Paul Du Noyer is a former NME journalist. His latest book is called 'In The City: A Celebration Of London Music'

London has always been an irresistible subject for writers of books – and for writers of songs. This seething metropolis throws up a million human dramas every day.

Growing up in The Beatles’ Liverpool, in the 1960s, I was hardly starved of classic pop music. But even as a kid – and this is Scouse blasphemy – I was drawn to bands from down south.

In particular there were The Kinks and The Small Faces. Think of Waterloo Sunset'’s young lovers, Terry and Julie, amid the commuter mayhem.

Or The Small Faces’ 'Itchycoo Park', a psychedelic Cockney fantasia in the unlikely location of Ilford. I’d never heard of Waterloo, and I still haven’t been to Ilford, but somehow they’re as reassuringly familiar as my home town.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, they were the soul of the old London music hall translated into rock’n’roll. They were in direct descent from the story tellers of old. And the story teller, I’ve discovered, is the archetypal London troubadour.

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The original “London acts” were vagabond minstrels, bawling of scandals, sleaze and public executions. The lyric sheets they flogged became the basis of the British music industry, nicknamed Tin Pan Alley.

Its get-rich-quick mentality has never really died. Guttersnipe shrewdness, a relish of the social cut-and-thrust, are London specialties. Here was a place where commoners and aristocracy lived cheek-by-jowl, and an uppity barrow boy might dress like a dandy to assert his dignity. (His spiritual grandchildren were called the mods.)

I finally got to live in London, and landed a job on the NME. I embraced the bands whose music chimed with my romantic daydream.

Ian Dury, Squeeze and Madness wrote songs that mapped this shapeless city for me (the latest Madness album, 'The Liberty Of Norton Folgate', still revels in all that scuzzy history).

I grew to understand how these acts were raised on music hall. The Sex Pistols were self-consciously modelled on Dickensian urchins; The Clash recalled the insurrections of the notorious London mob.

Paul Weller in his Jam days, Brett Anderson in Suede and Damon Albarn in Blur were each of them, somehow, more London than the real Londoners. They were boys from the south east satellite towns who’d grown up in London’s gravitational pull but couldn’t take their own identity for granted.

That’s OK. London accepts its music from everywhere, from the post-war calypsos of Commonwealth newcomers like Lord Kitchener, to the 21st century global fusions of MIA.

It’s not easy. London is famously indifferent to the strangers who wash up daily on its concrete shores. As an outsider, the city’s music gave me a way of relating to an alien place, and in gratitude I wrote a book to celebrate that music.

The great thing was, I realised it could be a history but thoroughly contemporary, too.

I’m thrilled by the unexpected continuities. There was a rash in recent years of glottally-stopped minstrels like Adele, Jack Penate, Jamie T and Kate Nash, spinning their own tales of London’s passing parade, often inspired by that fine adopted Londoner Mike Skinner of The Streets.

They are in their own ways inheritors of an observational style that stretches back for centuries. The grime school of East London has an excellent way of reporting on the realities of districts that some of us would only enter by mistake.

In fact when I look at the names of current hip-hop stars I’m reminded of a yellowing poster from a ghostly Edwardian music hall. Tinchy Stryder, Dizzee Rascal, Lady Sovereign, Crazy Titch … they could almost be the bill of a 1903 performance at Wilton’s, the great old East End theatre that survives to this day.

But stay too long and London eats you up. Amy Winehouse was once a wickedly perceptive chronicler of her world. Now she’s become the news story herself, and seldom in a welcome way.

Pete Doherty made the same shambling journey. And Lily Allen, born and brought up in the bosom of London showbiz, likewise looks caught in that awkward transition from the observer to the observed.

But, for now, their existence adds to the fabulous, unruly spectacle of London, an inspiring place for any musical student of human life.

Photo Gallery – songs inspired by London

In The City: A Celebration of London Music is published by Virgin Books

www.pauldunoyer.com