AP Features, February 5th, 2007
Want to see where Jimi Hendrix lived, where The Beatles got their start _ or even where Adam and the Ants filmed the video for "Stand and Deliver?"
A new tourist map of England, launched Monday, aims to help music-loving visitors find landmarks in the country's musical history, from the site of those early Fab Four gigs to the Manchester boys' club that inspired The Smiths.
Some of the more than 100 locations highlighted on the map, produced by the Visit Britain tourist agency, are legendary. Liverpool's Cavern Club, where The Beatles honed their craft, and London's Abbey Road Studios, where they recorded, are well-established tourist sites. So is Salford Lads Club in Manchester, featured on the sleeve of The Smiths' 1986 album "The Queen is Dead." The London house where Hendrix lived in the late 1960s is already marked by an English Heritage plaque as a site of historic importance.
"We know there's huge interest in locations connected to popular culture," Visit Britain's Laurence Bresh told The Guardian newspaper. "Everybody knows about tourists going to Liverpool to visit the Beatles locations, but it's much wider than that."
Some of the map's locations are esoteric _ the Birmingham pub frequented by the young Ozzy Osbourne _ while others are eerie. Among the sites is the highway service station where the car of Richey Edwards, guitarist with Welsh band Manic Street Preachers, was found abandoned in 1995. Edwards has never been seen again.
There is also the Macclesfield Crematorium, where Ian Curtis, lead singer of post-punk pioneers Joy Division, was laid to rest after his suicide in 1980.
The northern English town of Blackburn is included due to its appearance in the lyrics of The Beatles' song "A Day in the Life" _ "4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire."
__
On the Net: http://www.englandrocks.co.uk
