Time Out has teamed up with emusic to offer our readers 40 free music downloads and a free audiobook
50 best London songs
-
By Time Out editors
Posted: Mon Sep 25 2006 
1 Ralph McTell 1 Streets Of London Ralph McTell [download]
Post-war poverty, drugs, love and redemption – the most recorded London song of all time isn’t what you think it is
‘I grew up in post-war Croydon. I was quite a sensitive little boy and poverty was all around us, but because it was so common you didn’t notice unless somebody got something that you didn’t get, like pennies to spend or a new bike. There was no one that I knew that even had a car. So I was never aware of that poverty, until you saw someone who was worse off than you. I used to go to Saturday morning pictures at the end of Surrey Street, which was a busy bustling market, and collect boxes for firewood while they were clearing away the stalls. But late at night there was this old chap who used to wander up, kicking up the papers and picking up the rubbish from the market, just the odd bit of stuff that had been dumped, and it was an image that I always remembered. Feature continuesAdvertisement
‘When I was a busker in Paris in 1965, when we were coming home from our little jaunts in the Latin Quarter, there were a lot of very impoverished people – they call them clochards – sat over the hot-air gratings in the Metro, and I formed this idea of writing a song about those people. The time was right for that sort of song because of the protest movement and that social awareness that was apparent in all songs. So I started writing “The Streets Of Paris”. But I thought: Wait a minute, these images are everywhere. So I wrote it as “Streets Of London”, to a tune that I’d already composed.
‘After I got back from Paris, I offered it to a very good friend, a singer called Derek Brimstone. I scrawled it out on the proverbial napkin, in a pub somewhere in Fulham, and after a few months, he rang me up and said “ ’Ere, Ralph, you gotta do that song. It’s going down a storm!”
‘I thought it wasn’t quite complete, so I wrote a fourth verse and started doing it and Derek was right. The reaction to it was absolutely sensational. But I had to be persuaded to record it by my producer Gus Dudgeon. He begged me to put it on my second album, and I didn’t want to. But after the very last track for that was recorded, he said “Just do one pass for me, Ralph.” The band went to the pub and I sat there and did one pass on it. There was a cover version within four days of its release and it went round the world in a week [at one point the single was selling 90,000 copies a day].
There are now 212 or 214 cover versions – it’s been covered by everyone from Roger Whittaker to Sinéad O’Connor to the Sex Pistols. It’s sung in schools, and it’s used in English lessons all over Europe, even though it’s bad grammatically! A friend was hitch-hiking around the Himalayas ten years ago, and they asked him to sing them a song, and in return they sang him a song in English that they’d learnt from another hitch-hiker – it was “Streets Of London”. I don’t know how or why it happened, but there you go.
‘I have to say that the real important thing for me about that song, and in that song, is that I had a friend I was busking with in Paris and he was fascinated by drugs. He drifted into heroin and became seriously addicted and in a very poor state rather rapidly. In one of his half-hearted attempts to come off, we were talking and I was really trying to lay it on him. I said to him, “Why d’you fuckin’ do this, man? You’re killing everybody who loves you, you’re driving us all up the wall.” And he said, “Well, why should I change?”
In the end, this feeling of alienation, that he couldn’t be approached, was the key to the song. It wouldn’t have been written if it was just about homeless people, it was written about a mate of mine. So that “How can you tell me you’re lonely?” was the important thing, and these verses were the examples to him. When you see somebody worse off than you are you feel compassion, and you feel ashamed for feeling whatever you might feel, and that was the whole point. But the strangest thing of all about that intentioned message to a disconsolate, alienated fucked-up pal was that everyone thought it was a song about homelessness, which is a very strange twist.
‘I’ve always written slightly obliquely like that. But in ‘Streets Of London’, it’s so graphic, the images of the four characters in the song, starting off with the bloke in the market, then the old lady, then the lonely man in an all-night café and then the forgotten hero. There are four London characters there, but the central thing is the alienated individual who hasn’t realised, or needs to have it explained, that there are people much more alienated with no chance of being rehabilitated.
‘I was only 22 or something when I wrote it. In the end I wrote my friend another song, after he died, called “Song For Martin”. It’s about people who have that simple do-gooder idea, that you can help an addict. You can’t really. If he doesn’t want to be right, you won’t be able to help him. But that wasn’t for another… oh, 15 years or so.’
Available on ‘Spiral Staircase’ album (1969)- Add your comment to this feature
|
|
More ways to enjoy Time Out
-
Weekly London newsletter
The best of London in your inbox
-
Time Out Widgets
|
|
83 comments
I think "Leave the Capital" by the Fall should be in it. But I'm obsessed with the Fall
Hey what about "i like london in the rain" By Variety lab ?
(remix of blossom dearie)
What about " London Rain " by Heather Nova ?
Why are the prog-rockers always overlooked? How about "Mother Goose" by Jethro Tull or "The Battle of Epping Forest" by Geneis. One of my personal favourites is "Down to London" by Joe Jackson.
err, they didn't you plank. Its on there at Number 20!
Hey you lot leave Lily alone. She's done more records about London than anyone writing to this listings magazine interweb thingy, I bet. And I fancy her.
I really wrote to say, considering the proximity of the location to Time Out's very own office, I'm sorry they left out Donovan's sublime ditty entitled 'Sunny Goodge Street'. It's lovely with a capital L, like Lily.
the whole 'london calling' thing takes the piss a little... and the fact that there's no mention of 'guns of brixton' either?
and isn't born slippy by a guy from essex who's shouting 'going back to romford' by the end of the song?
'Towers of London' by XTC doesn''t seem to appear on the list, unless another one of their pseudonyms is Tommy Steele and 'Towers of London' has been horribly misspelt.
A top 50 wihout london calling!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
God Save The Queen is about London? Er, OK...
I think where they put Londons Burning (No. 19) by the Clash they mean Londons Calling.
If not, then I don't know whats going on.
what about "It's a London Thing" by Scott Garcia?
Seems pretty obvious to me...
The Fratellis - Chelsea Dagger?
The Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict a Riot. The best video clip!
By not including London Calling, by "you should really know who", it discredits this list. There are always going to be songs missed out...but I'm feeling in an unforgiveable mood today!!
London Calling by the Clash?
Parklife by Blur?