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A Disaffection, Or Fight Against Same: “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty

By Marcello Carlin


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

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