WINTER SOUNDS FOR PEAK DISTRICT DRIVES

What do you do when a new 30-minute drive to work takes you through scenery so epic, vast, bleak and beautiful that it threatens to melt your opticals and steal your oxygen?

Try not to career off the road on a hairpin bend is the first thing, I guess – ultimate life-preserver move.

But before long, you get to thinking: what music could be the soundtrack to this?

It’s got to be more than something you like. It’s got to be something you love AND it’s got to fit – it has to be deserving of the jaw-drop views from behind this widescreen windscreen lens. Anything less would be a disservice to the gift outside.

This has been my nicely indulgent task on a new but short term drive to work. Having just moved to Buxton and got a temp role through December, my drives took me on Macclesfield Road, aka the Cat and Fiddle road.

It is spectacular. The road climbs into the official Peak District and splits the moors 1,689 feet above sea level by the Cat and Fiddle Inn, a former pub that’s the second highest in the UK. The highest is Tan Hill Inn in North Yorkshire who, at the time of writing, was caught in a snow-in.

The road then carves a winding, hair-pinning zig-zag descent to Macclesfield on the other side. The moors are vast in their brown-purple haze. Dense fog is common, even when it’s clear down below. When adverse weather moves in, the road quickly becomes impassable. It’s been closed across the last three days since snow moved in on January 4th.

Fortunately, my drives didn’t encounter any snow beyond an occasional light flurry but joining that road at 5.20 am in the pitch black dark is a little bit of a test. All you can do is lean forward, follow the dots and block out the drops to the side. When there’s fog, it’s milk. Tunnel vision. For this, there is no music. Got to focus.

But the return journey a few hours later is different. Music becomes a possibility so … what’s it going to be? Melvins and Metallica might well be massive favourites but such riff-heavy, beat-driven manna is not going to be on the cards, not for this – not yet, anyway. The newness of the views and shifting natural lights is too fresh. We’re looking for an emotional, more than a physical, response from our tunes. Something to swell hearts.

It’s a time/place thing, too. If you’ve ever chosen not to play, say, David Bowie’s Low because it’s the wrong time of the day or the wrong time of the year then you know what we’re talking about here. Some music has conditions attached, even if you’ve made them up yourself. And some environments have conditions too. This is one of them.

So, the next few posts are short rambles about music that matches up to the mother of mid-winter views. See what you think of their seasonal potential.