Love song to a city that moved John Peel to tears

Ian Prowse was standing in his local pub literally crying into his beer about the end of a relationship when someone came in to tell him one of his songs had just been played on Radio 1.

Told it was "a song about a train", Prowse, the former frontman of 1990s band Pele, was perplexed. At the time he had no record deal and the song he knew it must have been, Does This Train Stop On Merseyside? had not been released.

He would then find out that BBC DJ John Peel had got hold of a copy, and had told his listeners that the song – a poignant love letter to Liverpool, warts and all – had moved him to tears.

Twenty years on from its release, it has been covered by Irish folk star Christy Moore, championed by Elvis Costello, and has become an anthem for the city - not least for its raw reflections on the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, whose 36th anniversary will be commemorated this month.

Prowse, now 61, had been the frontman of the 1990s band Pele, and was playing with his new outfit Amsterdam when Does This Train Stop On Merseyside? came to him as he sat at home one afternoon.

The inspiration came from the story of William McKenzie, a Victorian merchant who rests in a pyramid-shaped tomb in the graveyard of St Andrew's church in Liverpool, supposedly buried sitting upright clutching a winning hand of cards.

From that germ of inspiration, which gave the song its opening lines, the rest of the verses quickly flowed.

"I was on the floor at this point," he says. "The music industry had changed with the likes of the X Factor, and if you were over 30 you were essentially dead in the water.

"I was really struggling, and then John Peel started playing the song and then suddenly we had a record deal again."

The song was to receive an even bigger break when Irish folk star Moore came across it after a gig in Manchester, when a CD containing it was posted through the open window of his car by a fan as he left the Bridgewater Hall.

"By the time we got to London, I was in love with the song," says Moore.

"One of the great privileges of my life has been that I get to sing the songs of people like Ian Prowse."

For Elvis Costello, some of the song's charm lies in Prowse's "acute sense of the history of the city".

There are references in Does This Train Stop On Merseyside? to the Atlantic slave trade, of which Liverpool was the home; the influx of Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s, and the events of 15 April 1989, reflected in the lyrics "Yorkshire policemen fold their arms while people try and save their fellow fans".

Prowse adds: "For people of my generation. Hillsborough was the central event. I had so many friends who were survivors, I could not write a song that's talking about Liverpool without including that.

"For the city it was a double tragedy: there was the horror of 97 people losing their lives, then there was the city being smeared in the media.

"There's still righteous fury about that in the city, and although the truth has come out, there's never been any justice really."

Journalist Paul Du Noyer, who has written extensively about Liverpool and the Beatles, says of the song that it manages to encompass "the very worst things in human history to the sheer fun of being out in Matthew Street".

He adds it "ranked as one of the great Liverpool songs in that it was explicitly about Liverpool in the way that – to put it in distinguished company – Strawberry Fields Forever was, and Penny Lane".

For Prowse, who on 12 April will be performing the song at The Arts Club in Liverpool with the full seven-piece Amsterdam band to mark the 20th anniversary of its release, it is always humbling to see how well the song is received both on Merseyside and further afield.

"It's great to see how it travels so well," he says. "It's always people's favourite song of mine whether I'm playing in Dublin or Glasgow, but also if I'm doing acoustic shows in Stroud or Perth or wherever."

But there is no doubt that the most full-throated appreciation comes when Does This Train Stop On Merseyside? is played to a home crowd that knows the city and feels about it the way Prowse himself does.

"For all the darkness, and the bad things that have happened, it's still my favourite place in the whole world and it's somewhere I'd rather be than anywhere else," he says.

"The spirit, the heart of the place is amazing, and not necessarily despite of the bad things that have happened, but in some ways because of them."