horrors of the Hillsborough disaster. It’s had an incredible two decades. Along the way it has been covered by Irish folk figurehead Christy Moore and gained Ian fans including Elvis Costello, Damian Dempsey, Mick Jones of The Clash and The Stranglers' Jean Jacques Burnel. For many, though, it’s the track that brought John Peel to tears live on air whenever he played it.

“If I hadn't written it,” Ian says, “I just don't know where I would have been with my career. If I think about my career, I just think about the long struggle that it has been. Being a professional musician has been great for a number of years but I've had so many ups and downs over the years. I was with (the band) Pele in the 90s and we had a big major deal that fizzled out. We did two albums which were both artistically successful. They don't sound dated now but they didn't really crack it commercially, and I was under a lot of pressure from the record company for the third album for me to go solo. I didn’t want to. I saw myself as being more The Clash than being George Michael! I didn't want to go solo. Maybe in hindsight I shouldn't have resisted but what happened next was that I then went through the whole Britpop era watching all the people that supported Pele overtaking me. But I just didn't want to be a solo artist. I wanted to be The Clash or The Jam!”

And that's the context that makes Does This Train Stop On Merseyside? so special in Ian's career: “It's 20 years since it came out as a single and until then I had been really struggling. At that point I couldn't even get arrested. We had had the whole Pele experience and then we formed Amsterdam. We had some good songs but the whole industry was changing. If you were over 30 at that point, then you were dead in the water back then so we just couldn't get over the line. We just couldn't get going with early Amsterdam and it was really getting to me. It felt like I had all my eggs in one broken-down basket and I was thinking that if I didn't do this, then what would I do? It felt like I was facing like an existential crisis – how do I carry on life if I can't do what I want to do?”

Then came the song: “I didn't actually think that it was a really special song at the time. But it was my producer who said ‘This is the best thing you've ever written.’ He said to me ‘It's a stone-cold classic!’ But when we started recording it and started to build it up I could see what he meant. I think I was just too close to it. I've had that before where I think a song is going to be really big and the response is lukewarm or where I'm not sure about a song and then people have absolutely loved it.”

What cracked it for the single was when John Peel was given a CD of 20-brand new Liverpool songs: “He ignored 19 of them and just played mine and he had such a huge emotional reaction to it. He played it a fair few times. It was such an honour for me that he was playing it. I got into music through John Peel playing the latest Jam single!”

Thank goodness, Ian got the chance to speak with John Peel about what his backing did for the song: “On the day before he went Peru, which he never came back from, he telephoned me and we spoke for 45 minutes. He told me what the song meant to him and that he even played it at home. And his wife would have to come in and give him a big hug because was always in tears when he heard it. He said ‘As soon as I come back from Peru we will have to do a session.’ But sadly he never did come back from Peru.”

But the fact is Ian’s life would be very different now without the song and without John Peel’s intervention: “It came via some magical process. It is not even my favourite song that I've ever written but I do owe it a lot.”

And given the Hillsborough references, as he says, this is song to which you will always give 100 per cent every single time.