The university sound: pop’s unsung debt to higher education

A bad pun--"unsung debt"--proves nothing. Band members meet anywhere. Where are Clay's control groups? This is just silly. Come on, man! You're way off-key

Glad to see Pixies and U-Mass make an appearance. The peerless Half Man Half Biscuit have a few HE references in their oeuvre. The narrator of their track "4AD3DCD", who is on a foundation course, talks about "Playing eerie madrigals on the campus egg slicer"; and Goldsmiths features heavily in "If I had possession over pancake day".

Hey, what about a shout out for musicians who are now university academics- The wonderful late 1980’s The Edsel Auctioneer and Aidan Winterburn (Leeds Beckett) https://www.discogs.com/artist/952036-The-Edsel-Auctioneer https://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/staff/aidan-winterburn/

Kevin Godley and Lol Creme (10cc and Godley&Creme) teamed up at an art school, documented in their song Art School Canteen: "Come in late and go home earlier One day a week or maybe less So I lied about the funeral I was really playing chess But I was seen By the coffee machine

Another band which admits to have started at a university is Pure Reason Revolution formed at the University of Westminster.

You forgot Tom Lehrer's The Elements. There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium, And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium, And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium, And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium, And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium, And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium. There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium, And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium, There's strontium and silicon and silver and samarium, And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium. There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium, And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium, And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium, Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium. And lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium, Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium, And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium, And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium. There's sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium, And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium, And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium, And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium. These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard, And there may be many others but they haven't been discovered. (Now I have to explain to my dearly beloved why I was singing it - it's the only way I can remember the sequence!)

Jeremy Clay is a journalism lecturer at De Montfort University. In an earlier life, he joined a band at university. No, you haven’t heard of them. Oh yes I have! Hope you're well Jeremy!

Godley and Creme met on the Foundation course at the Manchester School of Art, where a bit earlier John Mayall had studied and actually recorded Art School Boogie in the main gallery there (playing piano at that time) Later Mick Hucknall got a 2.1 in painting. But my favourite musical academic is Professor Quincey Wagstaff of Huxley College in the US (aka Groucho Marx) who performed the oddly prescient anthem Whatever It is I'm Against It. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7cry-4pyy8

Thanks for your comments everyone - and hello jpodcaster! - some good extra suggestions here. And - arrgghhh! - how did I neglect to trawl through the Half Man Half Biscuit lyrics archive? Other songs that didn’t make the cut (I’d eaten up the word count) included Stanton, by Sports Team, about the fire warden at their Cambridge college, and Berkeley Heathen Scum by Fang, but that was mainly because it’s unpleasant.

Nice to see mention of The Fall but shame 'Hey! Student' wasn't mentioned with the less than appreciative lyrics: Ah-well I'm walking down the street, It's always students that I meet, Long hair down and sneakers on your feet. Write your letters to the Evening News I clench my fist and sing this tune: I said Hey student, hey student, hey student, You're gonna get it through the head, I said Hey student, hey student, hey student, You're gonna get it through the head, I said Well, walking to work, It's always students that I meet Henna in your hair, As you I clench my hand before I flip my lid. And so on . . .