The quintessential American road song – by a band who grew up in England and took their inspiration from a pair of paintings by European artists.
This is one of my all-time favourite songs. It’s so evocative of that mythical America, with its endless highways through scorched South-western deserts strewn with cacti… and it’s all a mirage.
Because ‘America’ grew up in England – and wrote this in Dorset…
Puddletown, to be exact.
Originally titled Desert Song, it was inspired not by the spectacular vistas of Arizona and New Mexico but by a painting of a desert by Salvador Dali hanging in the home studio of Arthur Brown (the guy who sang Fire! with his band The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown) at his house near Puddletown.
That was the desert. The horse came from an Escher picture hanging nearby.
Dewey Bunnell (born in Harrogate, Yorkshire), Dan Peek and Gerry Beckley were the sons of US Air Force personnel stationed at RAF South Ruislip and first met in the mid-Sixties at their school in Bushey Hall.
Inspired by the Americana sounds on the jukebox in the Air Force mess hall, and the vocal harmonies of The Eagles and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, they named themselves America in order not to sound as if they were a British band trying to sound “American”.
Yet it’s exactly that wistful sense of a mythical America acquired from film and music, art and literature, that makes the song so appealing: it perfectly captures the *idea* of America, and its landscape, in song.
Not only did it evoke the American desert – a place where “the heat was hot” and you found “flies that buzz” and “plants and birds and rocks and things” – the song also evoked Neil Young. In fact, Horse With No Name replaced Heart Of Gold at the top of the US charts in 1972, somewhat to his chagrin.
America made their live debut at a Christmas charity concert at The Roundhouse, opening for The Who and Elton John (and the Chalk Farm Salvation Army Band and Choir). That earned them a deal with Warner Bros – and they’re still going strong, despite the death in 2011 of Dan Peek, who had left the band in 1977 to pursue his Baptist faith.