Ralph McTell - My Side of Your Window 1969
Although he's best-known for his classic folk song staple "Streets of London," which first appeared on his
Spiral Staircase album in 1969, Ralph McTell is a multi-dimensional guitarist and singer/songwriter who's influenced hundreds of folk singers in Great Britain, Europe, and the U.S. Fortunately, people in the U.S. and Europe are beginning to connect to his vast body of excellent original work, and not just "Streets," which has been recorded more than 200 times by artists as diverse as
Bruce Springsteen,
Aretha Franklin, and even the angry punk group
Anti-Nowhere League, and is still McTell's most requested song.
McTell was raised in post-WWII London with his mother and a younger brother as Ralph May. His father left home when he was two. He began to show musical talent when he was seven, when he began playing harmonica. When skiffle bands became all the rage in England, Scotland, and Ireland, McTell began playing ukulele and formed his first band. Later in his teens, he began playing guitar.
At the College Jazz Club in London, McTell first heard
Ramblin' Jack Elliott sing
Jesse Fuller's "San Francisco Bay Blues."
Elliott's performance proved to be a revelatory experience for the shy, young, impressionable McTell. He took his earliest cues from the great blues and folk singers:
Elliott,
Woody Guthrie,
Leadbelly,
Blind Boy Fuller,
Blind Blake,
Robert Johnson, and
Blind Willie McTell. He took his adopted last name from blues singer McTell, and his songwriting inspiration from the writings of
Jack Kerouac and
John Steinbeck. After a few years hanging around London, he took off to travel along the south coast of England and the rest of Europe, where he made his way around hitchhiking and busking. While busking around Europe, he met his wife Nanna; shortly thereafter, they had a son.
McTell tried a conventional career as a teacher, but continued playing the folk clubs around London. He began a long tenure at Les Cousins in the Soho section of London and there he began to make a name for himself. A music publisher was so impressed by McTell's early songs that he secured a recording deal for him. His first album,
Eight Frames a Second, was released on the
Transatlantic label in 1968. With a gentle voice, superb guitar playing skills gleaned from his days as a ukulele player, and a level of modesty that showed through on-stage, McTell began incorporating his own songs into his live shows, which were mostly blues in those days. By July 1969, McTell was booked at the Cambridge Folk Festival, and in December of that year was headlining his first major London concert at Hornsey Town Hall. By May 1970, McTell completely sold out the Royal Festival Hall and was booked to play the Isle of Wight Festival alongside
Jimi Hendrix and
Bob Dylan. He made his first U.S. tour in 1972 and returned to London to sell out the Royal Albert Hall in 1974, the first British solo act to accomplish such a feat in 14 years.
The third song he ever wrote, "Streets of London," was something he deliberately left off his debut album, but at a producer's insistence, he included it on his second album for
Transatlantic,
Spiral Staircase. After the song was re-recorded in 1974 as a single for
Reprise/Warner Bros. it became a huge worldwide hit. The song reached number two on the British charts, and in Germany, there were four different versions of the song on the charts at one point, three by McTell and one by a German singer.
The pressures of worldwide success temporarily became too much for the shy, reserved McTell, and in the spring of 1975, he announced his intention to quit touring and withdraw from the music business for a while. He came to the U.S., where he relaxed and wrote songs in relative anonymity for a year before going back to the U.K. to play a Christmas benefit concert in Belfast. He continued recording for
Warner Bros. in the '70s, releasing
Right Side Up in 1976,
Ralph, Albert and Sydney in 1977, and
Slide Away the Screen in 1979. For most of the '80s, he spent his time touring and working on a children's television show called
Alphabet Zoo, which led the TV network to create a show especially for him,
Tickle on the Tum, and both programs introduced McTell to new generations of fans.
In 1995 and 1996, McTell returned to the U.S. and performed a series of sold-out shows on the East Coast, and his visibility in the U.S. may have been helped along by
Nanci Griffith's decision to record one of his songs, "From Clare to Here," on her Grammy-winning
Other Voices, Other Rooms album.
McTell's discography is very extensive and demonstrates his commitment to his craft as a songwriter. Though many of these albums are hard to locate, they're well worth seeking out, most originally recorded for
Transatlantic,
Reprise/Warner Bros., or
Mays.
In 1992, he recorded an ambitious project about the life and times of poet
Dylan Thomas,
The Boy with a Note, released on
Leola Music; recently, the U.S. has seen the Stateside release of
From Clare to Here (1996), a U.S. release of
Silver Celebration, and
Sand in Your Shoes (1998).
Blue Skies Black Heroes appeared the following year. AllMusic.
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Much of Who's Next derives from Lifehouse, an ambitious sci-fi rock opera Pete Townshend abandoned after suffering a nervous breakdown, caused in part from working on the sequel to Tommy. There's no discernable theme behind these songs, yet this album is stronger than Tommy, falling just behind Who Sell Out as the finest record the Who ever cut. Townshend developed an infatuation with synthesizers during the recording of the album, and they're all over this album, adding texture where needed and amplifying the force, which is already at a fever pitch. Apart from Live at Leeds, the Who have never sounded as LOUD and unhinged as they do here, yet that's balanced by ballads, both lovely ("The Song Is Over") and scathing ("Behind Blue Eyes"). That's the key to Who's Next — there's anger and sorrow, humor and regret, passion and tumult, all wrapped up in a blistering package where the rage is as affecting as the heartbreak. This is a retreat from the '60s, as Townshend declares the "Song Is Over," scorns the teenage wasteland, and bitterly declares that we "Won't Get Fooled Again." For all the sorrow and heartbreak that runs beneath the surface, this is an invigorating record, not just because Keith Moon runs rampant or because Roger Daltrey has never sung better or because John Entwistle spins out manic basslines that are as captivating as his "My Wife" is funny. This is invigorating because it has all of that, plus Townshend laying his soul bare in ways that are funny, painful, and utterly life-affirming. That is what the Who was about, not the rock operas, and that's why Who's Next is truer than Tommy or the abandoned Lifehouse. Those were art — this, even with its pretensions, is rock & roll. AllMusic.
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