WHETHER it’s getting beaten up while Down In The Tube Station At Midnight, or jostling through ‘Millions of people swarming like flies round Waterloo Underground’ – London’s tube system has inspired countless songwriters during its 150-year history.

From Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street to Duffy’s Warwick Avenue, via shortlived boyband Northern Line and a day return to Lord Kitchener’s 1950 hit The Underground Train Calypso, something about the London Underground and its stations fires the imaginations of the makers of music – and continues to do so.

Musician Vincent Sheehan is the latest artist to be drawn to its depths – penning a whole album of tracks about each stop along the Victoria Line.

“I was just on the tube one day, staring up at the stations by the adverts,” explains Vincent, who lives in Forty Hill, “I started to wonder if anyone had done an album before, with the stops on the line as inspiration. Great songs have been written about different stations before but never basing a whole album on the whole line.

“I couldn’t find anything similar so it became a challenge really, to focus my mind and creativity, it seemed like a good structure to hang an album from.”

After setting off from Walthamstow Central, the line’s northernmost stop, Vincent has so far completed seven songs and the album is fast approaching Euston, and on its way south.

Each song is in a different style, ranging from acoustic ballads to synthesiser-laden techno tracks and classically influenced musical theatre numbers. Vincent, a music teacher at Churchfield Primary School, Edmonton, plays all the instruments heard including guitar, piano and violin.

Supportive comments have flooded in to Vincent’s Soundcloud page, and a German creative team is looking at making an interactive website around the release. Some have touted it as ‘the world’s first commuter concept album’.

The tracks are laden with references to each station, its history and the area it serves as well as Vincent’s personal impressions.

Walthamstow Central has a train-like rhythm and mentions a particular William Morris textile design in the lyrics, Seven Sisters imagines a pilgramage of monks visiting the seven ancient trees that once stood in the area, while Highbury and Islington is based on Vincent’s encounter with a homeless man and a Victorian newspaper article about Highbury. In the latest, King’s Cross, Vincent takes the voice of King George IV, who erected a monument there.

“It sounds a weird project but it seems to have captured peoples’ imaginations,” says the 35-year-old.

The album is expected to terminate at Brixton this summer, until then you can listen to and download the tracks free at soundcloud.com/vincentsheehan