On Campus

Athens

Beginning a General Sherman-like march east across Georgia I’ve stopped off here for a night in the Classic City. A third of the 100,000 or so residents here are students at the University of Georgia (whose facilities I'm currently abusing having sneaked into the library) and the whole city feels like one big campus, only with lots of tastefully planted trees and bushes masking the concrete university buildings. In fact there seems to be more greenery here than in all the other American cities I’ve visited put together, which makes it far from unpleasant.

It’s more than 20 years since bands like R.E.M, the B-52s and Pylon emerged from here but the Athens music scene still has a big reputation, so my mission for the next 24 hours is to see if it’s justified. Listening to the local college radio station in my motel room a while ago was interesting. I sometimes used to wonder whether British student radio was in the same league as the much-vaunted American scene. Well, I was impressed by the music on the UGA station which was uniformly excellent although you could say the same about the best half-dozen stations back home. And in terms of production values and news good old LSRfm leaves UGA standing. I look forward to listening to a bit more though, before a gig to round the evening off.