On the cover of Josh Rouse’s new album, Country Mouse City House, we see the Nebraska-born singer gazing out across the skyline of the Spanish city of Valencia, where he now lives. The album title itself suggests that Rouse perhaps feels slightly out of place in his new home, as does the song Nice to Fit In, a typically addictive slice of Rousean soft rock in which the singer confesses that he is “living on the outside, a little”. Not that Rouse is complaining, exactly. Asthe son of a military man, he got used to being on the move during a peripatetic childhood. After establishing himself as a musician in Nashville, he moved to Spain. “I’d just got divorced. It was a transitional period,” he explains. “I thought about moving to New York, but then I started dating a girl, and she’s Spanish, so...”

A sense of place is important to Rouse’s work. The last album he wrote before leaving Nashville was named after the city, and its successor, Subtitulo, was written within a week of his arrival in Spain. “I definitely feel more inspired when I’m moving around. I should do it more often,” Rouse says. “And the Spanish culture has affected my music. Both the slower, more patient lifestyle, and the fact ofbeing a bitmore isolated – that sense of having to sit through conversations whereyou don’t know what’s going on – which seeps into the music.”

Rouse isn’t the first musician to find that a change in location can inspire creativity – nor the first to find that the travel-ler’s sense of isolation becomes a theme of their work. One of popular music’s most famous relocations was that of David Bowie, who decided to transplant himself from Los Angeles to Berlin in 1976. Bowie and his frequent collaborator Iggy Pop moved to Berlin ostensibly to clean up Bowie’s cocaine habit. The city also offered Bowie something close to real life: “They [Berlin-ers] are very matter-of-fact about celebrities,” Bowie said at the time. “They don’t seem particularly joyful about seeing a famous face.”

The newly clean and sober Bowie proceeded to hit his creative peak, the “Berlin trilogy” of Low, Heroes and Lodger, which explored themes not merely of isolation but of complete alienation, in a new style of music fashioned from a collision of American funk, German rock and English pop. To this day, Low is cited as the most influential album of all time, suggesting that A New Career in a New Town (as one of Low’s instrumental tracks is titled) can inspire great things.

Hang on a minute, though. What were those quote marks doing around “Berlin trilogy”? Low may have been inspired by Bowie’s arrival in Berlin, but it was actually recorded not in the forbidding shadow of the Berlin wall, but in a rather lovely old chateau surrounded by acres of gorgeous French countryside. Bowie had recorded at the Château d’Hérou-ville before; in fact, it had become something of a favourite among the early1970s glam-rockers, hosting Bowie’s Pin Ups, T. Rex’s The Slider and several albums by Elton John, who acknowledged the influence of the location by naming one of his records Honky Chateau.

Plenty of artists have gone looking for the creative inspiration that Bowie found in Berlin. Nick Cave moved there, as the obvious home for his expressionist work in the Birthday Party, while U2 headed for the Hansa studios, where Heroes actually was recorded, to get some of that “Bowie in Berlin” ambience onto Achtung Baby. (And if you’re thinking, “Surely they just wanted the Hansa studios sound”, I would just mention that Boney M also recorded there, so the precise acoustics of the studio probably aren’t the point.)

Sometimes a city does become an important destination for musicians because of a studio – or a producer, or a bunch of session musicians. Both Bowie and Elton John headed straight for Philadelphia when they wanted to make soul music – Bowie to Sigma Sound studios, Elton to work with the producer Thom Bell – while Elvis Costello made the journey to Nashville to inspire some authentic country feeling on his Almost Blue album. Working with the producer Billy Sherrill, who had co-written Tammy Wynette’s Stand by Your Man and produced Charlie Rich’s The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, Costello hoped to record in Columbia Studio B, where Blonde on Blonde and endless country hits had been fashioned, but it was being renovated, so he ended up in Studio A, which, he later commented, “could have been anywhere”. Add in the fact that Sherrill, architect of the then current “countrypolitan” sound, couldn’t fathom why some English punk wanted to record whatSherrillconsidered to be tired old country songs, andCostello might as well have stayed in London.

If the spirit of Nashville proved elusive for Costello, the essence of Miami as the ultimate party town seems a little easier to pick up on. The rule is: if you’re a quirky pop star who used to have hits, but are floundering a bit, head to Miami, chill out and pick up on the party vibe. It worked for Nelly Furtado last year, when the I’m Like a Bird singer reinvented herself as a summery provider of R&B party grooves on the Miami-spawned Loose. Thirty years previously, the Bee Gees had relocated to Miami and discovered disco. Within a year of their arrival, they had written Jive Talkin’, and were on their way to a whole new level of falsetto’n’flares success.

When Polly Harvey relocated to New York, she plugged into the uptight urban mood, creating her best and best-selling album, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Songs like the tremendous The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore ooze with the seamy spirit of the city.

But calling inthe removal menisn’t always a short cut to makingyour best work. True Rod Stewart fans have never forgiven the man for heading to LA; for them, the resulting album, Atlantic Crossing, marks the beginning of the end of Stewart as a great singer. Similarly, whoever thought shipping the Happy Mondays to the Bahamas would focus their work ethic was a little misguided. The ostensible reason was to get Shaun Ryder away from his sources of heroin; but, though you can take the boy out of Madchester, you can’t take Madchester out of the boy. While recording their album Yes Please! at Compass Point Studios, the band found other dealers and other drugs, and virtually bankrupted their label, Factory. The most misguided move of all – in musical terms – must be the decision to transfer Motown’s headquarters from Detroit to LA in 1972. The company continues to this day, asa subsidiary of Universal, but the classic Motown music was all left behind when Berry Gordy handed the keys to the West Grand Boulevard studios over to the estate agent.

Even the smallest move can cause problems. The Beatles had recorded every single one of their brilliant albums at Abbey Road, in northwest London. Then they decided to work on Let It Be just a few miles to the west, in Twickenham studios, and ended up with the most fraught, drawn-out and weakest record of their career.

But some of the strangest moves can work. The Belgian port of Ostend may seem an unlikely setting for a creative rebirth, but that’s where Marvin Gaye went to escape from the problems that haunted him back home in America. And where he booked into a small local studio and began working on a new sound, using programmed rhythms that would develop into his 1982 comeback album, Midnight Love, heralded by his biggest single, Sexual Healing.

So, if you’re a band looking to make the best album of your career, you should think about moving to Berlin, Miami or Ostend. Twickenham, on the other hand...

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