Even as a young teenager growing up in Lanarkshire, I was
always listening out for music that sounded out of kilter, whether it was
George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III (the
closing section of which I heard on a Saturday afternoon on Radio 3) or
anything which “irrupted” the top forty. From the first time that I heard “Baker
Street” on the radio – I think it was Dougie Donnelly on Radio Clyde – I was
immediately hooked, mentally noting that this song seemed to go as much against
the grain of a standard pop record as anything coming out of punk or New Wave,
and was probably just as angry, if not angrier.
For forty years I harboured the notion – and this was from a
time when visiting London, never mind living and working in it, was still a
distant pipedream – that the song encapsulated the situation of the displaced Scotsman,
marooned in a world he doesn’t really like or perhaps even understand. Make no
mistake, this is undeniably a Scottish record, and seemingly all about someone
determinedly losing themselves somewhere that is not home. Nigel Jenkins’
rhythm guitar repeatedly divebombs its way through the song, like impatient
passing traffic (echoed by the rattling percussion of Glen le Fleur), while
Graham Preskett’s unobtrusive string section, Tommy Eyre’s keyboards and Henry
Spinetti’s patient drums endeavour to maintain a setting of grand stability.
Rafferty’s vocal is determinedly cool, too; a little rougher
than Green Gartside and absolutely stoic, even when in self-denial. For,
despite the switch from second person in the first verse to third person in the
second, there seemed no doubt to me that Rafferty was singing to himself, that
he was the one who was crying now, that he wanted to abandon the drinking and
go and live in – Larkhall? – and that despite his polite protestations, he knew
that he could and would never escape this circle. He sings of going home – but does
he truly have a home which he can reach? He sounds lost, so much so that
halfway through the song his voice disappears entirely – in this sense, it is
the precise obverse of Bowie’s “Sound And Vision” as well as a precursor of
Gary Numan’s very similarly structured “Cars” – as though he has simply
wandered out of the studio.
Or does his voice vanish, as such? There are other voices on
this record – Hugh Burns’ acerbic lead guitar towards the end, and especially
the alto saxophone of Raphael Ravenscroft, which articulates the speech dormant
in Rafferty’s reticent heart, and does so beautifully, suggesting – as sadly
his story turned out – that the singer will never give up the booze, that
ultimately his body would give up on him because of the booze, and the fierce
underlying self-hate.
Yes, “Baker Street” seemed to break most pop record rules –
the saxophone line is the (Greek?) chorus, the structure resembles a
half-derelict house somewhere in Bellshill – and I can only conjecture that in
the late seventies of can-do, aspirational America, people were bowled over, if
not knocked for six, by this record which suggested: no, you can’t do, it’s all
a con trick. For me the nearest comparison would be – no, not the Proclaimers’ “Letter
From America” (the single version of which was produced by Rafferty) – but another
song from 1978 written and performed by a displaced Scotsman; “The Big Country”
by Talking Heads, with its tactfully agonised refrains of “I wouldn’t live
there if you paid me” and the coda of “I'm tired of looking out the windows of
the airplane/I'm tired of travelling, I want to be somewhere!” (see Rafferty’s “Home And Dry”).
At least, that is how I interpreted it for decades. But that’s
not what “Baker Street” is actually about. Rafferty had been in Stealers Wheel,
which had split messily in 1975; various legal proceedings arising from that meant
that he was prevented from recording for three years. His family home was in
his birthplace of Paisley, but for business purposes he regularly had to
commute between there and London, hence the disillusionment expressed in the
song. The friend in the second verse really did live in a small flat off Baker
Street – yes, readers, as unbelievable as it may now seem, there was a time,
not so long ago, when you could live cheaply in central London (I myself did so
for many years) – but the final lap of the song, the going home/guitar solo
section, actually represents the exhilaration
that Rafferty felt when the dispute was settled and he could record again. So,
when he sings “You’re going home,” it is an expression of relief that he doesn’t have to deal with That London again. The closing
sequence is, in fact, a triumphant argument in
favour of life. The winning, if you will, of a fight for life, which
Rafferty finally lost but which I won this year (and not for the first time).
It wasn’t, in the end, out of kilter with my mind, nor indeed my heart.
Date Record Made
Number Two: 24 June 1978
Number Of Weeks At
Number Two: 6
Record At Number One: “Shadow
Dancing” by Andy Gibb
UK Chart Position: 3
Thank you Marcello 😊
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