A curious feature of Britain’s number ones is how they mirror the history of global travel: “Summer Holiday” in the 50s, Demis Roussos in the 70s, and now Men At Work’s paean to the Australian diaspora, spreading back along the old hippie trail and into Europe. “Down Under” is a song for anyone who’s ever felt the happy shock of familiarity in a strange place.
You could make a strong case, of course, that familiarity is precisely not the point of travel in the first place. Imagine an English-abroad version of “Down Under”, in which a laddish singer expresses his intense relief at finding someone who not only speaks the Q’s E but has fish and chips on hand too. “Down Under”‘s cameraderie is built on – and has contributed to – an idea of Aussies abroad as an ever-jovial brotherhood of chunderers on the rampage: an image which, I’d guess, annoys more travellers than it empowers.
But even if every Australian backpacker in the country bought a copy of “Down Under”, it wouldn’t have topped the charts without crossing over. Its cause was surely helped by the Police being on holiday – Men At Work’s take on pop-reggae is a cruder, bouncier knock-off of Sting’s, albeit with a bizarre Ian Anderson style flute break shoved in the middle.
The flute helps take the edge of the chorus’ unsubtlety. and there’s a taut and well-practised new wave group in here somewhere – but in the end “Down Under” lives or dies by how well you can cope with its high-participation afterlife.
Score: 5
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This is the most base song ever. It is enjoyable to hear it with at least 50 other people, anything less and its crapness shines through.
Between some time in 1978, when I started listening to the charts as some kind of ultrapunky disciplinary project — as defined by me and not really imposed on the world at large! (pogo in yr bedroom! but only when yr mum’s gone out!) — i had treated number ones as a signal of value, that had to be acknowledged
not that something getting to no.1 was actually by definition good, but that something getting to no.1 was a sign that a significant cultural micro-polity within the world-at-large considered it good, and that this had to be factored into my own understanding of what music meant; what its values were and what its value is
this is the song where my confidence in this metric totally broke down — where my dislike for it (and its success) absolutely overrode my attempt to keep distinct a private sociological-anthropogical research schema from the energies of my own taste
three possible reasons:
A: i was confident enough in my own knowledge of what i knew and didn’t yet know but needed to, to take absolute as opposed to provisional stands (as noted, my earlier year-zero punky extremism was very fierce, but very largely kept to myself)
B: i had now left college and was — sorta kinda — earning my own living and paying my own way (yes hullo dole office), so couldn’t afford keeping my options open any longer
C: this is the worst record ever made ever (!)
Although of course Men at Work were scarcely more Aussie than the Bee Gees were – singer and songwriter Colin Hay being a Scottish laddie.
A pleasantly agreeable little ditty which I suspect owes more to Barry Mackenzie and promotions for the intruder Foster’s lager (disgusting stuff) than to the affections of the genuine Australian diaspora. A few years later when I lived not far from Earls Court I commented to a young Aussie, who was gay like most of those I knew and worked with seemed to be, that the Australians I met were very far from the standard ‘ocker’ image. He said that’s why they were all in London.
I seem to recall a video in which members of the band put on the ocker act including bush hats with corks attached and tubes of ice-cold piss, and the flautist playing up a gum (or whatever) tree.
As for Vegemite – it’s Marmite for wimps, innit!
knowing it was coming up, i concentrated on this more than usual when I heard it on capital gold the other day. i actually found myself quite moved by the song’s central idea that everywhere the singer went he could find an aussie being cheerfully vulgar, and everything would be alright. mind you, i was already a bit primed for this reaction after witnessing, and admiring, some spectacular public drunkenness outside the covent garden walkabout last week.
I remember thinking the video was fun and the song slightly less so. I can’t see my own views differing much from Tom’s for the rest of the 80s which makes commenting difficult.
The video boosted my score when I watched it last night.
#2 Watch: A week of Eddy Grant’s patently superior ‘Electric Avenue’.
Totp watch in my house: Dad pshawing and saying “Men at work, what do THEY know about work”.
I’ve been trying to construct a cricketing joke about Australia and Electric Avenue being not too far from The Oval but without success.
I don’t know anything about Men At Work but this is always struck me as some old duffers (Dire Straits maybe) attempting to make a “new wave” record. I’m not surprised it was huge in America.
Pinkchampale #4 – my office isn’t far from the Covent Garden Walkabout – are you sure this public drunkenness was Aussies and not disgruntled Arsenal or Chelsea fans after the “Champs League” semi-finals?
The flute and the percussion intro (sounding like a pinball machine) are the hooks here, and it’s one I remember fondly. How you feel about the subject matter possibly depends on how you feel about Aussies: personally I can honestly say I’ve never met an Aussie I didn’t like – an Aussie friend told me there were plenty she didn’t like but they generally didn’t come over here. But the rhyming of, for instance, “speaka my language” and “Vegemite sandwich” shows a band not taking itself too seriously and producing a highly listenable shuffle into the bargain.
Men at Work had a dramatic and brief impact – for a week or two their single and album were at number one in the US and UK simultaneously, which is rare enough but must be unique for such a new band. I’ve just looked it up and the “Business As Usual” album was top of the US album chart for 15 weeks, replaced by “Thriller” which stayed for 17 weeks. An Aussie invasion of the US predating Crocodile Dundee by three or four years.
Incidentally – Eurovision Watch – the first semi-final was on last night, and I note that Finland’s entry is by a band called Waldo’s People. The boy’s been moonlighting!
At the time this was popular at school, especially because it taught us all the word chunder.
My other contemporary memory is of huge confusion between Men At Work and Men Without Hats – a health and safety official’s nightmare.
#9 LondonLee – yr “old wine in new wave bottles” hypothesis surely confirmed by their having a single called “Dr Heckyll And Mr Jive” – perhaps THE most pub rock title of all time.
#11 especially when it then also starts raining men
#11: i think the chunder-factor was actually another of the reasons behind my (basically unreasonable) loathing — i have never liked the whole giggly area of “mainstream-sanctioned naughtiness”, i used to get terribly cross even as a kid when grown-ups said “sugar” instead of “shit”, and i am completely allergic to the whole look-at-us-we-smoking-DOPE thing in amsterdam bars — if yr expecting a medal for behaviour with zero negative consequences, I WILL HAPPILY SUPPLY THE NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES D00DS and earn you yr medal
yes, yes i was a weird kid
#12 – Wasn’t that also the title of a Pigbag album? They’re not pub rock!
#11 – There was also a Men At Play in 1983 – an obscure electro/hip hop act as I recall, who had a tune called “Dr. Jam”.
Um, yes, “Down Under”. You know what: I must have heard this many dozens of times over, but I’ve never bothered to work out what they were singing about. It’s amiable enough, and it provokes a pleasurable Proustian rush, so I’m happy to leave it there. A five from me. Terrible album cover, wasn’t it?
I also quite liked “Who Can It Be Now”, the single which preceded it.
eritian – no it was early on saturday evening. a load of aussies taking advantage of the unseasonable weather by playing a pissed-up game of aussie rules in the street. with attendant risks to passers-by and parked cars. all quite entertaining to witness, though clearly destined to end in a massive ruck.
glad it’s not just me who was confused by the men at work without hats
Hello everyone. I’ve been watching from the sidelines for about ten years’ worth of number ones, wondering when would be the right moment to join in. I decided it had to be a song that I bought myself when it was a hit, which ruled out the Arrival tape my parents bought me and the countless songs I overheard through my early teens, when I was spending all my pocket money on comics and Rubik’s Cubes. And even this one I bought as part of an album rather than as a single… but 1983 was my First True Year of Pop, and this is near enough to where it started, so here I am.
Rosie (if I can launch into first-name familiarity), it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that Men at Work weren’t an Australian band because one of its five members only moved there at age 14, half a lifetime before they released this! Certainly my generation of young Aussies (I was fifteen when the band’s popularity was at its peak at the beginning of 1983) thought of them as Australian; most of us didn’t know much about Hay’s background. Our equivalent of TOTP, Countdown, was obsessed with the band for months, not least because of their international success.
As a portrait of Aussies this was obviously a cartoon, even to 15-year-olds, but in that time and place the mere presence of lyrics about chundering in number one songs was intriguingly transgressive – a seven-inch dose of theory just as we were starting to do the practical. We hadn’t yet been there and done that when it came to the travelling, but that only added to the aspirational appeal. One striking feature (in hindsight) of “Down Under” is its reference to destinations that seemed tantalizingly obscure to young Aussies, in the form of Brussels and Bombay; the 1984 Redgum song “I’ve Been to Bali Too” spoke more to the actual experience of most young Australian travellers in the 1980s. Perhaps that’s down to Hay’s cross-cultural perspective; come to that, perhaps even the title is (we weren’t in the habit of thinking of ourselves as “down under”, although the phrase gained more currency in Australia after this song charted).
Again in hindsight, it’s no surprise that the band were bigger in the US than anywhere else. Not only did they have the “band from far away” novelty they would have had here in the UK, the themes of their biggest hit would have spoken to young Americans just as much as to young Australians (Brussels being as exotic to them as to us, and a similar “ugly American” stereotype hanging over them as well).
The music on this sounds less dated than on some of their other songs, thanks to the flute being more difficult to place in time than the saxophones on most of Business as Usual. The “taut and well-practised new wave group” is really elsewhere, on “Helpless Automaton”, and could have done interesting things if they’d let it. But they were part of an Australian pub rock tradition that produced some weird hybrids during these few years, few of which made it out of the country, and the musical tension shows. You had to be there, I suppose. Because I was, and as a nod to my 15-year-old self at the start of his new obsession with popular music, I’m tempted to give this a higher rating, but it’s also a song that any Australian my age is thoroughly sick of by now, so five sounds about right.
Loathed it when it came out and for some time, having only caught a glimpse of the video, actually thought they were a bunch of hippies (the flute didn’t help). However, come their next single, ‘Overkill’ all was forgiven as I thought this was a little gem.
#17 hi Rory – great first contribution and welcome aboard. Excellent to get some Aussie perspective on this.
#17 – I like the idea of Americans finding as much to identify with as Australians. I have to admit that as a twelve year old Londoner, Brussels and Bombay sounded exotic to me.
It made me wonder if other countries have their own “Down Under”. As I might have mentioned elsewhere, for West-Coast Canadians of a certain age, Spirit Of The West’s “Home For A Rest” seems to occupy a similar role, with it’s themes of travel and references to traditional music (the flute in Down Under echoing the Australian nursey rhyme Kookaburra).
Despite it’s “high-particpation afterlife”, I struggle to dislike this. It’s one of those songs where any reservations I have (based on grim nights in theme pubs) are simply worn down by the melody.
as an american i always noticed a tendency for british travelogue songs to be very unappreciative of the destination in question, with a palpable eagerness to return back home as soon as possible. this as opposed to the stereotype of the ignorant-but-happy american/australian/european traveller some of you have been talking about. the only two examples i can think of off the top of my head are the clash’s “Safe European Home” and the Kinks’ “Holiday in Waikiki”, but maybe there’s something to this observation? you tell me.
‘Dreadlock Holiday’ is probably the most famous example of that.
We don’t really do “road” songs either
I’m a little surprised at the negativity towards this number one and indeed this band, as I think the fleeting visit afforded us by Men at Work was one of the highpoints of the period. I loved “Down Under” from the moment I heard it and had no hesitation in acquiring “Business as Usual” in an instant on the back of it and being far from disappointed. Let the sociologists gloomily pick the “meaning” of DU apart but for me there is nothing to get one’s knickers in a twist about here and in fact I detect a definite feelgood element to it, as demonstrated by the ludicrous “speaka my language – vegimite sandwich” line. What we have here imho is a fine little pop song, with the flute (was Midge playing it? suggests Waldo. And he doesn’t mean Mr Ure) leaping around all over the place to add to the fun. The accompanying album is also first rate (DU by no means being the best track on it) and for me, Men at Work were like a breath of fresh air. I repeat my puzzlement that they have been red-carded so enthusiastically here. But that’s Popular!
Bit surprised too at the Men at Work/Men Without Hats confusion, the latter being French Canadians.
Colin Hay certainly an Australian and not a Scot, despite his birthplace. Consider Frank Ifield, late of this blog. Born in Coventry to Australian parents who then went back to Australia where Frank grew up before he came back here to embellish his career, with not inconsiderable success. Nationality? Australian surely…
About as Australian as Rod Hull.
Frank Ifield cannot be contained by your puny geographical classifications.
# 24 – Not quite, Erithian. Hull went to Oz by himself as an adult in his mid twenties. Ifield was a child of eleven and went with, I repeat, his Australian parents.
#25 – Sorry, Lee. I’m afraid I don’t agree with you at all.
I didn’t mind this at the time (in my immature way I liked it because it seemed to be all about getting off your tits everywhere which was basically all I was doing back then before it all went a bit sour for me). However now I think its just quite a catchy tune but also tinged with nostalgia for those couple of years before the partying got out of control and things started to go wrong.
I reckon it’s a 7 or 8 for me.
12 & 15 etc: and Jackie McLean had a bit of classic jazz-funk out a couple of years before called “Dr Jackyll and Mr Funk” I think it was even a minor hit
Thanks for the welcome, Tom – glad to join the conversation at last!
#23 Agreed about the album – there are at least four tracks on it that I prefer to this, including all the other singles.
I wonder how this would have fared if they’d employed Aussie accents to go with the coloquialisms?!
I don’t mind this too much although I can’t get too excited about it either. Whereas my feelings for Phil Collins were soured by his association with prog (of which I had been an avid consumer only a few years earlier) Men at work had no such baggage, however there’s something a bit pedestrian about them as performers which is why I don’t care too much about them now.
I can’t remember whether the Castlemaine XXXX Australian stereotype pre or post dates this tune. I know Barry Humphries had promoted the idea back in the 70s(?) but I don’t think it was too mainstream then.
Like Mike, while I knew for a fact that this had lyrics – there most certainly were vocalists pronouncing words – it never occurred to me to figure out what they meant. This wasn’t owing to any dislike of the music: sorta lounge reggae with pleasing pop harmonies uptop. Would give it an 8 on Jukebox, a 7 here, with the high standards you lot seem to have for number ones.
I do think I preferred Men Without Hats. (Les Hommes Sans Chapeaux? Excuse me if the spelling is wrong.)
To the suggestions that Americans bought it because it echoed back their own experience of being abroad I can only offer a dumbfounded “wha..?” Americans don’t go abroad, and they certainly don’t think about how they’re perceived when they do. (This from someone who spent his adolescence in Latin America. Something like <30% of the country has ever left it, and if that figure includes people who came from elsewhere we’re hovering around <10%.) Besides, very few Americans (and people, surely) pay such close attention to lyrics as such a proposition would require.
I certainly had no idea that it was about Australians abroad; if asked, I would have said that the rhyme for “under” was “plunder.” Australians as lawless pirates; Mad Max and that.
From a Yankee perspective this is of a piece with the early-mid-80s (ca. 1982-1986, with outliers like Plastic Bertrand and Martika at both ends of the decade) phenomenon of global pop peeping its head in, a strange and not often replicated experience within US borders. Nena and Men Without Hats (yes, easily mixed up) and Baltimora and After The Fire and Falco and Trio and a-ha and even Dexys misidentified as Irish could be slotted into that category, not to mention all the standard British material we were getting. (Apologies to any upcoming bunnies I may have spoilt.) Exotic but not too exotic, bouncy and synthy (mostly) and with a strong visual hook, it was a cornucopia of bizarre one-offs and wild outliers just waiting to be steamrolled by homegrown juggernauts like M*d*nn*, B. Spr*ngst**n, M. J*cks*n and Pr*nc*.
I don’t know if the standard U.S. attitude towards the MTV pop of the 80s, a combination of gobsmacked glee at the weird variety of it all and a pitying condescension at its uselessness (because so few of these bands were ever Serious Album Artists in our country), has gotten much play in the UK. Most Americans are surprised to learn that Dexys and Madness, e.g., ever had more than the one song. Always remember that most Americans have to be reminded the rest of the world exists.
EDIT: And I see that Kogan’s made some of my points already. Grist for the mill.
Rory – you might be able to remember this to agree or disagree, but I seem to recall that “Down Under” had already been a hit in Australia, and in fact Men At Work had had their really big splash of success by time Down Under happened OS – it was a big deal again, because this was the year that an Australian entry won the America’s Cup….a US-held yacht race that probably means nothing in the UK, but Australian interests had been entering for years, and in ’83 finally wrested the prize away from the Yanks, who’d won it every year since its inception (it was almost a national holiday, the Prime Minister achieving fame for saying “Any boss that sacks somebody for not turning up for work today is a bum”). The song used in the TV coverage was “Down Under”, and I can only guess that this was what helped propel it into the charts overseas.
In Australia, MAW’s first album had already been a smash, it felt like every track had been released a a single, and so this was just a repeat of same. The band themselves were regarded as irreverent pranksters, the film clip was typical of their presentation, live TV appearances were always
“One striking feature (in hindsight) of “Down Under” is its reference to destinations that seemed tantalizingly obscure to young Aussies, in the form of Brussels and Bombay; the 1984 Redgum song “I’ve Been to Bali Too” spoke more to the actual experience of most young Australian travellers in the 1980s”
But MAW were of the generation that still recalled a time when young Aussies travelled from Australia to Britain by hauling overland across SE Asia, up through the Middle East and over Europe to finally wash up at Earl’s Court…a route that now would be virtually inconceivable (I’m still waiting for the travelogue TV show re-doing the route)…Bali’s heyday was just around the corner (one tires of older folk bemoaning the loss of the “real” Bali of their long-distant youth)
I’ve just looked it up and the “Business As Usual” album was top of the US album chart for 15 weeks, replaced by “Thriller”
Yes – “Business is Usual” is absolutely UBIQUITOUS in American thrift stores and garage sales. It is everywhere, propelled by this and “Who Can It Be Now?” In addition to the point about Americans not being habitual travelers, I’d also add that for Americans, Australians are fantastically rare creatures; I’ve met two, maybe three in my lifetime (counting a German who moved there after college), and they have the same appeal as aliens in Star Trek – an incredibly foreign species that by some stroke of luck speaks a recognizable, though adorably odd, version of our language.
I don’t mind the band at all; they have some underrated singles in “It’s A Mistake” and “Overkill” (great hooks throughout that one, kind of a rewrite of “Who Can It Be Now?” but not bad). This one work very well, it’s sort of silly on the surface but does have a sweet idea about finding companionship where you least expect it. I don’t think it’s so much that everywhere you go you run into drunken Australians and thus never get into contact with other cultures – it’s more like those days traveling where you’ve really enjoyed getting into contact with other cultures, it’s been very fun thank you but god would it be nice to talk to somebody *familiar* to get back in my comfort zone for just a little bit. So he’s in this “den in Bombay,” or Brussels or whatever, runs into what seems like a scary situation, this giant muscular guy…but it turns out he’s found a friend, a fellow countryman, someone who may also be feeling traveler’s blues! Nice story. I guess for me the real daydream is that I’d be traveling in some ridiculously far-off place (I am actually going to pass through Mumbai later this year) and, just as I’m getting burnt out on the joys of exploration, run into, not a godforsaken fellow American, but one of them quirky Australians I’ve heard so much about.
And welcome aboard to Rory!
Incidentally, have there been any other hits built around this premise? It seems like there must be tons of cultures scattered in diaspora that might find some resonance in similar sentiments. I feel like there’s a really obvious song but I just can’t think of it.
Walk like an Egyptian?!!
More seriously, The Proclaimers’ “Letter From America” is essentially about the experiences of Scots abroad.
#30 – The stereotypes predate this, although the “Don’t give a XXXX” campaign came afterwards, once the brand went global in the wake of Fosters’ success (and around the same time, the old Aussie joke went global: Why’s it called XXXX? Because
QueenslandersAustralians can’t spell “beer”). Barry Humphries was the one who popularised the word “chunder” through his Barry Mackenzie strip in Private Eye, which spawned two Australian films in the early 1970s; Humphries was also the one who suggested the name “Bruce” to Cleese and co. for the Monty Python “philosophers” sketch. The hats with corks were a creation of English cartoonists at around the same time, although they’ve since been taken up by Australian souvenir manufacturers.#32 – I didn’t want to suggest that Americans in general were bigger international travellers than Australians, just that a city like Brussels would seem more exotic to you (and us) than to UK people who heard its name on the news every other week thanks to the EU connection. I know that differences in annual leave and the range of potential domestic options create different travel situations in the US and Australia.
#33 – Yes, “Down Under” topped the Australian charts well before 1983. 1983 was when their much-anticipated second album came out locally (mid-year, Wikipedia reminds me, which sounds right, because I was one of the ones doing the anticipating). You’re right that the song was played to death during the America’s Cup campaign, but that didn’t happen until September that year. Billboard says that it topped the US charts simultaneously with the UK charts, and claims it was because “their funny, irreverent videos became MTV favorites” (“Who Can It Be Now?” had already been a US number one for the band, and Business as Usual topped the US charts in November 1982). I notice that Wikipedia claims that the America’s Cup win was what popularised the song internationally, which I will now go and amend!
And true, Men at Work were of the generation that recalled the hippy trail, but the ones buying most of their records weren’t. The band were in their late twenties when they had their hits, but early ’80s school-age record buyers like me knew nothing of hippy trails, and our older siblings who were off travelling in their early twenties (post-uni) were going to Bali and London, not Bombay and Brussels.
it’s not exactly touristic, obviously, but re diaspora there’s the rastafarian “exiles in babylon” relationship to africa, which started to become concrete once its stars began to travel there
And of course the Pogues’ “Thousands Are Sailing” for the Irish.
More recently, what songs would continue Tom’s idea about the UK charts mirroring the history of Brits’ global travel? – any number of Ibiza anthems? “Pure Shores”, at least in the context of the film it soundtracked?
Snif – yes we did notice your America’s Cup victory up here! I understand the national mood was such that you could have renamed the beach in Sydney “Bondy” for the occasion. It was the period when Aussies were emerging from the “cultural cringe” with musicians and film directors asserting themselves (“Gallipoli” was a massive success here), leading up to the bicentenary in 1988. And even if “Down Under” wasn’t a great cultural artefact, as a sign of greater confidence in the nation it was unmistakable. (You’d just got the Ashes back too.)
The Kent Music Report (via Wikipedia) says that “Down Under” peaked at no. 1 in Australia for six weeks at the end of 1981 and beginning of 1982. That twelve month sea-voyage to Blighty is a shocker…
Ain’t Going To Goa.
I would imagine that the video was a factor in it’s success in the US via MTV – and around this time there was Jonathan King popping up on TOTP with news of what was hot in the US charts before he started Entertainment USA.
It’s strange looking back on this that it never struck me as any sort of ‘novelty song’ back in the day. I think perhaps it was more accepted in the early 80s that comedy had a part to play even in “serious” muisic. Artists like Elvis Costello, The Specials, XTC and The Police all displayed a sense of humour in the their songs (albeit rather dry at times) and groups like Madness obviously incorporated much humour and silliness into their music without ever being dismissed as a novelty act. Maybe I just saw this as ‘serious music with humorous lyrics’ rather than a comedy/novelty song.
don’t recall anyone else mentioning this, but there was a curious fad for all things Australian in ’80’s America. This song was the first taste of it, but before long we had Foster’s, Outback Steakhouse, Banana Republic clothing (in the mid-’80s the store’s look was definitely Aussie-centric), Aussie shampoo, “Crocodile Dundee”, etc.
Snif – Erithian’s quite right. Your America’s Cup win was big news here too, if only for the fact that the Yanks finally lost a contest they were never supposed to lose, rather than the Ossies winning it. I seem to recall that the bloke at the US boat club where the cup had always been on display was loathe to relinquish the trophy even though they were no longer the holders. This was always replicated, of course, by the English cricket authorities always insisting on the Ashes remaining at Lords even when Australia held them, which was and is more often than not.
Dire Straits ‘Twisting By the Pool’, Wham! ‘Club Tropicana’ (sort of), ‘El Vino Collapso’ by Black Lace, Cats UK ‘Luton Airport’ (again sort of), ‘Englishman in New York’ by Sting
all related to the English abroad
…And to some extent both “California Dreaming” and “California Girls” are about being displaced Californians missing various aspects of home life. And of course “Homeward Bound” was an autobiographical tale of Paul Simon’s yearnings for his American homeland whilst sitting in Wigan or Widness station (depending on which version of the story you believe)
I would venture to state that the America’s Cup win went almost entirely unnoticed by America!
48: I’ve mentioned somewhere in the archive, haven’t I, that ’twas me who conjured up that story about Homeward Bound and Widnes North station (as it was in the early 70s) in a throwaway remark I made in the Liverpool Uni student newspaper. I was amazed when, years later, it seemed to have become common knowledge. It was going to be Runcorn originally, but I thought that was much too obvious with Runcorn station being on a viaduct surrounded by an industrial landscape.