Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: Ralph McTell turns 80 today, and it strikes me that for someone who took a while to decide to become a full-time musician, he has a decent claim to being the most successful English folk musician of his generation.

'McTell’, of course, was a stage name, suggested by his lifelong friend Wizz Jones, from their shared love of the bluesman Blind Willie McTell. But ‘Ralph’ also had a musical connection. His father, Fred May, had worked for the composer Vaughan Williams before the war, and named after ‘RVW’. But Fred walked out on his family when Ralph was young, leaving his mother, Winifred, to bring up him and his brother on her own, in council housing in Croydon in south London.

(Ralph McTell in 2006 holding up a concert poster from the late 1960s. Photo: Andy F via Wikipedia. CC BY 3.0). 

It’s hard to remember how big McTell was in the 1970s, partly because of the success of Streets of London, which went to #2 in the UK charts and has since been covered by something like 200 artists.

In 1970, for example, he sold out the Royal Festival Hall twice and appeared at the Isle of Wight Festival that headlined Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. He headlined the Montreux Jass Festival in 1976. And in the 1980s, when British folk went through something of a slump, McTell found himself writing original songs for a children’s TV show, Alphabet Zoo. He took the job because he admired the songs that Woody Guthrie—one of his heroes—had written for children.

He was blessed with a strong baritone voice, and a guitar technique learned from listening to American blues players—he frequently namechecks the Reverend Gary Davis as a particular influence.

But he has also managed the record industry astutely. A record deal with Transatlantic Records—the folk label of the ‘60s and the ‘70s—launched his career. But he ended up with the rights to those early songs, and he’s been smart about both releasing music on his own labels and on repackaging the earlier material to find new audiences.

Of course, none of this would be the case had the songs not been as strong as they are. Until Nanci Griffiths covered From Clare to Here and I read her sleeve notes, I hadn’t realised that McTell had written the song. It sounded like a timeless song of Irish exile, like Carrickfergus. (I’m a fair bit younger than McTell, so his early career had been a bit of a blur to me.)

Here on the site, Colin wrote about From Clare to Here comparing McTell’s version of the song to both Nanci Griffiths’s and to that of the north-eastern singer Bob Fox, sharing the version above, recorded in recent years with the RTE Concert Orchestra providing an accompaniment.

As with Streets of London, From Clare to Here is blessed with a simple chorus that encapsulates the whole emotion of the song: “It’s a long, long way/ And it gets further by the day.” It’s simple, but for a songwriter, this is just about the hardest thing to do.

In the case of Streets of London, the song works because of the tension between the chorus, addressed to the friend who is feeling sorry for themselves, and the cases of real loneliness out on the streets. It’s as much about self-pity as pity.

At the bottom of this post, we have included the 2017 version of the song, recorded in aid of the homeless charity Crisis, which we wrote about on the site. Annie Lennox is on guest vocals.

Similarly, Spiral Staircase, the title track of his second record, has a chorus that catches the giddiness of falling in love. I can’t listen to the song without regret, even now. When I was in my early 20s a young woman who I’d got to know sent me the lyrics to Spiral Staircase in a letter, and I was too young, or too disbelieving, to understand what she was trying to tell me, at least until it was too late.

I like to think that Spiral Staircase was about his Norwegian wife Nonna, who he met while busking in Paris in 1966. They married a year later, and stayed married for 57 years until her death earlier this year. Nanna’s Song, which opened his first record, Eight Frames a Second, about his times with her in Paris, is a wonderful evocation:

Ice cream and candy bars/ A Paris moon and Paris stars

Can you count the times/ That we heard the chimes of Notre Dame

Across the Seine/ To remind us sadly once again,

Time just like the river/ Was swiftly passing by.

When you look back at McTell’s career, the word that comes to mind is ‘grounded’. I was watching his 1976 appearance on the BBC show The Old Grey Whistle Test, which was re-shown recently. (If you have access to iPlayer, it’s available for another week.)

That year, he headlined Montreux, filled the Royal Albert Hall, and had sold a million copies of Streets of London. But there’s no sense of self-importance, and very little ego on show. He’s written a piano rag specially for the show—‘The Old Grey Rag’—that he’s never played in public before:

“As you know, the Old Grey Whistle Test is always first with experimental music”, as he tells them beforehand.

In truth, it could have done with a little more practice, although the audience, perhaps disarmed, was enthusiastic. Unfazed, he makes a joke about Earl Hines that probably goes straight over their heads and then doubles down, playing another song—John Martyn’s May You Never—that he’s also not previously performed in public.

It’s a long way from there to here.

Wikipedia lists more than 50 records released by McTell over the course of 55 years, some of which are collections or reissues. But they also include experiments like the songs about the poet Dylan Thomas, written for a BBC commission.

He’s kept working throughout. I saw him playing with Wizz Jones in 2017, after the pair of them had finally made a record together in their 70s, and he made his first career appearance on Later... With Jools Holland in 2018. He popped up earlier this year to guest for Richard Thompson at the Royal Albert Hall.

It’s hard to come down from the heights that McTell reached in his 20s and 30s and still keep your balance. Some of his contemporaries became mired in drink or drugs. Reading a clutch of interviews on his website, I realised that his experience of an absent father had probably been a key to this. It is threaded through his work, in songs like Barges and Mr Connaughton. As he told Andy Farquarson in 2001,

Critics describe my work as 'gentle' but my family upbringing was as tough as anyone's... when I go home, the door shuts. I just try to be a good husband and dad.

Happy birthday, Ralph!

Crisis’s Christmas appeal can be found here.