THE rugged beauty of Weardale has brought inspiration to many artists - landscape painters and nature-loving poets - but never can it have been said to have inspired a pop overture to a revolution aboard a Russian ship.

This week, the Pet Shop Boys announced that they are to perform their soundtrack to the 1925 black and white silent movie Battleship Potemkin at Swan Hunter's shipyard in Wallsend on May 1. Singer Neil Tennant said the performance will be "a celebration of the industrial past and present of the North-East", and that he had composed the soundtrack at his country home in Wolsingham.

It needs some explanation?

Grigori Potemkin was the lover of Catherine the Great - she who reputedly enjoyed equine encounters. Potemkin became commander of the newly-captured Crimea. When Catherine visited, he wanted to show her the prosperity of her new territory, and so he assembled fake houses, warmed by fake fires, along the river. According to legend, Catherine regally sailed down the Dneiper, impressed by what she saw and not realizing that the fake village she'd just passed was being dismantled and rushed ahead so she could be impressed by it once again.

Sadly, the story isn't true - neither is the one about her attachment to her horse - but the phrase "potemkin village" still means something that looks substantial from a distance but turns out to be wholly hollow. A bit like this week's Education Bill, perhaps.

After Potemkin's death, the lead battleship in Russia's Black Sea fleet was named after him.

Come January 1905, Russia was in revolt. She had just lost a war with Japan - on the way to battle, the Russian Baltic fleet somehow fired on British trawlers in the North Sea having mistaken them for Japanese gunboats - and on "Bloody Sunday" the peasants marched on Tsar Nicholas' Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Soldiers opened fire, killing 100, injuring 3,000.

Discontent spread. By June, all Russia was on strike. Even the ballet wouldn't dance.

Battleship Potemkin was returning to port. Its crew were mutinous. Breakfast was maggot-infested meat. They refused to eat.

"The senior surgeon approached the meat, put on his pince-nez so as to see the maggots better, twisted it around in front of his face, sniffed and said the meat was very good, that the crew was merely faddy," recalled one sailor.

"All that was necessary was to wash off the maggots with water and the meat would be excellent."

Those that refused to eat were put before a firing squad. As the guns were cocked, one of the refuseniks appealed to the better nature of the shooters.

The guns drooped; all hell broke out. The officers were thrown overboard; the mutineers took control, and sailed into Odessa which was in the grip of a general strike.

A riot broke out. Shells were sent crashing into the government buildings.

Guns were fired in reply. Up to 2,000 people died. The rest of Black Sea Fleet was sent to sort out Potemkin.

The battleship turned around in Odessa harbour and prepared to meet its Waterloo. But the warships let the Potemkin through, the sailors applauding wildly.

For a fortnight, the battleship sailed around the Black Sea, trying to foment revolt. She failed. The 1905 revolution fizzled out. The revolting sailors surrendered to Romania. Some sought new lives abroad; others returned home and mysteriously disappeared.

But Leon Trotsky said the 1905 revolution was the inspiration for the 1917 Revolution which overthrew the Tsar, and the Pet Shop Boys found that it was an inspiration for a film soundtrack written in Weardale.

Published: 18/03/2006