Blinded by the Light is set in Luton – can humdrum towns inspire great art?

I come from Ashford in Kent. In terms of cultural legacy, it’s a wasteland. Nobody has ever written a classic song about Ashford. No blockbuster films have ever been set here. The most famous person who went to my school was Neil Ruddock, a footballer who played for England a grand total of once 25 years ago.

When you come from a place like Ashford, it’s easy to feel jealous of the big city and all the attention it gets. Nothingy little towns like ours will always get blown out of the water by metropolitan allure. Take London, for instance. Not only does it seem to get obliterated in about a fifth of every blockbuster movie ever made – which is basically the highest compliment you can pay a location in the superhero age – but there are actually classic songs about specific places in London. Up the Junction. West End Girls. A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. That couldn’t possibly happen here, not unless anyone decides to write a stirring power ballad called “I Left My Heart in the Mobile Phone Repair Shop Next to Greggs”.

I think I understand why. It’s rare to find a work of art about a provincial town or a humdrum suburb that is truly fond of its setting. Gurinder Chadha’s new film Blinded by the Light might be set in Luton, but it’s depicted as a town full of small minds and casual violence that the protagonist is desperate to leave. Same with Kes and Barnsley, or Starter for Ten and Southend. The final two parts of Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy – Hot Fuzz and The World’s End – are both about people who feel suffocated when they move out of  the city.

Perhaps that is the allure. If you want to make something that’s about ambition and opportunity and excitement, you set it in a major city. But if you want to explore more everyday themes, such as boredom and loneliness and flat existential sadness, you shift your focus a few miles away. The Office, which revolved around a paper merchants in that most derided of towns, Slough, wouldn’t have worked if the firm had been based in London. Nor would other sitcoms such as Ever Decreasing Circles, or Keeping Up Appearances. None of the characters would have been very funny if they lived in a place where they had actual things to do.

Then there’s pop. When The Specials wanted to capture their feelings about Coventry, they wrote Ghost Town; a song that sounds like it was recorded on the set of an abandoned Spaghetti Western. When Paul Weller wanted to write a song about his home town of Woking, he called the end result A Town Called Malice. Sham 69’s Hersham Boys might have aimed for a more celebratory tone, but then reality kicked in and the result (the local girls are “not beauty queens”) stinks of defeated compromise.

However, there is an escape route. Not all small-town songs and films are about miserable people hemmed in by limited opportunity. Dig deep enough and you can find moments of real celebration. Last year’s The Bromley Boys clawed moments of joy from  a tale about a young man’s determination to enjoy lower-league football in suburban Kent. Tom Jones’s Green, Green Grass of Home might have originally been written by a man from Princeton, Alabama, but there’s enough yearning in Jones’s voice to root his version deep in the heart of Pontypridd. Ed Sheeran’s Castle on the Hill drips with fondness for Framlingham, the Suffolk town where he grew up; for its winding country lanes and the smell of its grass. So it can be done.

But you’ll notice that it can only be done from a distance. The Bromley Boys was set in the Seventies, long before the writer, Dave Roberts, upped and left for the comparative bustle of Leeds. When Tom Jones recorded Green, Green Grass of Home he’d ditched small-town Wales for the life of a big-shot millionaire. And let’s not forget that, for all his yearning about his perfect childhood, Ed Sheeran now lives in such an upper echelon of fame that an actual princess once cut his face open with a ceremonial sword. So that’s your choice.

You can stay in a dead-end town and mourn its deadbeat stagnation, or you can leave and look back with rose-tinted glasses. As far as art goes, that’s it. It’s one  or the other. I still have hope for Ashford, though. It might not ever become the subject of an Oscar-winning film, or a celebrated poem, or a song that grows to define a generation, but I’m happy to lower my standards a little. Maybe someone might roller skate through it in a music video, like Cliff Richard did in Milton Keynes for Wired for Sound. It’s not much, but at this point I’d take it.