So mostly it is song that carries the workers by to a time when they will be expelled late flung out by the bureau alarm

In that short detonate of summer at the finish of April, I took a train by the City of London, past Bishopsgate, Threadneedle, Cheapside, St Paul"s. From the tip deck, I watched the dim suits spilling out of bureau blocks, by revolving doors to sandwich shops, blood vessel stations, cab cabs, faces carried quickly towards the extended honeyed blue of the sky. And I remembered, as we rolled on towards Holborn, how each July, lunchtime in Lincoln"s InnFields brings the bureau workers out to lay on the comfortable grass, trouser legs rolled up, jackets splayed out, boots kicked off.

There"s a strain by John Hartford, called In Tall Buildings, that I regularly think of when I find myself in this piece of locale – it seems to fit the landscape, the shadows thrown by the Gherkin, and the Willis Building, and the solid climb of the Heron Tower. It is a hippy-hearted song, a immature man revelation of the unavoidable obey to bureau life. "Someday baby, when I am a man," it opens, "When others have taught me the most appropriate that they can / They"ll sell me a fit and they"ll cut off my hair / And send me to work in tall buildings."

You feel all the extreme happiness of him squeezed out as he heads to the subway, behest "Goodbye to the fever / Goodbye to the dew / Goodbye to flowering plants / And goodbye to you." And in the shutting verse, he greets retirement, "when my hold up is my own", and finds himself right afar wondering "what happened, mid and between, when I went to work in tall buildings".

It was in actuality Gillian Welch"s version of In Tall Buildings I listened first, on the manuscript A Tribute to John Hartford: Live From Mountain Stage. "This is a balance of John"s that I"ve desired for years," she told the audience. "It"s flattering sad. There"s probably a satisfactory series of people that give up their jobs since of this song." Welch"s voice carries a of course bittersweet quality, and in her hands this strain acquires something of the low spirits of Theodore Roethke"s poem Dolor, a rail opposite the deadening outcome of institutions: "All the wretchedness ofmanila folders and glue … / Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, / Endless duplication of lives and objects."

Rock"n"roll"s attribute with operative hold up is a predictably nervous one, from the style-cramping trainer of Summertime Blues who barks "No bones son, you gotta work late!" to the simmering disappointment of Springsteen"s Factory. And if you see at the story of work songs, at the songs of the fields and the fishermen, the mills and the mines, there is something consoling in the actuality that it is so mostly strain that has carried the workers through, hidden the stroke of their tasks to sing of a time when they will be released, retired, flung out by the bureau whistle.

One of my prime work songs is the Rolling Stones" Factory Girl, a small and beautifully peculiar shard of a strain that appears on their 1968 manuscript Beggars Banquet. Against an Appalachian tune, all fiddle and conga drums, tabla and Mellotron, Jagger sings us an industrial stage of station in the rain, watchful for a lady outward the bureau where she works. She is a girl, he tells us, who has no income and wears curlers in her hair, a lady who gets dipsomaniac and gets him in to fights. "Waiting for a lady and her knees are most as well fat / Waiting for a lady who wears scarves instead of hats / Her zipper"s damaged down the behind / Waiting for a bureau girl."

We know zero of the bureau itself, the sound and the mud and the din of it, but we know that, as in Hartford"s song, it is usually outward of this construction that hold up begins. It is the enterprise for freedom, of course, that is the engine of rock"n"roll – there in all those songs about teenage rebellions, about fast cars and splash anddrugs and sex. These dual songs are dismissed by that same desire, by the same clarity of watchful to begin, watchful for the strength and the extract of it; far afar from the intelligent fit and the circuit leather belt andthe slicing of hair, hold up is about the dew and the sunshine, the fat knees and the fights.