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50 best London songs
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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.’
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83 comments
For me & probably most other Aussies, it has to be The Waifs 'London Still', nothing else can take you to London in your mind or bring the memories flooding back so fast, simple yet brilliant song.
Up The Junction by Squeeze is a sauf London essential. Stephen Duffy's London Girls is Camden circa Britpop distilled into three minutes. Another forgotten gem is Morrissey's anthem to Sloane Square, Hairdresser on Fire.
i reckon Baker Street and Electric Avenue both deserve a mention if only for being infectious. The sax lick is pure gold and the 'Gonna rock down to Electric avenue...' sticks in your head for days after it's on the radio
Has to be the 'The Bear Necessities' - it just completely sums up living in London.
Waterloo Sunset of course - it's so beautiful and lasting. Everytime I go over Waterloo Bridge it pops into my head, sunset or not!
Guns of Brixton - Clash of course. Also covered by Nouvelle Vague recently.
London boy by Bowie remembering his Mod days in Soho followed by Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks.who will remember LDN in 40 years or even Lily Allen?
Of course LDN isn't the best London song ever. Maybe the best London song of this year... Lily Allen has to prove herself before she can stand beside the likes of Blur, Madness, The Clash etc