National Express

The coach moves through the English night and everyone on it has a story, and Hannon has noticed all of them with the affection of someone who genuinely loves the country he is satirizing. The arrangement is brassy and propulsive, full of horns that sound like a brass band at a provincial fete — deliberately populist, warmly ridiculous, impossible not to bob your head to. The tempo has the momentum of travel itself, that particular rhythm of long-distance buses where the landscape empties and people become temporarily honest strangers. Hannon's voice here is at its most performance-ready: precise, slightly arch, but underneath the theatricality there is real warmth for the cast of characters he is assembling. The song is an act of loving documentation — the fat man eating his sandwich, the girl reading a magazine, all rendered with a sociologist's eye and a music-hall entertainer's timing. It sits in the tradition of the great British character song, from Flanders and Swann through to Kirsty MacColl, but updated for the late nineties with knowing orchestral pop gloss. It captures something true about English working life that more earnest songs about the same subject miss entirely: the dignity and comedy of ordinary transit, of being in motion together without quite connecting. You want this song at the start of a journey, any journey, as the city thins out and the road opens up.