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Andrew Curry writes: I’d half expected Ralph McTell to show up to his birthday concert at the Royal Festival Hall with a few friends to help him take the strain. After all, he’s a couple of months past 80 now.

(Photo: via Ralph McTell)

So I’d imagined that maybe a couple of younger singers might step in, maybe playing a couple of his songs, to give him a bit of a break in each half.

The set contributed to this thought. To the right of the piano in the middle of the stage was a sofa, to the right there was a desk and a coat stand, with some props scattered around to make it look less contrived.

“Not my idea”, he said in the first half, gesturing to all of this. “You probably think you’re in a furniture shop.”

I was wrong about the friends. He played solo for more than two hours, swapping his fleet of guitars from time to time, popping over to the piano occasionally, even reading a poem at the desk, telling stories about the songs as he went. I hope I still have his stamina and lucidity when I get to his age.

The first half of the concert, broadly, had an autobiographical thread, connected by his tough upbringing in council housing in Croydon, his first eleven years living in “a condemned basement” mostly being brought up by a single mum.

It took us from some of his youngest memories though to 20, when he was starting out as a musician.

As a result, the first half was quite a rich evocation of that 1950s world starting with Brighton Belle, about some early memories, before his father left, of his grandfather driving trains—first steam, then electric. Trips to Sunday School were conjured in Mrs Adlam’s Angels, and his song for his upstairs neighbour, the young Irishman Mr Connaughton was obviously part of this sequence, with its story about building a wooden box cart to play on the streets.

Mr Connaughton was—clearly from the lyric—a bit of a father figure, but McTell wrote it much later, after his daughter, whose birth is mentioned in the song, introduced herself to him after a concert.

McTell’s songs make a lot of small images, and two other songs from the first half built on such images to create a vivd picture of his childhood world. The first was the Ballad of Dancing Doreen, about Come Dancing, the drab-but-glamorous-for-the-time BBC ballroom dancing series that ran for almost 40 years. The detail: that one of the contestants had sewed on every one of the 20,000 sequins on her costume.

Factory Girl comes from another childhood memory—of the young women who worked in the factories off the Mitcham Road, where the May family was eventually rehoused, gathering in the morning and chatting before they clocked on for work.

His song about Derek Bentley, controversially hanged in 1953, also comes from his childhood.

His mother knew the Bentley family , and the incident in which the policeman was killed happened only a few miles from where he lived when the young Ralph was eight.

McTell’s an admirer of Woody Guthrie, and part of the inspiration for the song came from Guthrie’s topical songs. For me this was the high spot of the first half. McTell was involved in the campaign for a pardon for Bentley for 15 years, and sang the song at the memorial service for Bentley after the pardon was granted.

There were a couple of songs about artists he admired as the first half closed: his Dylan tribute, West Street and 4th, which brings to life the cover of Freewheelin’, and A Kiss in the Rain, which imagines Anne Briggs teaching Bert Jansch Blackwaterside. Jansch’s guitar-playing, McTell said, made him wish he’d taken up the trombone.

The second half was more eclectic. There’s a setlist online, so I don’t need to run through this in detail. He opened with Sylvia, his song about the poet Sylvia Plath, and closed with The Ferryman, inspired by Hermann Hesse’s Siddharta. Somewhere in the middle he read a poem from his Dylan Thomas project, so it’s fair to say that the half had a literary flavour to it.

Towards the end he played “a medley of his greatest hit”, and invited us to sing along with him on Streets of London.

His lovely song about older love, Naomi, was slotted in, next to the sprightly Close Shave, apparently based on a true story “that was too good not to use”.

The sofa, by the way, was inspired by his 2012 record Sofa Noodling, and he repaired to it once in each half to play a couple of blues and ragtime influenced instrumentals.

Before he got to an encore, his family—children and grandchildren—came on to sing him happy birthday, and then he closed it out with Somewhere Down The Road:

Somewhere down the road is not goodbye

It means we'll meet again or at least we'll try

And on some October day

When your leaves are blowin' away

You'll maybe shed a tear and so will I.

All in all, then, 20 songs from across a portfolio of something more than 300, taken from right across his career, and written and recorded over a period of more than half a century. Some had been requested by fans ahead of the concert—who were also thanked for their support during his difficult 2024, when his wife Nanna died.

Taken together, it was a picture of a man who has worked hard at his craft for 60 years, at both the songwriting and the guitar playing.

And selling out the 2,700 seater Royal Festival Hall at 80-–he first played there in 1970—is a sign of how much esteem and affection he’s held in.

What keeps him at it? He said between songs that it was just a desire—every day—to learn how to play the guitar better, which he described as a fascination that he’d had since he first started to learn how to play it.

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