CLEAR DAY RAB NOAKES DRIVER
His father was of Irish stock, a lorry driver by trade and a heavy drinker. Rafferty grew up in a ground-floor tenement on one of the town’s sprawling council estates. Fairly typically of Paisley at the time, they were a working class family. Rafferty was the youngest of three sons born to Joseph and Mary Rafferty. Rafferty’s friend, the painter and playwright John Byrne, describes the two places as being as different as chalk and cheese, suggesting Glasgow more generally breeds stand-up comics and Paisley oddballs. The town where Gerald Rafferty arrived into the world on 16 April 1947 is six miles from Glasgow, but prides itself on being apart from the city.
I rest my case.”Īnd on blockbusting saxophone… Raphael Ravenscroft (Image credit: Getty Images) One thing I do know is that James Taylor wrote Gerry a fan letter about another song on City To City, Whatever’s Written In Your Heart. “He could have been as famous as any songwriter in the world, but chose not to be. “He was a titan, a giant,” opines Barbara Dickson, who sung with Rafferty in Glasgow’s folk clubs and contributed backing vocals to City To City. When he died on January 4, 2011, aged sixty-three, his work had made him a millionaire, but the considerable due he merited as a songwriter of rare craft and intuitive skill had largely eluded him. It never went away, but neither was Rafferty able to get out from under the looming shadow the song cast, or seem to escape the demons in him it appeared to amplify. The actual the actual figure, however was much higher. In 2003, Rafferty was quoted as estimating that the song was still earning him £80,000 a year. The sound of Baker Street would become as emblematic of the era as any of Queen’s excursions into mock-opera, the Eagles’ sun-blushed harmonies, the Bee Gees’ stratospheric disco or Johnny Rotten sneering ‘God save the Queen’. “They smiled more, gave me bigger portions of food at school lunches, and I remember feeling how fake and phony people became. “When Baker Street became the hit that it was, adults changed towards me,” recalls Martha Rafferty. He was very sure of his own talent and equally suspicious of how it would be exploited.” I had seen many sides of the record business by then. He was very guarded, but I could understand that. From my side of things, the main problem was that basically he wanted me to say no to everything. Quite the opposite, he needed someone to more or less answer the phone. Mad promoters from Utah would be ringing him in the middle of the night and demanding that he tour. “The album had sold more than four million and he didn’t even have a manager. “I don’t believe he had any particular expectations that he would have such enormous successes commercially,” says Michael Grey, head of press at United Artists when City To City was released and who Rafferty brought in as his manager. Altogether, no aspect of his life would ever again be the same. The insular Rafferty wryly noted how he had become an overnight sensation from doing what he had for a decade.
Off the back of it, City To City sold five and a half million copies and knocked the Bee Gees’ until then all-conquering Saturday Night Fever soundtrack from the top of the Billboard chart in the States.
He got a telegram from McCartney congratulating him on “an incredible song”. Baker Street rose to Number Three on the UK chart, went one higher in the US and won Rafferty two Ivor Novello awards. Rafferty and Murphy practically had to beg them to put it out, but once they did on February 3, 1978, the song took off like Ravenscroft’s spiralling saxophone. Initially, Rafferty’s new label, United Artists were set against releasing Baker Street as the album’s lead-off single. Rafferty had originally written it for guitar, but when that didn’t soar – and at producer Hugh Murphy’s prompting – he summoned an unheralded session player, Raphael Ravenscroft to the studio to put it down instead on sax. That much seeped into the optimistic last lines of the song: ‘And when you wake up, it’s a new morning/The sun is shining it’s a new morning/And you’re going, you’re going home.’ These were given wings by the album’s most distinctive melody line and which burst up throughout the song. Baker Street was one of the last songs he wrote for the record and just as his contractual dispute was being settled. Rafferty was also blessed to be able to sing them in a voice that had both McCartney’s sweeter registers and Lennon’s raw passion. A Beatles nut, he fixated on strong melodies and the ten featured songs had that much in abundance. The title of the album he eventually cut was also derived from his protracted spell commuting – City To City.
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