ARTS: Simple Minds, Elton John, James Taylor, Van Morrison - Belfast has long been a focus for musicians. A book and CD exploring representations of the city in song picks up on guilty feelings, writes Jane Coyle

Elton John lamented "deep inside my soul fights a war I can't explain"; Simple Minds vowed " one day we'll return here, when the Belfast Child sings again"; James Taylor crooned of "the blessing of forgiveness"; the Pretty Things bemoaned the lot of "Celtic children born with stone in hand"; while Gary Kemp permitted a glimpse into the creative thinking behind the Spandau Ballet hit Through the Barricades when he confided "I thought the Romeo and Juliet possibilities of the streets of Belfast was the only way I could really capture the Troubles".

In the league table of songs written about the world's cities, Belfast ranks behind only London, Berlin and, unexpectedly, Stockholm. According to the All Music Guide, there are 86 songs which feature Belfast in their titles and many others which make a passing reference to the city. A significant number of these have been written by artists who never visited the city or have little personal knowledge of it.

When Factotum decided its next project would focus on interpretations of Belfast through popular song and critical analysis, it could not have anticipated the widespread interest and impact it would generate.

"We have been surprised and very pleased that so many people are talking about it," says Richard West, co-director of Factotum and editor of Source photographic magazine. "We are interested in exploring the different ways in which the city has been represented and generating critical responses to what is going on here."

Although less than a year old, the organisation already has a number of projects to its credit. The first was a series of talks entitled "What Is He Building In There?", an investigation of what goes on behind the anonymous doors of the city's Cathedral Quarter. Those discoveries included a newspaper office, a second World War museum, Catalyst Arts and a prison arts institute.

There followed four contemporary dance events in which professionals from, or working in, Belfast, were commissioned to create new dance pieces, one of which will soon be performed in Cork. And they have revived a West Belfast-based free newspaper as a platform for free speech and opinion.

"We are encouraging people to ask 'where are we now?' and to come up with their own views, freely expressed," says co-director Stephen Hackett, formerly a director of Catalyst Arts. Next will be another book project, Belfast Ordinary, which will examine the development and demise of the city's architecture.

In Belfast Songs, writers, poets, critics and academics with Belfast links were invited to analyse 14 songs, some by big names such as the Pretty Things, Van Morrison, Elton John, Simple Minds, James Taylor and Nanci Griffiths, others by local punk bands such as Crass, Shock Treatment and the memorable Stiff Little Fingers, plus a couple of traditional ballads and Orbital's electronic Belfast.

"We didn't set out to be negative or to criticise people for not knowing what they were talking about," says West. "In a way, it's a compliment for people to be writing about the city. But it was interesting to pick up on the guilt and self-consciousness that people feel when they are writing about Belfast."

In his introduction to the series of essays, Hackett takes that argument one step further: "The kudos of mentioning Belfast, Bosnia or Palestine in popular music tends to mean 'I care' and that the artists themselves are socially and politically aware of the situation in these cities or countries."

Critic Aaron Kelly judges Elton John's Belfast to be "written from the outside to such an extent that its stereotypes, masquerading as empathy, amount to an insult to Belfast's people, due to its ignorance of their actual lives. If this song is intended as some kind of testament to our city, then we do not need it; we have suffered enough already".

In similar tones of exasperation, Glenn Patterson implores folk-rock singer James Taylor to "stop singing about us as though the City Hall was thatched" in his mournful Belfast to Boston.

In contrast, it was Belfast's own loud-mouthed, fearless punk bands who were prepared to tell it like it really was. Poet Paul Muldoon admires the early songs of Stiff Little Fingers for "their insistence on the double duty to 'question everything you're told' and come up with answers of one's own". Chris Magee admits that he never really liked Crass but acknowledges how important they were and continue to be to some people.

He quotes from Banned from the Roxy, "the truth of their reality is at the wrong end of a gun, the proof that is Belfast and that's no f--king fun", as an illustration of Crass's "unrelenting guerilla campaign against the system - in all its manifestations".

In Martin McLoone's lyrical essay on Van Morrison's landmark Astral Weeks album, he remarks that its release in 1969 coincided with the escalation of sectarian violence and rioting in Belfast. Yet the album's eight songs tell of "romantic love and the capacity of human beings to experience something of the mysticism and the sublime, central to so many different religions".

He points to a basic irony in Morrison's portrayal of his home town. "He is rooted to its culture and yet he is driven by the desire to escape it. Finally, of course, his escape was physical and most of his music was conceived and recorded in exile."

The accompanying CD contains remixes of the chosen songs by a number of remix specialists and "plunderphonics". It is an edgy, sometimes angry collection, hitting back, where appropriate, at the mawkish, if well-meaning, lyrics and Celticised musical mush of some of the originals and reflective of Will Bradley's assertion that the keening Belfast Child by Simple Minds, "tries so desperately hard to say something without really telling you what . . . (but) in the end, it all sounds as empty as Wembley Arena on a Tuesday afternoon".

But, as Stephen Hackett is at pains to point out, the blame does not entirely lie with those on the outside track: "Some cultural production in the city dwells on the clichés. Themes of the conflict, love across the barricades, emigration etc. are still prevalent. Until Belfast stops trading on the symbolic capital of 'Belfast' or inflating its own clichés and hackneyed representations of itself . . . it will be difficult to move on."

• Belfast Songs book and CD package is £12 and is available from the Factotum website: www.factotum.org.uk and selected bookshops and record shops.