This week’s New Statesman – guest-edited, as you may have noticed by now, by Ken Livingstone – features a number of prominent people picking their favourite London songs. Their choices are led-off by an article on London’s music by Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley.

What’s striking is how many of the selections in the list are of old songs. Admittedly there’s London Calling and Lily Allen’s The Fear, but also chosen are Noel Coward’s London Pride,  A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, The Lambeth Walk, A Foggy Day (In London Town), even Oranges and Lemons.

This got me thinking about an old song whose title I often think about when I’m near Oxford Street, or planning to head that way: Life Begins At Oxford Circus, by Jack Hylton and his orchestra, from 1935.

What a perfect title to sum up the possibility of what London can be. As song titles go it offers a ludicrously hedonistic and frivolous view of life.

For a long time I saw Hylton’s song as a louche anthem of the priveleged classes of the 1930s: arch and ironic. How wrong I was. I recently retrieved the record from where I had it stored, and on listening to it after so many years it’s been transformed from a memorable title, with all the assumptions I built up around, it into something completely different. Starting with a fanfare of sorts it launches straight into its catchy, cheerful tune before finally getting into its short set of lyrics:

Life begins at Oxford Circus
When the busy day is done
We don’t care how much they work us
Just as long as we have fun

Off with your old clothes
On with your best
Just bring your girlfriend to be your guest, and come up West
Life begins at Oxford Circus
When the busy day is done

Jack Hylton

Far from being the signature tune of the cocktail set it’s an invitation to working class Londoners to put their working day behind them, get dressed up, and spend some of their hard-earned cash ‘up West’.  Working is existing, having fun is living. It applies as much today to the thousands of pleasure seekers heading to the West End as it did when it was recorded.

I know relatively little about the song, although from what I can find online it shares its title with a London Palladium revue that included the Crazy Gang, also from 1935,  which seems to bear out my radically altered take on it. My copy of Jack Hylton’s tune is on the BBC’s soundtrack to Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven which appears still to be available and which is stuffed full of songs from the same era. Alternatively you can hear it on YouTube here.

Bob Stanley’s article has also got me thinking about other London songs that I would have on my London playlist – so this is something I may return to (on an irregular basis). If you have any ideas of songs that would be on your playlist let me know.