Disc and Music Echo, 1971

Beat Instrumental, 1973

Albert Hall Review, 1974

Disc
February 2nd, 1974

Zig Zag Magazine, 1974

Disc, December 1974

Spotlight Magazine, 1975

Spotlight Magazine
March 1975

Musicians Only, 1980

Folk International,
1982  Interview

Mean Moody McTell

Dirty Linen Article, 1996

RALPH, ALBERT & SYDNEY
MUSIC PRESS

Ralph McTell – The Soldier Who Didn’t Want To Be A Hero

By Rosalind Russell
Disc & Music Echo  11 September 1971
“Two days after joining the army it dawned on me that it wasn’t a game, and that I was in a killer force…it was a traumatic experience”
Ralph McTell is too sincere for his own good – at least he would be if he was seeking fame and fortune in a business where sincerity doesn’t count for much.  But not being a bread head and asking no more than understanding from his audiences, the trappings of the pop business hold little interest for him.  He could be excused if he did want money, because it’s a commodity that hasn’t come easy in his family. 

Born 26 years ago in Farnborough, Kent, Ralph lived with his mother and younger brother Bruce.  His father disappeared early on in Ralph’s life, leaving Mrs McTell¹ to cope with two young sons.  Although Ralph didn’t realise it at the time, his father’s action affected his life quite considerably.  He had a very happy childhood, and felt that the family unit of three was complete, but can look back on it now and see the responsibility he felt towards his mother. 

“Your role in that relationship must be different because of your responsibility to one parent and you realise very well that one parent has given up a lot to look after you.  It’s very easy to dump kids in a home and if one parent decides to stick with the kids, that’s something of a sacrifice.  If you have two parents, you don’t feel, when you leave home, that you’re doing a bad thing.  Actually it’s surprising how many people in the music business come from broken homes. 

“I think they are essentially creative as a result.  I think that being brought up by one parent, and that being my mother, I became more sensitive in my formative years.  I don’t think people from broken homes are consciously attracted to the business, but being insecure brings out a creativity.” 

Ralph’s creativity wasn’t doing much in those earlier days – he rapidly began to lose interest in learning.  People had said that he would go far and that brother Bruce would have some catching up to do, but it turned out that Bruce streaked ahead academically and is now a lecturer in Sociology.  Ralph stresses that his dropping out was not a result of being left fatherless.  Later on he even wrote a song about how happy he has been with his small family.  “Daddy’s Here” is an understanding of the problems his mother may have had, and shows that they are none the worse for that.  The song is included on Ralph’s first album², “Spiral Staircase” 

Usually a modest person, who speaks when there is something special to say, Ralph was uneasy at expressing so many of his views in what might be interpreted as words from a self styled prophet – as many artists think they may be.  But there are no castles in Spain for him.  He sits back on the sofa in his manager’s London office, playing lap host to two small pugs, Nelson and Henry (papa and junior respectively) who belong to manager Jo Lustig.  They go to sleep and snore loudly into the tape recorder. 

Ralph’s talent in music and songwriting didn’t begin to develop until he had done a fair amount of growing and living.  He found what he thought would be an easy way of leaving home without causing too much heartbreak for his mum, and went into the Army at 15 years old.  He had been a cadet at school, playing soldiers and going off to camps.  He found that the real thing was quite a different story. 

“I thought that joining the Army would be a secure thing.  It meant that I would be looked after.  It was one of the easiest things in the world to join the Army, and one of the hardest to get out of. 

“I was out again before I was 16.  It was a short stay and a memorable one.  It was very traumatic, actually, the two things coming together – leaving home and thinking I was going to make it.  It was amazing too that so many kids in the Army – the boy soldiers – seemed to come from broken home backgrounds, or Borstal, or were illegitimate kids.  In other words, they were the real under-privileged, the ones who had got a chip on their shoulders.  They were the ones that make good soldiers, because they were at odds with the world anyway.” 

Disgusting
About two days after joining up, it dawned on Ralph that it wasn’t a game, and that he’d joined a killer force.  He also realised that he wasn’t as brave as he thought he was – the training and assault courses held a terror for him that they didn’t for some of the other kids.  He wouldn’t recommend the Army as a bed of inspiration, but agrees that it probably helped him to grow up with more mature ideas and a better understanding of people than he would otherwise have had. 

“After 13 weeks of what they call basic training, but what is breaking your spirit – at least that’s what it was for me – the leaders have emerged and the others are knocked into shape to go on with their proper units.  I was in what is essentially a killing unit, the infantry is known as the teeth and arms of the Army.  I was told that I’d be able to carry on with my education, but that was a joke.  A lot of the kids couldn’t read or write. 

“We got £2 a week wages and £1 of that went on cleaning equipment, and I also got some of the most disgusting food I’ve ever seen presented to anyone in my life.  The discipline was ruthless.” 

A sharp dose of discipline was the final straw for McTell.  He received a whack from a pace stick – the rod used to mark out the length of a pace – which nearly broke his wrist.  Despite exhortations from some of his family to let stay in because “it would make a man of him”, his mother borrowed £50 and bought him out.  His departure is full of memories of other lads who couldn’t take that way out, and tried to kill themselves instead. 

Although his stand has changed radically to anti-war, he is quick to jump to the defence of anyone who dismisses soldiers as mindless robots. 

“A lot of people might think this is strange, but I still get very moved by parades of soldiers.  They aren’t toy soldiers now.  Even the guards are fighting in Ireland.  There is something about the anonymous ranks of brown uniforms that is moving, because there are human beings among that lot, whom we allow to be brainwashed into being machines.  We also allow the disgusting process of letting a 15-year-old boy sign away the nine best years of his life. 

“There were so many boys from Scotland there – a whole company full of them. 

“They are exploited to the maximum because people fail to have enough sympathy to see what forces a guy into such a situation, to go out and be a professional killer, whatever the reason. 

“The cats who scream about revolution and such, should realise that the soldiers are just as under-privileged as they are – that’s a specific reference to Northern Ireland.  These guys have more in common with the people, but they don’t realise it because they are being used.  About the third day I was in, it suddenly dawned on me that I might get shot getting off a boat somewhere.” 

The under-privileged and the lonely have always been somewhere in Ralph’s list of lost causes.  He has a penchant for looking after and protecting lame ducks, and the Army gave him some first-hand experience. 

When he got out, he went to a further education college, to get some “A” levels.  He didn’t stay very long, partly because he didn’t feel at home with most of the students there.  Another McTell bogey raised its head, and he found that class barriers were still very much in evidence.  His Croydon accent stood out from some of the middle-class voices around and he was made to feel uncomfortable.  He did, however, begin to develop his interest in music there, and at 17 began learning to play the guitar seriously.  He also began to draw, and passed an “A” level in Art. 

It was listening to an album by American country/folk singer Jack Elliott – “Jack Takes The Floor” – which really caught Ralph’s attention.  He heard authentic versions of “Bed Bug Blues”, “Cocaine” and then turned to Woody Guthrie. 

“It was then that I picked up the guitar and worked at it.  I decided I could become a busker like Wizz Jones and a few others that were around then.  A few guys were busking at the weekends and a few stories actually filtered through about people who had even left the country with their guitars.  That was really something then.  Hardly anyone was doing it – that was in 1959.” 

The romance of bumming off to Europe with a guitar appealed to the lad from Croydon, where his family was then living, and came as a reaction to the institution-like confines of the Army.  He met another guy who could play guitar, but didn’t learn anything from him. 

“He used to say that he’d had to pick it all up himself and so I could too.  He used to play with his back to me, which was bizarre!” 

Immoral
Despite their differences, they set off for France, and later travelled to Holland and Germany.  It was the first of quite a few trips abroad.  Ralph would come back for a while, and get a job on a building site until he had enough to go off again. 

During one stay in Germany, sleeping in cold doorways and lack of food made him very ill.  He travelled down to France and was shipped home by the British Consul.  In France, he and his companion spent several nights in jail and were lucky to come off lightly.  The usual procedure by the police there was to take the guitar and smash it off the nearest wall – to make sure the busker didn’t busk again.  It was well for Ralph he was nimble enough to dodge the heavies. 

On his last trip to France he met his Norwegian wife, Nanna.  She was one of two girls collecting money for another busker, who lent her to Ralph to do his collecting.  She was studying at university in Paris but came back with Ralph, married, and is now mum to their two children, Sam and Leah. 

But before he married, Ralph managed to make it to Greece, where he’d always wanted to go.  He busked there with a guy he met on the road and spent a really good time there.  They were thrown out of one town four times for busking.  Each time they came up before the long-suffering Chief of Police, he told them, “It’s the last time lads.  It’s illegal, you’ll have to go inside,” so they didn’t push their luck after the fourth bust. 

“I went to Turkey from there.  That was really being on your uppers.  It was sort of immoral taking money from the Turks who are incredibly deprived people.  We’d work for three hours and end up with perhaps a quarter of the amount we’d earn in Venice in 15 minutes.  In Turkey, people would gather round at the novel sight of a European begging, because that’s what it was. 

“But in Paris we became really well known to the cinema queues, and when the police came to hussle us the crowd used to gather round and boo and hiss at the cops!” 

In Paris, Ralph was invited to audition for the job as guitarist to Antoine – at that time billed at the French Bob Dylan. Antoine, however, couldn’t play guitar – he mimed and had three guys in evening dress sitting behind him, supposedly as a backing.  The only one playing guitar was Ralph.  He played for him at the Olympia for three weeks at about £4.50 a night, no questions asked! 

“I was worried because I wanted it all to be above board – I didn’t want to get busted for working without a permit and de Gaulle was tightening up then – kicking all the bums out. 

“The best thing that happened to me was that I saw Francoise Hardy, just standing there.  She’d come along with Juliette Greco and was just standing in the audience.  Antoine was playing to sell-out audiences.  But Francoise Hardy was different to what I thought she was from her pictures.” 

Ralph also had to tune Antoine’s guitar for him to strum, but as the French concert pitch is different from everyone else’s, the guitars, the harmonica and orchestra were all quarter keys apart.  But the audience didn’t seem to notice, and Antoine got rave reviews in the French papers. 

On his return to England, Ralph was asked to go to Cornwall with Wizz Jones, whom he’d always admired, to play guitar with him.  In Cornwall, he began to think seriously of doing something creative and stable, and finally decided on applying for a place in teacher training college.  At least this would still provide the opportunity to be creative.  He also had his wife and soon a baby, to think about. 

His own background being so one-sided, Ralph made sure, and is still conscious of it, that he would be with his family as often as he could.  He also began writing more songs then, becoming more aware of the social problems around him, and facing up to what was going on among under-privileged people – a thought which he’d more or less hidden with his memories of the Army. 

“Streets of London” was one of his first songs and probably his best known.  It’s on both of his albums here and has been released as a single in the States, preceding his forthcoming visit.  It has also been recorded by many artists, and the sheet music made the charts and stayed there for a couple of months. 

So it’s odd that the song which has taken him far is the one he didn’t think was any good.  It was only after much persuasion that he added it to his album.  From that one song you can learn a lot about Ralph’s environment.  A country person couldn’t have written a song like it, and by the same token, a city person can have more appreciation of a beautiful dawn than the farmer who sees it so often that he takes it for granted. 

In the song, he shows you the poor and lonely of the city, and loneliness is something Ralph McTell cares about.  Looking back on his songs he finds that many of them are about the problem, and from letters he receives, it shows that he has communicated to people in his audiences who understand it too.  A headmaster wrote to say that he played the album to his children in a village, because they had no conception of what it must be like to be lonely, and someone else – a teacher – had his class paint pictures from their imaginations after hearing the album.  This is where Ralph McTell finds his rewards. 

“I acknowledge my debt to “Streets of London” but I’m looking forward very much to the day when I don’t have to sing it.  I find that the song has preceded me wherever I go.  Everyone already knows it.” 

Confession
He will, however, have to sing it during his trip to the States.  Among other dates, he will be playing at the Bitter End in New York and the Troubadour in L.A.  He’s also doing a “Frost Over America” TV appearance.  Quite apart from this being his first appearance there, his main fear is of flying to the States. 

“It’s a drag but I know there are lots of people in this business who are the same.  One of the reasons Alan Price left The Animals was that he didn’t like flying.  The prospect of spending seven hours in the air is very heavy.  I don’t mind propeller planes – planes with a visible means of support.  It’s the jets I don’t like.  I know there’s a propeller there, it’s only because I can’t see it that I worry.  I feel as though I’m in a sealed bullet, blindly flying through the air with no control over it. 

“I’m not crazy about the idea of death, but I’ve been through all that.  Somehow it’s the impersonal business of an aeroplane crash.  There’s no chance of surviving if anything goes wrong.  It’s a bad confession to make, especially after writing a song like “The Ferryman” which is centred round the ideas of Buddhism.” 

Ralph began to write more songs while he was at teacher training college and through an introduction to someone at Essex Music, made a recording deal with Transatlantic and left the college.  He thinks that if he hadn’t left, he might have been kicked out anyway.  He got into the college largely through the influence of a more radical person on the college board.  He admitted to Ralph later that he liked to bring in enough radical thinkers just to act as a stimulus, so that the students wouldn’t become complacent about political and social affairs.  After Ralph left the college, most of the radicals were removed. 

But Ralph McTell is still a radical, although he worries about stepping on people’s toes in his beliefs.  Still fighting for his soldiers, he points out that nothing has changed – you always hear about the lads being shot in Ireland, but it’s not often an officer gets caught in the line of fire. 

McTell puts them all in his line of fire, but you won’t hear him preach it from his platform.  He doesn’t usually explain his songs either.  If you listen, in an audience, or to his albums, Ralph McTell says it all. 

Ed’s notes:
1.  McTell is Ralph’s adopted surname.  His mother is Mrs May.
2.  Ralph’s first album was “Eight Frames A Second”
MJ

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Ralph McTell hadn't played a guitar before he was seventeen years old. The thing that inspired him to actually pick one up was a record by Jack Elliot, played to him by a friend at college.
'It was something about the roughness', recalls McTell, 'that made me want to be able to do the same. There was an obvious joy and enthusiasm there. Skiffle music was very popular at the time and to me Elliot's guitar playing had the same quality in that it was rough and ready."

MUSIC PRESS
RALPH McTELL – Royal Albert Hall
Review By Roy Hill
Publication Not Known
1974  
Singer/composer, Ralph McTell can hardly be classed as a superstar and yet he manages to pack ‘em in.
What I like about his music is that it can be absorbed without having to really listen hard.  McTell delivers his songs with such ease that you get right in there with him.
At the Royal Albert Hall his new album Easy, featured strongly in his act with Summer Lightning, Zig Zag Line (a song about McTell and his little lad), Sweet Mystery and Maddy Dances (dedicated to Steeleye Span’s Maddy Prior) all delighting the audience.  Somewhere in the concert there just had to be Zimmerman Blues and the obvious happened for his encore.  Streets of London was what everyone wanted and it was what they got, even yours truly sang along.  Another stamping of feet brought McTell and his bass accompaniment, Danny Thompson, back on but alas all good things must come to an end.
Supporting McTell was the very beautiful sound of Prelude who received a fantastic reception and capped their fine performance with After the Goldrush.
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MUSIC PRESS
Disc
21 December 1974
RALPH McTELL : FROM THE STREETS TO STARDOM
By Ray Fox-Cumming
STREETS OF LONDON, they say, is such a sad song, but it isn’t at all, believe me.  To the bedsit brigade – in London or any other British city – it has become an anthem of hope, telling you, no matter how hard you feel the world has treated you, that you are better off than the guy from the seaman’s mission or the lady who carries her world in two plastic bags.

But what of the down-and-outs of London?  Is it, to them, a statement informing them of their ultimate wretchedness?

Not at all according to Mr McTell: “If you think people who sleep out in London are hard done by, you should see the same people in Paris.  If they lie out in the streets, people don’t give a damn, they just walk over them.  You’d never believe it, but when they lie over the vents in the pavement where the warm air comes up, they have to sleep with their shoes under their heads.  If they leave them on their feet, people come along at night, undo the laces and take them away.”

Streets of London was written partly in Paris and partly in London, but it’s not a George Orwell type story of “Down And Out In Paris And London”.  McTell says that, while not on his beam ends, he wasn’t exactly wealthy in those days, but the song wasn’t written as a piece of advice to himself.  “It was written for a friend.”

The song was penned some eight years ago and for two years after that for some inexplicable reason, McTell chose to offer it to his folksinger friends rather than record it himself.

Eventually he did get around to doing it in the studio and it has appeared twice on albums of Ralph’s apart from countless cover versions both on singles and albums, but until now Ralph has been prevented from putting the song out as a single for contractual reasons.

At one point last year he became so embittered over his lack of freedom with the song that he vowed never to sing it onstage again: “But in the end in my whole career I’ve only got through six concerts without doing it…” and then there were complaints.

Now that the song is a hit for him, Ralph still doesn’t reckon himself as a singles artist and almost seems naïve enough to believe that his record company won’t expect a follow-up.  Fortunately though, he’s not in the same position as someone like Peter Sarstedt, who found himself in the position of having a classic first hit that he could never follow.

For years Ralph has been one of the very few folk artists who could sell out anywhere they chose to play without the bonus of a hit.  “If there are new fans,” he says modestly, “I don’t know where they are going to go.  We’re pretty full most places already.”  Pretty full?  Nonsense, they’re full – to the brim.

In all his career so far, Ralph has gone out as a solo artist with perhaps one extra musician to help him out now and again, but now he plans to fill out his concert sound with a group.

“I’ll be touring here again in February and for the first time I’ll be using a group.”  He won’t say precisely what the group will comprise, because he’s not yet sure himself, but already rehearsals have been going on for a couple of weeks with a basic four-piece outfit and Ralph says he’s surprised how well his songs have adapted to the bigger sound.

Last week, for the first time in his lengthy career, he did “Top Of The Pops”.  “I was scared still but as a whole experience I enjoyed it.”

In a way he was fortunate, because the particular edition of the programme he appeared on was a goodie – including such worthy musicians as Elton John, Status Quo and others.  It’s nice he was able to feel at home.  After such a long haul to get there (whether he wanted it or not) he deserved it.

BACK TO INDEX

If that title means anything to you at all, it’s either because you’re a Woody Guthrie fan, or you’ve been to a Ralph McTell concert. The words are Woody’s, often quoted by Ralph at the end of a gig, where others would say “Peace, love and the spirit of Woodstock” or “I gotta go”.  However, this is not an article on the farewells of the famous, nor is it about the great Mr Guthrie-it’s an attempt to unravel the musical career of Ralph McTell.
But, we can’t start at the beginning, Ralph is more than fed up with talking about his early days and influences, having told it all so many times to the British music press.  Anyway, he considers that “the story of what you do before you record anything can be glossed over in a couple of lines normally”.  If you try that in Ralph’s case it reads something like – he busked his way across Europe, from London to Ankara and back, making his headquarters in Paris where he wrote his first song, underwent a great deal of influences and made a hell of a lot of friends.

ZZ: Why did you pick the name McTell?

RM: I didn’t actually.  I had just come back from Paris, I was about nineteen at the time and I was working with Wizz Jones down in Cornwall.  He wanted some unusual name on the posters and I was playing a lot of Blind Willie stuff at the time.  So they called me Ralph McTell and the name stuck.

ZZ: What sort of places were you playing in when you got the recording contract?

RM: Well I was just very amateur at the time, playing in folk clubs and hotels.  I had a jug band at the time.  Then I went to college where I actually got the contract.

ZZ: Who was in this band of yours?

RM: The personnel used to change a lot.  There was Mick Bennett, he’s still around.  We used to call him ‘Whispering Mick’.  He was in Clive Palmer’s band, you know C.O.B.  Bob Strawbridge was in prison last time I heard of him.  Mac MacGann, he used to have a band called the Levee-breakers which Beverly Martyn used to sing with, you know, John’s wife.  That’s about all you would know.

ZZ: Pete Berryman?

RM: Oh Henry VIII on jug of course.  Pete joined just before I left actually and took over the band in Cornwall.  I had to leave to go to college.

ZZ: And they became the Famous Jug Band?

RM: Eventually, yes.  Pete and Henry and then Clive joined them.

The First Two Albums and Chasing That Song Around The Country
In 1968 Ralph recorded his first album, ‘Eight Frames A Second’ for Transatlantic.  The jug band make an appearance on a couple of tracks.  There are thirteen tracks in all; nine of Ralph’s compositions, one traditional song, a rag by Blind Blake - all of which are beautiful.  The other two tracks should never have been put out.  Tim Rose’s ‘Morning Dew’ is completely destroyed by Tony Visconti’s attempt to emulate the Phil Spector sound, the other track, ‘Granny Takes A Trip’, credited to Bowyer/Beard, sounds similar to all those early Bowie tracks they keep on re-issuing.  The whole thing was packaged in one of the worst covers I have ever seen.  Nonetheless, the album is well worth a listen, if you can get hold of it.
The next year saw the release of the ‘Spiral Staircase’ album which had a superb cover, again featured the jug band, had fewer production errors (if at times a little too much orchestra) and of course featured that song ‘Streets of London’.

RM: I was totally bewildered by it all when I made the first album.  It was Gus’s first production, Gus Dudgeon who has since become very famous.  He was as confused as I was – we did it in Pye studios.  It was Tony Visconti’s first arranging job on an album.  I had a bit of a fight to get Gus to let me play my own guitar on it.  There was the usual clutch of session men who I was totally in awe of.  We made the usual mistakes, no, I made the usual mistakes that people do on their first albums.  There’s a lot of tracks that I’m not happy with.  I mean the songs are alright, I don’t dislike any of the songs I’ve written, but I think some of them could have been approached better. 

ZZ: Was it your choice of material for the album?

RM: No, not entirely, I would have put much more blues and stuff on it.  I wanted to do an album like Bert Jansch’s first album.  I know our styles are entirely different, but I would have thought guitar and voice would be fine.  Transatlantic had this idea of making me a pop star or something.  It was their idea that I had the haircut as well.  In fact Nat Joseph gave me twelve quid to get some decent gear for the photograph on the cover of the album.  That’s why I was wearing that Marks and Spencer pullover.  I did the haircut myself with a razor blade and a comb.  Lots of people think I look like a boxer or something on the front.  Also there were a couple of songs on there I wasn’t too happy with.  I originally recorded Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ for the album.  You see I sing in B flat or C flat and Tony arranged it in the key of C, it was too hard to arrange in any other key I suppose, so we had a sort of castrato vocal.  Thankfully we left it off the album, although I suppose it would have been a bit of a coup to have had a Leonard Cohen song on there.  But then there was ‘Granny Takes A Trip’ which Nat Joseph had the publishing on and I think he wanted me to record that.  Essex had the publishing on a song called ‘Morning Dew’ which was a beautiful song and one that I really liked, but we should never have tried to come anywhere near the original version.  So there you go.  I did get a couple of rags on it and a few of my own songs so I was quite happy with it.

ZZ: Where did you pick up ‘Hesitation Blues’?

RM: I learnt that from a guy called Gary Peterson, it was while I was over in Paris.  He’s one of the finest acoustic guitarists I know.  He comes from California, he was in that crowd that Country Joe drew the Fish from.  He was playing in jug and skiffle bands like the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band.  He was playing the streets – playing finger style which was not a great idea because you don’t get much volume.  When I heard this guy play I thought, “Jesus, this is how I want to play”.  I can’t play the song like he does, he plays like the Rev Davis himself.  I’ve got what Stefan Grossman calls the English guitar player’s approach, which is a bit raggy and a bit skiffly.

ZZ: Who was managing you at this time?

RM: I didn’t really have a manager at this time.  My wife used to take bookings over the phone and I would go out and get bookings sometimes.  Then after a while – I’d been pro for six months – Graham Churchill (of Essex Music) used to take bookings for me.  But it soon became obvious that I needed someone full time, so my brother Bruce took over.  Later I got involved with Jo Lustig.

ZZ: Did the frequency of your gigs improve with the release of ‘Eight Frames A Second’?

RM: Oh yeah!  In fact I think it amazed everybody.  My album came out at the same time as one by a guy called Bob Bunting.  His album was like the way I wanted mine to be, more freedom – less attempt at a direction.  I was working with Bob at the Cousins down in Greek Street.  Bob sort of disappeared, my album did about two and a half thousand in the first year.  So by the end of the first year I was working five nights a week all over the country.

ZZ: So they rushed you in to do the second album, ‘Spiral Staircase’?

RM: Well, actually, I had a contract to do one a year.  The second one had ‘Streets Of London’ on it.  I had that ready for the first album but I didn’t want to record it.  It’s funny but I had already gone off the song.  We had finished the second album and Gus said to me, “Look you really must record that song, go on, just for me”.  So we went up to Regent Sound, £10 an hour, and did it there in two takes.  Then they decided we must have that as the opening track on the album, so the song rushed around the country in front of me and every gig I went to they asked me to sing it.  I suppose all the rest is history.  It never got to be a hit in this country, but over here it has been covered by countless people [estimates vary between 20 and 40]; everyone down from the usual Night Ride mob down to Val Doonican.  What can I say!  I must admit though that I haven’t heard all the versions.  It has got to the point now where I am totally objective about it.  I have changed my mind so many times about the song that when I listen to it now it doesn’t feel like my song.  I no longer have a hard opinion about it at all.  I don’t sing it anymore.  I stopped half way through the last tour. 

ZZ: Who was it dedicated to?

RM: Well, it was actually dedicated to a friend of mine in Croydon.  He got into a very bad way.  He died in a tragic accident.  That’s why when I started singing it again I thought, “well it does still have a meaning, it’s for this guy”.  People, when they listen to the song, think about the verses rather than the chorus, which to me was the important thing.  I have no inclination to do it anymore.  It’s there, it’s his song.  It will always be his song.  Nobody will ever know.

ZZ: Also on that album was ‘Rizraklaru’.  What was that an anagram of?

RM: It was an anagram of rural karzi.  You take the first and last letter and swing them round and spell the whole thing backwards.  It was called rural karzi because I was working the thing out while I was living in a caravan down in Cornwall.  A mate of mine, it was Henry actually, was out in the little shed arrangement a hundred yards downwind from the caravan having a crap.  He was singing his head off and whistling away and I was thinking, “Oh, what can I call it?”  We got rural karzi but the tune seemed too pretty to call it that.  So I anagrammed it.  On Country Meets Folk we ran a competition giving away an album to anyone who could work it out.  One guy came up with ‘you’re all crazy’ (urr all krazi) which I thought was very clever so we gave him an album for such a good effort.

ZZ: ‘Rizraklaru’ serves as a good example of your guitar style. You seem to have broken away from the standard basic chord fingerings, is this through deliberate experimentation?

RM: This is through looking for harmony.  I have no formal training whatsoever.  I know C, F, G7, D – the main chords.  If I’m looking for a harmony that doesn’t come in these I have to find it for myself.  You get odd chord shapes arising from this.  I am very flattered you noticed that.  I think you have to experiment.  I am just solo with a guitar and I have to do new things otherwise it would get boring.  As I am not a good singer, I look for things to help my voice along.  I work very hard on the guitar parts to my songs, some of them are really hard to learn.  Once you have worked it out you have to learn it, then you have to get fluent at it.  If I leave a song any length of time I have to relearn it.

ZZ: Two songs on ‘Spiral Staircase’ refer directly to your childhood: ‘Mrs Adlam’s Angels’ and ‘Daddy’s Here’.

RM: Mrs Adlam was a teacher at Sunday School.  I chose Jesus all by myself.  I got a great deal of comfort and security in believing in Jesus and reading the Bible.  It wasn’t until I was about … that I started questioning the existence of a God figure.  That’s when my radicalisation began I suppose.  I realised what dreadful circumstances my mother had been forced to bring us up in and then I went off the idea of God.  ‘Daddy’s Here’ is about what the song says and how I could almost tell when he was going to be at my house.  It was a difficult song to write and it’s an impossible song to sing.  I have done it once or twice but the memories are too vivid, too painful.  It’s about my mother, my brother, and me, and our relationship when he came and visited us.

My Side Of The Window and the Producer’s Side of the Glass 
Ralph’s next album was the thought-provoking ‘My Side Of Your Window’, his first under the management of Jo Lustig.  It’s Ralph’s favourite, but not mine despite the inclusion of the exceptional track ‘Michael In The Garden’.  This album brings us into the seventies and the singer-songwriter boom; so far the first time all the tracks were Ralph McTell compositions except ‘Girl On A Bicycle’, which was co-written with Gary Peterson, who was over in England at the time gigging with his band Formerly Fat Harry.  I put it to Ralph that the album had the concept of a pacific revolutionary.

 RM: Yeah, that’s rather grand but it’s probably true.  That’s certainly how I was feeling at the time.  When you say ‘Ralph McTell’ to a lot of people they think, “Oh flowers and old girls wandering around the streets of London and all that”, just because I don’t stand up screaming at them.  I was brought up on a council estate, I was born right at the tail end of the war – I grew up with ration books and so on – exactly the same situation that John Lennon went through.  He lost his mother, I lost my father.  I think that makes a difference in your perspective, in the way you view things.  I was practically a member of the Communist party when I was at college, but there’s Roy Harper in the clubs and I don’t think anyone could match Roy for his angle and drive in that respect, so why bother?  Although I have a very working class background I think my audience is predominantly middle class and I wanted them to understand what I was singing about without me having to scream at them.  That’s how it all came about I think. Yeah, that’s a fair definition.

ZZ: ‘Michael In The Garden’ opens that album.  Now in the songbook, above ‘Michael’ it says ‘this song is not autobiographical but there are times when I wish it was’.  Why?

RM: Anything you write you must feel and there are times when I feel like I imagine he must feel, if not so exaggerated.  Somehow the way I wrote that song I wanted you to feel that the guy was at peace with himself, although by our reckoning he wasn’t.  That peace must be a nice thing to have.  That’s basically what I meant by that statement.  A lot of people ask me if the song is about myself.

ZZ: Is he a child then, as he was in the ‘Camera And The Song’ production?

RM: Oh you saw that.  Well, no – I wrote it deliberately ambiguously, he could be any age.  I have been in touch with grown men who have got similar attitudes.  When I was working on building sites and factories I met a lot of strange people.  In the depths and bowels of factories you find all sorts of odd characters working as loaders and packers, in jobs where you don’t really need to think, but in fact you meet some amazingly intelligent people who have opted out.  They have their own things going on in their heads and if anybody could only be bothered to talk to them they could learn a hell of a lot.  I mean my education didn’t stop when I want to the factory, I learnt more there about people than I could have ever learned in school.

ZZ: This is also where ‘Factory Girl’ stems from.

RM: Yep, ‘Factory Girl’ is my own street.  At the back of our place you could see, in the mornings, the girls go to work and then come back again in the evenings.  The song had been in my head for years and I finally got it recorded for the third album.

ZZ: Have you produced anything since ‘My Side Of Your Window’?

RM: I have done a couple for Clive Palmer’s band on CBS and Polydor, but I think that’s because they couldn’t get anybody else.  You see they’re all great pals of mine but like getting these geezers in the studio together is a real hard one.  They’re so loose that they’re almost falling apart.  In some cases we had twenty goes to get them to get it together.  I think they are lovely albums but the public don’t think so, so bad luck to the public.

ZZ: Do you remember what those albums were called?

RM: One was called ‘Spirit of Love’ and the other was ‘Moisha McStiff And The Tartan Lancers Of The Sacred Harp’.

Selling Ralph to the States and the Effects that had over there.
By now Ralph was an established artist in Britain and so it was decided to try and break him in in the USA.  They put together an album of the best tracks for the last two albums, for Jo to take to the States in order to impress an American company.  This was the ‘Revisited’ album which, unlike most composites, does not sound like a collection of old tracks strung together.  It turned out to be a very good album.
All was not well in the States though, the album never got a release there.  Jo Lustig had sold Ralph to Paramount in the States, their distributors over here were Famous/EMI.  Paramount decided that they didn’t want to release an old album and that they would rather wait for the next album and just keep ‘Streets Of London’ to put on it.  So Ralph was bought out of Transatlantic who were given the ‘Revisited’ album while America awaited Ralph’s  finest album so far, ‘You Well-Meaning Brought Me Here’ which was released over here without ‘Streets Of London’ on it.

RM: I chose the tracks, I drew up a list and eventually they agreed, we hassled and haggled.  When it was released over here I had to find an excuse to warrant putting out the album when I was perfectly happy for the other albums to stay.  I had to find something to say, but what could I say?  If I hadn’t found anything to say on the back I think it would have been worse.  I mean it wasn’t entirely the record company’s fault, but what I do blame them for and did at the time, was making it a full price album. 

ZZ: How much work did you do on the album?

RM: Re-recording ‘Streets Of London’ was the beginning of my association with Danny Thompson – we had known each other beforehand, but never worked together.  The other tracks were remixed up at Dick James Music, Gus Dudgeon came along and we had Hookfoot.  I was playing with them on a couple of tracks, we took strings out, we double-tracked, we really tried in every case to make a better version than the existing one.  A couple of tracks were left untouched, but they were the exceptions.

ZZ: The EMI album, ‘You Well-Meaning Brought Me Here’, had the lyrics printed on it, was this your idea?

RM: Yes, I suppose it was.  I had wanted them on before but this was my first gatefold.  Without the gatefold there wouldn’t have been room, we did actually have lyrics inside ‘Spiral Staircase’ – they printed them up and the packers, bless their hearts, and up the union, ‘cause I’m a union man, got fed up with putting these inserts in so they didn’t.  Bruce [Ralph’s brother, original manager and later to become his manager again, and also a thoroughly nice bloke] didn’t want the lyrics on the record because he thought it would put me open to poetic criticism.  But I looked at other sleeves and saw that there was so much shit around that I could stand reasonable comparison and at least people would see the way I set out to write things, that I had actual rhyme schemes and that I set it out like a piece of poetry.  It took quite a long time to get it word perfect, you wouldn’t believe how long.  You know when you sing a song you get a word wrong or change a phrase so we had to correct it all.

ZZ: Could you explain ‘Claudia’?

RM: That’s a heavy one, man.  It’s deliberately a bit obscure.  It’s two separate incidents that I married together.  Firstly the actual incident took place up North, where I was meeting some geezers and we were talking and a guy did actually get beaten up because he was white.  In the song I’m waiting for him and he’s my friend and we both get drunk whereas actually I knew it was inevitable he was going to get beaten up and he was not one of my friends.  I don’t even think his name was John, but you’re allowed to do things like that in songs.
At the same time, where I come from, I was with a bunch of so-called revolutionaries, people who felt strongly about race and equality.  It was also the time of the Dylan songs and the civil rights movement and all that and I met a chick from Harlem called Claudia.  She was working with the Black Panther party on their arts programme for black kids.  A lot of people think when you say Black Panthers that you mean power and revolution, well it is revolution but in the total sense, not just fighting and in Bobby Seal’s book he disassociates himself from violence.  Anyway, I was talking to her one night, we had several long conversations.  In the end when we had agreed on virtually everything, she said, “But you see you’re white and I’m black”, and I felt so brought down by that, that it had ended like that when we had agreed on so many things.
I wrote that song as a warning to my ‘revolutionary’ friends, you see I’m not saying I’m any different from back-bar revolutionaries, that’s what Claudia is saying.  I am just trying to make a point, it’s no good just talking about equality, get up off your arses and do something about it.  But it doesn’t look like anybody was listening to me.
The only thing about putting the lyrics on the sleeve was that I thought people might think I was a white racist or something, which I’m certainly not – no way.  It was a kind of a dialogue thing.  It was a very complex thing to put down in the song that’s why I had to introduce Claudia and say where she was from to try and throw some light on the song.  I save the fact that he’s white until the end.  You see, all through the song, I thought people would think he was a black guy being beaten up by a bunch of white kids.  It was the other way around, that was the sort of twist at the end.

ZZ: Also on that album was ‘The Ferryman’ which was inspired by Hermann Hesse’s ‘Siddhartha’.

RM: I think you can absorb ideas from everywhere.  Very rarely do I write about a book though.  That book was recommended to me when I was really screwed up.  After the ‘My Side Of Your Window’ album I was getting very down, very depressed, and I was friendly with a guy called Bruce Barthol, who used to play bass with Country Joe’s band.  He’s split to come to England to join Gary Peterson’s mob.  Bruce was one of the most laid back Americans I had ever met, he was a lot younger than me but he was very cool, very relaxed.  I was talking with him one day and he said, “You should read this book, I’ve got it in the States, I’ll get it sent over.”  Well he sent me this little paperback, because it wasn’t released over here then.  I read it slowly before sleeping every night and it used to relax me.  It really brought me out of a very bad thing.  I tried to communicate the idea in my song.  It took me six months to write that song.  The tune I had, but the words had to be exactly right.  I left out a bit in the book and I changed the ending.  I interpreted the book my way.  I still find it a very relaxing song to sing.  
I was involved in a film of that by a guy called Conrad Rookes.  It was a very beautiful film, but it seems to have disappeared.  It was shown at the Berlin Film Festival but it never got a release as far as I know.  It may come out, they used the song in it.  The film was called ‘Siddhartha’, it was filmed in India with all English-speaking Indian actors.

ZZ: Presumably there is no soundtrack album?

RM: No, there would have been but big business got in the way and swallowed it up.  One of the best things that came out of it was that I met an Indian musician called Hermanta Khumah.   He’s done the music for about forty or fifty films back in India.  He came to my house with his little harmonium and he played me songs.  He told me what they were about and I was going to write translations.  If you have ever tried to write English lyrics to Indian tunes then you understand what it was like.  It was a great experience and the rough recordings we did at my place are treasured possessions.

ZZ: Now I think you wrote ‘Pick Up A Gun’ as a direct result of your experiences in the army.

RM: Yeah, that was certainly written about my experiences and also about what people say about soldiers.  I think a lot of crap goes down about soldiers, you know – blanket condemnation.  I think a little closer inspection of the facts would reveal a lot.  It’s not one of my most coherent compositions in terms of the way it all drops together.  It took a long time to write, but I just had to write it somehow.  I haven’t sung it live since I recorded it.

A Collector’s Item
It’s amazing really how many people have recorded an obscurity at some time.  Ralph is no exception, about eighteen months ago he recorded a single for Famous that has appeared in record charts ever since.

ZZ: Was ‘Teacher, Teacher/Trucking Little Baby’ put out around this time?

RM: It was never put out.  Long story that one.  It was as a result of my spell at Teacher’s Training College that I wrote the words to ‘Teacher, Teacher’.  We were going to make a single, I think.  We played Tony [Visconti] a lot of tracks and he picked those two.  I mean ‘Trucking Little Baby’ was practically my signature tune and it still hasn’t been recorded on an album, perhaps the next one.  [He means the one after ‘Easy’.]  We did the single and I was knocked out, everybody was knocked out.  It even got as far as review copies and even the Daily Mirror liked it.  So I thought, “Jesus, man, you’ve got a single at last that is going to be played.”  But what happened was, the BBC apparently put a block on it, they said they wouldn’t play it.  Now whether this was through politics I don’t know.  I doubt it.  I think it probably just didn’t fit in with what they thought of when they thought ‘Ralph McTell’.  That’s the biggest problem I’ve got, I got a name for one particular song and now every song has to be like that or it doesn’t get played.  They can’t fit it into their little thing, you know.

ZZ: Is there any way you can get a copy?

RM: No, I don’t even have one myself.  If anyone has got one, I’d love to have it.  I’ll buy it back.  There probably are a few about, I think actually about twenty did get into the shops and were sold, but I still get people asking if they can get hold of a copy, collectors and that.

All Change, One More Time
After this Ralph split from Paramount.  No problem on the English front, EMI were doing a good job over here but Paramount were neglecting their duties in the States.  They were wrapped up in the film industry and the success of ‘Love Story’ and ‘The Godfather’.  For further discourse on the problems of recording for Paramount in the States see Pete’s interview with Commander Cody (ZZ35).  Thus Ralph joined Reprise.

ZZ: Are you happy to stay with Reprise?

RM: Sure.  I didn’t want to move in the first place.  It’s a hassle meeting new people, new faces; it’s not that I mind that but the media can be a real drag.  You know, this guy is the executive producer’s assistant, this guy’s the executive producer’s assistant’s assistant and this guy is the promotional assistant of the executive diddle-a-diddle-a-diddle, you know, and they’re all faces and they change all the time.  They’re all young men who are trying to become big wheels in the media game.  After seven albums I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for all this chopping and changing.  I just want to stay with a company who gets the records made and in the shops on time so that I can just get on with making the music.

ZZ: They don’t pressure you in any way?

RM: No, they’re too big, too cool.  I think they’re good.  I imagine they would like two albums a year, most companies would, but I don’t get that many songs written.

ZZ: Have you thought about recording other people’s songs?

RM: Oh, yeah, but there has been such a spate of other people doing other people’s songs recently that it has postponed my own want to do anybody else’s songs.  I think it is natural for a writer to want to get his own material accepted first, but there have been so many incredible songs that I want to play.  Eventually I will get around to doing it.  I’ve got some funny choices as well.  Whether it all gets done or not I don’t know.

ZZ: Are you going to give us a preview?

RM: It would be wrong to say definitely.  I’d like to do Jackson C. Franck’s ‘Blues Run The Game’.  I like a song called ‘San Miguel’ which was done by the Kingston Trio, Ry Cooder did an instrumental version of it – which choked me off.  I’ll say this for the guy, he’s got incredible taste because he keeps recording stuff that I was going to do.  I love the stuff he records.  There may even be an old thirties thing, you know, one of Fats Waller because I love that kind of stuff.  We will wait and see, I’ll try and get a few rags on it, Blind Boy Fuller stuff, maybe even a Willie McTell track.

ZZ: The album you did make for Warners had that strange title, ‘Not…Till Tomorrow’.  How did that come about?

RM: That’s really funny man.  We had the album finished and they were all saying, ‘What are you going to call it?’ and I was saying, ‘Hang on, and I’ll try to think of something groovy.’  You see you have to have an imaginative title but I couldn’t think of one.  I was sitting in Jo’s office and Paul Brown was on the phone, and they rang and said, ‘Everything is ready, we’ve got the running order and we have dealt with the musicians – have you got the title yet?’ and Paul had to ask for another day, so he said, ‘Not till tomorrow’, and they went, ‘Yeah, what a great title’.  Paul was saying, ‘Now wait a minute.’  He turned to me and he said what they were going to call it and I said, ‘Yeah, anything man, let’s get it over with.’

ZZ: ‘Zimmerman Blues’ opened that album and that’s another of your obscure songs, isn’t it?

RM: Well, I think the Zimmerman blues is what all early Dylan freaks must be feeling, not necessarily because of what Bob Dylan has decided to do with the rest of his life and his music.  That’s entirely up to him, and I’ve enjoyed every album he has made.  I even dug the ‘Self Portrait’ one, but Dylan was the beginning and the end of an era for a lot of people.  The Zimmerman Blues is a kind of attempt to understand what happened and to sympathise and to point the finger and to ask a few questions.  Lines like:

            “Do a concert for Angela, build a building or two.”

Now I don’t suppose Dylan ever did that but he did the Bangla Desh concert, which is very commendable and understandable, whereas at the same time I read somewhere – it’s a rumour, and rumours have some sort of validity in this game, I suppose – that he was going into a building project with Hugh Heffner and I find the two hard to equate and that kind of confusion is the Zimmerman Blues. 

            “It gets harder for me  and easier for you.”

Well that’s how I would imagine him saying it:  “The more things go on, the more the media can capitalise on radicalism, left-wingism, drop-outism, whatever you want to call it, the more easy it becomes for you to criticise and the harder it is for me to maintain my integrity.  Look, you give me millions of dollars, what am I supposed to do?  Invest it?  Give it away? Or what?”

ZZ: Do you find the same thing is happening to you?

RM: Yes.  I mean it could except that I don’t think I ever counted in any way, shape or form for as much as Mr Zimmerman ever did.  I’m just a small part of things.  I think if people saw the guy who wrote ‘Streets Of London’ driving around in a white Rolls Royce they might think along those lines, but I don’t think that will ever happen, the most important thing for me is that I enjoy playing.  In fact, things have got just about as big as I can cope with in this country.

ZZ: The start of ‘Barges’ and Grieg’s ‘Peer Gynt’ Suite sound exactly the same.

RM: Absolutely correct.  My wife is Norwegian so maybe I absorbed it from her, although actually we had it at school I think.  It was one of the first classical pieces I was ever introduced to, and so the influence obviously crept in there.  John Peel was the first one who told me that, on his ‘Top Gear’ show and I thought, ‘Oh well I’m in good company and great minds think alike.’  It doesn’t matter, it’s only E minor to G, I mean Jesus Christ, there must be a million tunes that go the same way, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.  It’s out of copyright isn’t it?

ZZ: ‘Another Rain Has Fallen’ is on that album.  That’s one of your old songs, so why did it take you so long to record it?

RM: I wanted to record that on the previous album and wasn’t able to.  I was very pleased with that as a composition, I always wanted to write something in a traditional vein.  That’s the nearest I’ve got to it so far.  I’ve done another song like that which isn’t recorded.  That might seem a bit odd on that album, but there are a few odd things on that album anyway.  There is always one that stands out as a little odd.  I was very pleased with that song, the only reason I don’t do it more often live is because I have a surfeit of mid to slow tempo numbers and I don’t want to drag the whole evening down.

ZZ: There is something strange about the time on the single they took from that album, ‘When I Was A Cowboy’, isn’t there?

RM: Yeah, ‘Cowboy’ is really weird, it’s not in regular time at all.  The drummer on that was a friend of mine called Laurie Allen.  He was also in Formerly Fat Harry.  A very fine American band but too advanced for most of the public at the time I think.  They used to play everything in odd time, so Laurie, when he heard ‘Cowboy’, was knocked out, he said, ‘Cor, that was clever’.  I didn’t even realise it was in odd time, it’s not strict 4/4.

ZZ: You split from Jo Lustig after that album, why was that?

RM: I left after my third year with him.  That’s a very difficult question to answer, I’d prefer to just say our contract expired, and I didn’t renew, and that’s it.

ZZ: So back to Bruce?

RM: Back to Bruce, yeah.  He’s my brother, he knows me very well, he knows what I want, he knows what I want to work at, he understands all the songs that I write, we grew up together you know.  I love him and he loves me and we’re good pals as well.  I don’t think you can get a better working relationship than that.

I’d just like to add my thanks to Bruce.  He’s been amazingly helpful throughout this interview in many ways.  In fact, all the photographs you see here come out of his own personal collection.  The new album should be out by the time this issue of Zig Zag hits the streets.  Ralph says he’s very happy with it.  I’ve yet to hear it, but he tells me that two of my favourite songs, ‘Maddy Dances’ – his tribute to Maddy Prior – and ‘Zig Zag Line’, are on it.  If the rest of the album matches up to the quality of these two tracks then this album is going to be a must for any Zig Zagger’s collection.  So I suggest you rush out to your local dealer and get him to play it to you.  What are you waiting for?
Fraser Massey 
BACK TO INDEX

MUSIC PRESS
Ralph McTells All
Disc
2 February 1974
By Ray Fox-Cumming
Ralph McTell has just started a major 24-date British tour, which is near enough a sell-out.  Yet, although his records sell well enough to cover their costs, he has never had either a single or album hit.  So how does he account for his very substantial following?  

“I honestly don’t know.  It’s strange really.  I think a lot of my initial fans have stayed with me, but there are always new, younger faces turning up. 

The fact that I haven’t had a hit is probably my own fault, I don’t usually get on very well in the studios.” 

The trouble, apparently, is that the stony faces behind the glass panel in the studios inhibit him and he doesn’t like the accepted way of building up songs piecemeal.  To a certain extent he’s made things easier for himself by cutting to a minimum the number of people in the studio at any one time and now, whether anyone likes it or not, he insists on recording his guitar and voice simultaneously.  All the same, he confesses, the best way of overcoming his uneasiness during recordings is to get himself slightly sloshed beforehand. 

Last September he recorded his fifth album, which should be out late February or early March.  He pronounces himself more satisfied with it than any of his previous efforts, but is reluctant to play me the whole thing, “because you may hate it and if you do, you’ll be too polite to say so.” 

However, after a little gentle persuasion, I get to hear most of it and am very favourably impressed.  The songs are all of a high standard and the production is excellent.  There is also one song that stands out as an obvious single. 

Ralph is normally thought of as a folk singer, “but I’m not, I don’t sing folk songs.  I suppose I’m really a singer-songwriter, though the term seems to be going out of fashion.  I think I’ll call myself a group,” he adds wryly. 

He is also thought of as being a rather over-serious, taciturn man.  “I know,” he agrees.  “It’s an image I somehow acquired and it’s very hard to get rid of it.  I’m not like that at all and I want to change it.  That’s why we’ve put out this clowning picture of me for the tour publicity.  I hated that picture at first, but then I thought, ‘it’s me’, I’m like that, so why not?” 

He refers back to folk music and says, “Although I don’t consider myself a folk singer, I don’t want you to think that I’m knocking folk or folk clubs.  I’m very grateful to folk clubs, in the early days they provided me with somewhere to play.” 

I asked him if the very matey folk circuit was as much alive today as it was in the mid-sixties when he was working it. 

“To a lesser extent, yes.  There aren’t so many clubs now and some of the old faces have gone, but I like those people.  They’re very ordinary, down to earth people, not posers at all – but I’ve no time for these 16-year old spotty herberts telling you what’s wrong with the world.” 

Ralph in no way gives the impression of a tortured writer, wreaking havoc with his personal life to find experiences to write about.  He’s a happily married man with two kids and a pleasantly easy-going personality.  Does he find his fairly domestic lifestyle sufficient source for his lyrics? 

“Yes, I always write from life, but more about feelings than events.  Little things happen that I store up and use when I want them.” 

There’s talk of Ralph doing a TV series with Jake Thackeray.  “It hasn’t got very far yet, it’s just an idea.  As far as TV’s concerned, they don’t know whether to put me on The Old Grey Whistle Test or The Morecambe and Wise Show”. 

But what form would the series take – a sort of ‘Folk on Two’ type of thing?  “Oh no, if the word folk comes into it I’m having nothing to do with it at all.” 

Well, a show a la John Denver then?  He visibly cringes. 

“Good God no.  I’m not intending to start handing out kazoos to the audience!  I think it’ll work out all right.  Jake’s not the sort of person who’d do any kind of show that I’d be unhappy with.  Between us I’m sure we’ll work it the way we want it.” 

BACK TO INDEX

MUSIC PRESS
McFibbing McTell
Spotlight Magazine 1975
By Desmond Ilford

So Ralph McTell has finally made the charts – and reached the No. 1 position too – with that nice little ditty, Streets of London.  Well, well.  Times change don’t they?  It seems only yesterday that old Ralphy sat sipping beer in Dublin’s Gresham Hotel on the eve of his 1974 Carlton concert, telling the assembled press that he didn’t think he’d both playing Streets of London at his show because after eight years he was fed up with it.

As it happened, McTell did in fact do the number, as an encore at the very end of his set, and ironically it was the best received song of the evening.

Originally recorded by the Johnstons, Streets of London has now made Ralph McTell a star.  On February 22^nd he kicks off his biggest concert tour of his ten-year-old career, playing a total of 28 venues, including a major London appearance at Drury Lane.  And as a prelude to the tour, Warner Bros will be releasing a new McTell album, entitled oh so predictably, Streets.

Funnily enough, the chart-topping number was featured on an early McTell set way back in the dark old days of ‘66/’67.  Until late 1974, however, it was not released as a single “for contractual reasons”, say the official hand-outs.  Understandably, one cannot expect his record company to give us the whole sordid story of how legal hassles prevented its issue until now and that that is the real reason for McTell not wanting to feature the song anymore.

“I’d like to hear it recorded by a choral outfit,” he told me last summer, “and then I want to forget it.”

Well forget it Mr McTell most certainly did not.  And in fact, he so much wanted the public not to forget Streets of London that he even agreed to appear on BBC’s Top Of The Pops around Christmas time.  That did the trick.  The record zoomed up the charts, jostling for a while with top-selling Rubettes and Status Quo and getting away umpteen thousand copies in the process.

So Ralph McTell has finally arrived.  Well, you’ve got to hand it to him.  He’s worked hard for his success and the people who come up slowest are more often than not the ones who go down slowest too.  So congrats anyway, Ralph.

You’re a bit of a fibber, but you’re all right.

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MUSIC PRESS
Ralph McTell
A Fairytale Comes True
New Spotlight Magazine
March 13th, 1975
(Irelands National Music Teen Weekly)
JIMMY SAVILE introducing Ralph McTell for his first appearance on BBC's Top Of The Pops said that once in a while in the entertainment business, a fairytale comes true. The story of McTell's phenomenal success is such a fairytale. Ralph wrote Streets of London seven years ago and it was first released on an album in 1969. Last Christmas it leapt into the single charts, shot into the No. 1 slot for three weeks, is still selling here and in Britain, and looks set to clock up sales in excess of 500,000 copies. It has just been released in Europe and has already gone straight into the Top Ten in Germany and Scandinavia.

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MUSIC PRESS
Ralph McTell – Britain’s Premier Singer Songwriter
Talks of Water of Dreams, of Streets and of Nellie the Newt
Folk International Magazine     
approx. 1982
By Tim Oakes

To talk to Ralph McTell is to talk to a professional.  A vastly over-used term, but McTell’s professionalism is not restricted to his playing and singing, but also covers his studio technique, the way he produces and writes his material, and of course he is also a professional human being.  He takes life very seriously and uses its outer edges as the inspiration for many of his songs.  The basis of emotion is one that is most strongly found on his latest LP, Water of Dreams, where he has taken the gist and feeling of each of the most desperate of human emotions, love, fear, hate and despair, and turned them, through the McTell Song Machine, into a series of pristine musical works – works that are much more a statement of fact than a figment of some rich imagination.

The interview with Ralph McTell was a strange affair, catching the man, it seems, is the job for an experienced trapper . . . But we finally caught up with him finishing the recording of songs from a new TV series shown in January.  A children’s series, each programme is dedicated to an animal, and they run alphabetically: A for Antelope – Z for Zebra . . . It would be easy, and I suppose explainable, if an artist of McTell’s stature wandered into the studio on a project like this, threw the tracks down, and wandered out again.  But, like I said, he’s a professional, and even this strange and flimsy work demands his total attention.  After the nth remix of Nellie the Newt, that becomes very apparent and our talk began with this unique project.

“I got approached by Granada TV who asked if I’d be interested in doing some songs for a kids programme.  So I thought about it, and then I realised that in all the years I’ve been playing, I’ve never been actively involved with anything for children, and as a father of four, I thought, yes, why not.

“They sent me the script, the stories from where the songs would come.  And it was amazing, I just read it through and then wrote a song, right there.  But 26??  Naturally I got well behind . . .

“I got so far behind, in fact, that I had to end up writing the songs during the lunch hour of the recordings!  I felt very strange doing that because when you’re out on the road, you get the benefit of hearing a song over and over, until you really know it.  But that was unique, having to play them off literally minutes after they were finished.”

The series is likely to make a big splash for McTell not least for the quality and obvious delight inherent in the songs, but also because it sounds so natural for him to be singing them.  Nellie the Newt is amazing . . .

(One fear McTell has of the series is getting ‘stick’ for it, he awaits the painful day when, on getting up on stage, the cry of ‘Dusty the Dog . . .’ resounds through the auditorium . . .)

Far from just letting the songs just ‘get written’ McTell took them apart and added much that would appear to be incongruous – were it not so damn funny.  “Yes, I took a double brief on it.  The kids at home were a great testing ground, but I thought, who is going to watch this sort of thing with them? – their mothers, so I slipped a bit of humour in there as well, for them.”

His work has obviously taken him to many recording studios, but his feeling of unease in them is somewhat of an enigma.

“I can honestly say that I am only marginally more comfortable in the studio now than when I first went in.  It’s to do with performance.  I tell the engineers ‘look, I’ve rehearsed this.  I know the song and will record it once.  If it breaks down we’ll try a second time, and if it breaks down then we go on and do something else.’  It’s because I still perform for an audience and even in the studio the audience are the engineer, the tape op, the producer . . . and in some cases the other musicians.  Quite often they want another ‘take’ but I just can’t.  I can do it with someone else’s song, play it time and time again, but with my own . . .  

“I can also only perform with the guitar.  I can’t breathe right without a guitar in my hand . . . my breath anticipates the note – I really admire people who can do overdubs.  But after all that’s the way that it was written.  It’s like timing tracks.  I never use them because no one ever really writes like that, it really is a feel thing.  It always comes over so cold, the breath of life is stripped out of it.   I like the odd late cymbal crash or if it slows up a bit, the guitar has to be right against the vocals, and there is no way I’m ever going to sing anything to a timer, it would sound like a robot.” 

GUITAR COLLECTION 

Ralph’s guitar collection was the next subject, and one is very passionate about.  Being a very direct and purposeful musician, he likes his instruments to match. 

“The guitar I use most is the old Gibson. It’s far from perfect, but I love it.  It causes some problems in the studio because it has such a strong bass.  But it’s like old clothes that you feel comfortable in, that old J45 really is comfortable.  I got it in a music shop in Wardour Street in about 1962 and I paid £65 for it.  It wasn’t exactly perfect, I had to strip the top – with a bit of broken glass . . . people were aghast, but I’m really not into the nonsense of guitars.  I actually put the bridge on upside down and never noticed . . .  

“It’s the guitar I’ve always wanted.  I got turned onto acoustic music by the ‘sound’ of the instruments.  The first, I suppose, was Jack Elliot’s jumbo.  I really jumped!  All that bass, and then I saw Jimmy McGregor on the Tonight Show and that had the same sound too . . . then there was the local folk club, The Wheatsheaf, and I went for the sound of the guitars, and then gradually got into the music.” 

Unlike his contemporaries, Ralph has never actively collected guitars, when he had the money and saw an instrument he bought it, but never searched for them directly.  He owns 14 guitars now, two hand-made ones by Tom Mates, a Guild and a strange selection of others, picked up from all over Europe . . . 

WATER OF DREAMS 

“The last album was recorded over two years.  I wanted to make the LP a crossover, but still really me.  I tried the same thing with Love Grows but it never really worked out and my audience just didn’t respond.  So we had a rethink and then Bruce (Ralph’s manager) introduced me to this guy Martin Lavel who had made some really fantastic records with Neil Ardley and various people.  So we sat down together and started to put some tracks down.  Among the first few we did were two tracks of Water of Dreams.  ‘Cold on the Stones’ and ‘Martin’, it was very exciting and although in retrospect there were a couple of things wrong, it was two years of friendship with Martin and the results, I feel, are really excellent.” 

The Water of Dreams track itself is somewhat of a departure from the McTell soft ‘contemporary’ style, being what could easily be taken for a protest song, but the truth in his terms is somewhat different. 

“I feel that dreams can be used, literally, as sort of ‘conscience prodders’.  That was the whole point, people can say that they don’t know or they aren’t aware, and it’s like the Germany of the 1930s.  It’s just not good enough, we have fairly free access to information in this country, and it’s quite clear that there is something amiss with the judicial system in the aftermath of Blair Peach being killed, and people said nothing.  It is really sad – especially when you know that people can do something.  People in this country still believe that the Police force are perfect – believe me, I’m not anti-cop or anything like that, but if something is rotten it has to be cut out – show that it’s rotten.  The Police do a fantastic job, but when three men die . . .” 

With that in mind, and looking at the way that the folk movement of the ‘60s became a powerful producer of political emotions, did Ralph feel that the political side is coming back? 

“I think, inevitably, that the political side is growing less.  People who were very radical in the '‘0s, and there were plenty of them, were really reflecting the public mood, and that’s why they came to the fore.  But when people moved away from that the singers who were the representatives of those opinions changed.  But it has been carried on, bands like UB40 and the young bands are doing the same thing.  The bands are their spokesmen.  But after about 20 years, that’s 20 years on, they either remain political but don’t remain musicians – because there’s no market for them – or they mellow.

“You will always find radical protest of some sort in the folk movements, because it has always been the music of the people.  But the artists, like the people, get a little softer . . . get a little rounded at the edges . . . complacent perhaps, but they also have to follow their markets.  Take Paul Simon for example, I can’t think of a political statement he’s made in years, but in the early days there were lots.  Not the Phil Ochs style, I was never into that either – the subversive side.  The people who want to hear that sort of political statement go to see that sort of political act – which all sounds too simple I know – but I still feel that the best way of making a statement like that is to do it through a crossover.  I had that sort of market from very early on, and, in a way, Streets of London was a very political song.  I like to think that it helped, I like to think that that along the way and with other factors like Cathy Come Home, that it made people think ‘Oh there’s something wrong here’.”  

ON THE ROAD 

Ralph McTell on the road is a strange sight, I mean, all the trappings of Genesis in Europe for a solo contemporary singer/songwriter?  Wouldn’t he prefer the smaller clubs? 

“Oh no I much prefer the big places, I like to be mollycoddled.  I get to ride in a big limousine . . . I get a dressing room . . . the theatre manager comes to see how it is.  I also get a good PA, and a couple of super road crew (they used to be with Fairport).  I take along the lighting guys and you can concentrate on getting an intimate, club sort of atmosphere – without having to do so many gigs . . . ! 

“There was so much relief when I started playing the bigger places, not because I don’t like the clubs or the people that run them, just that you feel more safe, and also in the occasional moments when I open my eyes, there’s just a wall of black in front of you, when you open your eyes in a club there’s all these people!  I always find that a bit disconcerting.  I sometimes miss it though, the early days when the clubs were just part of the broad base of live entertainment, before it got to the ‘you can’t play here you’ve got a guitar’ or ‘you sing American songs’, I missed all that thank God!  I’m sure that a lot of the traditional versus contemporary differences are wrong.  I mean, I’m sure that most trad clubs would really welcome Ewan McColl, who’s written some of the greatest contemporary songs around.”

 STREETS OF PARIS? 

The traditional and contemporary problems apart, there always comes a time with any ‘classic’ song when the writer is left behind in its run for popularity.  Ralph is no stranger to this, with both ‘From Clare to Here’ and  ‘Streets of London’ going on to become ‘standards’, rather than ‘Ralph McTell songs’. 

Everyone that I knew from the early days of folk clubbing started their first gig, their first song with Streets of London.  Four chords, easy to remember verses, and an audience who knew all the words and who sang along, added up to a great ego booster.  Recounting this to Ralph produced an amazing answer. 

“Really, I didn’t know that! It’s very gratifying.  Strange really, I knew lots of people knew the song, I just didn’t think they were actually singing it!” 

The history of the song is one that starts with a very hard up busker  . . . 

“I went down to Paris quite a lot, I was on the road a great deal and I made the models for my travelling Jack Kerouac . . . then Woodie Guthrie.  I’ve read lots of books since about the guy, but for me it was love at first hearing . . . so I went on the road.  I made it really hard for myself, I didn’t even take a sleeping bag, though I could’ve afforded one.  Instead I had a blanket and four safety pins . . . seventeen years old, staggering round Europe, sleeping in doorways – I was really travellin’!  I was determined when other buskers were playing Everly Brothers stuff, I was playing This Land Is Your Land – they earned a fortune and I got tuppence . . .

 “We travelled a long way really.  I started moving around with a couple of other buskers and I can still remember the first time we played Turkey.  We played on the Galatta Bridge, which links Europe and Asia across the Bosphorus.  The bridge was closed, and me and this Norwegian guy – who knew one chord that was G and the other wasn’t – played and it was tremendous, we must have been some of the first Europeans they had ever seen busking.  Then I got back and I was really getting fed up with working in this timber yard.  There was another guy there and we’d sing all the time, but we were broke and I said, ‘Let’s go to Paris’.  Well he couldn’t come straight away, so I went over on my own, blew my money in one night so that I had to go out and play the next day.  We had four cinema queues that we would defend really staunchly!  There were lots of people who wanted them . . .  

“One morning I was coming out of my room, which was a dreadful place, and it was January and freezing.  The place was covered in snow and I was going down to the market in the street when I saw this guy – and his mate – crawling out of a snowdrift.  It was so bad.  Some of them would freeze to death in the night, and the Parisians were just blasé about it.  They had been brutalised by all this poverty and just, well, were conditioned to look the other way.” 

The attitudes of the French annoyed him, and, sitting one night in a bar, a friend began to complain about his life and conditions.  “The fact that you have got someone to tell your troubles to,” retorted McTell, “means that you are a lot better off than a lot of people.” 

“So I started to think about it, and people saying things like ‘I’m lonely’ and it worked its way into ‘How can you tell me you’re lonely . . .’ and I had this tune that was a sort of raggish thing.  And it grew . . . ‘How can you tell me you’re lonely . . . let me take you by the hand, I’ll lead you through the streets of Paris . . .’  And then I thought that I really couldn’t talk about Paris when there was so much of the same thing happening in London.  So gradually I put all the characters I knew around London into the same song.  The first bloke, in the market, was around Surrey Street market near Croydon.  This guy used to come along kicking the newspapers, actually looking for the odd fallen apple or whatever.  The old lady used to hang around the West End of London, and one day I tried to drop some money into her bag but she was yelling, ‘I don’t need your bloody money’, and then she took it out and scattered it all over the floor.  I just left it there.  That gave the line ‘ . . . no time for talking, just keeps right on walking’.  The ‘all night café’ was Mick’s in Fleet Street and the ‘Seaman’s Mission’ was a sort of mission at the bottom of Hatcher Lane in Croydon where I used to live.  Well, I wrote three verses and gave it to Derek Brimstone, we were at the Fiesta on Fulham Road, it was a folkie hangout, Sandy (Denny), Trevor (Lucas) and all that crowd used to gig or just drop in.  I wrote it out on a serviette and gave it to Derek and sang him the tune.  I saw him again months later and he said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to start singing that song, it’s going great’, which was about 1968 or so.  And the rest just happened . . .” 

The other song which has ‘gone trad’ for want of a term, is, as we have mentioned From Clare To Here, Ralph is in awe of its success.   

“When I wrote it I thought that if I got the credibility of an Irishman singing that song – it’ll do well.  It was Noel Murphy who gave it that credibility.  I’m – was, and still am – romantic about Ireland, in an artistic sense.  A much maligned people.  But when I heard Noel sing it, I thought, great!  It’s there.  And it carried on.  Dingle Spike did a great version around the pubs, and now, in Ireland, people don’t realise it was written by an Englishman.  I’m not bothered.  I mean it, like Guthrie said of one of his songs, ‘Anyone found singing this song sure is a friend of mine – cos that’s what I wrote it for . . .’.  I was stood in a pub in Dublin and there were some guys singing this on stage.  I tell you, I got the chills, but it was such a feeling, everyone singing it . . .  It was only about the third song that I wrote the words before the tune, I nearly always write the tune first.” 

With that, we proceeded to talk about his songwriting and playing techniques.  While it may be that some have the edge for words, and some for melody, there can be few artists who can compare with McTell for the sheer consistency of both, a generator of ‘songs’ that makes a mockery of the singing poets or the poetic singers. 

“I used to try to be ‘interesting’ on the guitar and write clever little bits in there, which is perhaps why there are only a few cover versions.  It came from admiring people like Bert (Jansch) who always wrote bits in like them.  As a consequence a lot of the stuff sounds easy – until you try to play them.  It gets hard trying to explain to a bass player ‘There’s a half beat in there’, and he says ‘How do you count that?’ and I can’t!  Bert has a great answer to that though.  They say ‘How do you count that?’ and he says, ‘one, one, one, one . . .’. 

THE FAIRPORTS 

Talking about bass players reminded both of us of Dave Pegg, and Fairport, and the close links that he has had with the band in the past.  His work with them, literally individually and collectively, has been the highspot for a lot of concerts. 

Considering the fact that Ralph is principally a solo artist, his concerts, when they are coupled up with other musicians, are tremendous.  One particular event this year which proved the McTell genius was the Theakstons Music Festival.  Ralph alone on the stage managed to win over a mostly indifferent audience with a stunning solo set, and was then joined by a motley crew of familiar faces . . .  

“I looked down the list I’d made up and I had about five or six songs to play, and I decided to slip Streets in next.  So off it went and next thing I knew there was Dave sauntering on and the crowd went mad.  There was no plan to do it – but there was an idea for some of them to come on for a couple of encores together.  Then they all trouped in.  One monitor in the middle of the stage, and Dave (Swarbrick), Peggy and Simon all fighting to get at the microphone for their solos . . . 

“Fairport and me go back an awful long way.  When you are on the road, on your own, you never really know or mix with your peers.  You might, but it’s more luck than anything . . . Dave Pegg was with Ian Campbell when I first met him – he was playing double bass – and I got booked to play this place . . . ‘just another Cockney’ . . . and I was really nervous.  I’d never played a place as big, but I was getting £17 for it so . . . I did it!  Then afterwards, he watched my progress and I watched his, and we met through Sandy and Trevor.  Dave is a great enthusiast, and we got on really well, and gradually I met the rest of the band and they were great.  It was amazing when they gave me compliments because I felt that people who were in a band like that, liking what I did as a soloist, was really great.  Then, when I finished working with Danny Thompson, Dave filled the gap, and we carried on like that. 

“Then they asked me to sing with them, wow!  Great fun.  Then they asked me to do the reunion thing and we all ended up doing the old rock ‘n’ roll thing . . . what a night.  It was the most thrilling experience I’ve had, there have been others, of course there have, like the Isle of Wight Festival with 250,000 or the Albert Hall . . . but nothing beats playing with musicians like that.” 

And the future?  “I’m looking forward to getting this (the Animal songs) out of the way, not because I don’t like it but because I’ve got so many more ideas coming up.  If you don’t get the songs out, you get a logjam.  You have to get a few of them out of the way to let the flow get going again.”

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MUSIC PRESS
MEAN, MOODY McTELL
By Howard Fielding
Publication Not Known
Date Not Known

One of the characteristics of a ‘folk singer’ – if I may use a hackneyed and outworn term which now means little – is that he deals with the relationship between performer and audience in a strictly personal way.  And it is the lot of most such singers to have a personal clientele, who attach themselves to him and his life, loves and attitudes, rather than to any great originality in the style of his music.

Only a few solo singers are privileged to touch the nerve of a nation, or of a whole world-wide generation – and then their success is usually by means of a generic appeal.  It is their nationhood, their youth, their freedom or what have you, or by means of such a unique voice or delivery that words and music are secondary.  Ralph McTell, to end my preamble, is not one of these few, never having touched the world or its children en masse.

This may be a compliment, for to reach groups of people as groups requires some generalisation and abstraction, and McTell sings of himself and people he knows, and his songs have that specific quality.  But this ties him, I suspect, to the syndrome of being enjoyed only by people who meet him at a time when he is associated with a particular moment in their lives – a love, a broken affair, a growing up.

McTell sings songs to all these moods, but the requirement for his success lies in the existence of those moments in the lives of his audience – it is they who contribute their emotion and experience – and without their tacit assent that his songs ring true to their hearts, the songs alone would not last or have much being of their own, for they do not take over the spirit or haunt the mind of one who has not shared that emotion.

Until he finds the ability to compose music and lyrics with this arresting quality, it seems that he must remain with his pleasant, likeable personality – with a static, or slowly growing appeal.  To advance more quickly needs greater insights, greater poetic and musical content than his songs at present possess.  

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Music Press
Dirty Linen (Folk/Folk Trad & World Music Magazine)
April / May 1996
Ralph McTell – Still Weathering the Storm
By Tom Nelligan
One of the most enduring voices in English acoustic music has been that of singer/songwriter/guitarist Ralph McTell.  In the course of a career that is approaching the 30 years mark, he has produced 23 original albums and more than a dozen re-issues and has evolved from a young pop star into a respected folk legend.  From busking on the streets of Paris, to writing one of the most recorded songs in the English language, to recording a series of consistently thoughtful albums that have received far too little notice in America, McTell’s hallmark has been a deep, warm voice, a strong set of fingers on his guitar, and a seldom-matched aptitude for the songwriter’s craft. 

This past November, McTell came to the United States to perform her for the first time since 1984, doing a short solo tour in the Northeast.  Before his sold-out show at the Old Vienna Kaffeehouse in Westborough, Massachusetts, he talked about his life and his music. 

McTell was born Ralph May in 1944 in Farnborough, Kent and grew up in Croydon, just south of London, at a time when craters from German bombs were still part of the urban landscape.  His father left home when he was two years old, which led to the challenging circumstances of McTell’s early years: “I came from a broken home,” he recalled, “like a lot of kids after the war, and although I was brought up by a very firm mum who kept us straight, pretty much, there was a time when I was alienated, and alone, and disturbed.”  

He began playing harmonica at age 7, and said, “I actually wrote a tune when I was about 8 or 9 that I can still remember, only because someone said they liked it – probably the lady upstairs in the tenements where we lived.”  An enduring song that recalls this period is “Mr Connaughton”, a tribute to a kindly neighbour who was something of a surrogate father to McTell.  “Not everybody had a dad,” he remembered, “so they were sort of shared around.” 

Restless and probably looking to make some changes in his life, he left school at age 15 to join the British army, only to buy his way out after six months and latch onto making music as his focus.  “Certain kids drift into music because music is a discipline and a lifestyle.  I just loved music.  To be able to make music was something I was always fascinated with.  For me, music, rather than politics or religion, was the discipline, the thing I hung onto when I was going through that dodgy teenage period.” 

American folk music, imported to England in person by people like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and on record by many others, became a major influence on McTell, who in the early 60s became a flashy fingerstyle guitarist and hung out in folk clubs in London and Brighton with anyone who could teach him a tune or a lick.  “From the age of 16 or 17 I heard mountain fiddle players, black guys playing harmonica, 12-string blues, slide guitar, Woody Guthrie – you name it, I heard it.  I was just totally immersed in it.  I didn’t even notice the Beatles, because when they were around I was trying to play like Blind Willie McTell.” 

Not only playing like Blind Willie, but taking his name as well.  May thought he needed a better-sounding stage name, and on a suggestion from veteran English folkie Wizz Jones, as they were planning the publicity for a series of 1966 duo gigs, May became McTell.  “He said, ‘call yourself what you like – no one knows who you are!’  When I tried to sign my record deal with Transatlantic, I said, ‘listen, that’s not my real name.’  They said, ‘What’s your real name?’ and I said, ‘Ralph May’ and they said, ‘oh, no, you’ve definitely got to stay with Ralph McTell,’ and it’s been ever since.” 

“My tradition is English,” he admitted.  “I’ve always felt that when I was about 18 and my mates were singing blues about being from Tennessee or from the Mississippi Delta, when we were from South London, was a bit iffy.  You could play it and love it, but you’re never going to be black.  I realised that I was never going to have that sound in my voice, as much as I loved the poetry of those great artists – I mean that, absolutely, the poetry of Leroy Carr and Robert Johnson, and the skill of Blind Blake and Willie McTell and all those.  Without those guys I wouldn’t have started to play.” 

Of course McTell wasn’t the only English teenager of his generation who was listening to American blues – people like Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger were hearing the same records in the early 60s, and blues became an essential component of the 60s English rock scene.  Asked why this foreign sound had such an attraction for so many of his contemporaries, McTell explained, “I think that the white working class kids in England just identified with blues so completely.  The music had this authenticity and a purity; it was regarded by some as a music of protest.  It’s easily accessible if you can play three chords.  It understates things to such a huge amount.  There’s sexual innuendo, there’s power of manhood in it, and it’s your own, you make it your own.  Of course there were hangers-on, people who just liked the beat or liked to dance to it, but I think in the beginning it was highly idealistic.” 

Even if he started out trying to sound like a black bluesman, by the late 60s McTell’s blend of American guitar styles with his own rich voice and talent for words was attracting attention on its own.  After several years of busking around Europe and building an audience at English folk clubs, he released his first album, Eight Frames a Second, in 1968.  Produced by Gus Dudgeon, who would soon be famous for his work with Elton John, it has something of a late 60s psychedelic feel overlaid on McTell’s blues roots.  “Transatlantic didn’t quite know what to do with me,” he recalled, “because my songs weren’t blues, they were perhaps more melodic and stranger.  So they played them to Gus, and Gus loved them, loved the opportunity.  I was scared shitless, and he was new and exciting – he gave it 110, 200 percent of his time.  We were sneaking into Decca studios on Sunday mornings to get half an hour of extra time.” 

McTell’s second album, 1969’s Spiral Staircase, included the first release of the song that has become his signature, “Streets Of London”.  “Within a week of recording it,” he remembered, “it had its first cover version, and within a week after that someone had heard it in Australia.  The song was on its way then, and it’s been travelling ever since.”  This gentle but powerful look at homelessness remains the first thing that comes to most people’s minds when McTell is mentioned.  It quickly became a concert favourite and five years later a re-recorded version (that added a perhaps too-sweet female backup chorus) became an international pop hit.  The number of recorded cover versions now tops 200, one of the latest is by Sinead O’Connor.  “The song is a monster,” McTell said, “but it’s a benevolent monster.  It’s been incalculable to me because it’s made it possible to travel.  I wrote that song when I was 21 or 22, recorded it when I was 23, and since then I’ve been writing and singing and performing and hopefully getting better.  But when you get a monster like that you never get past it in public perception.” 

Asked for no doubt the thousandth time to explain how that song came to be McTell patiently explained: “I was always asking questions in my mind – ‘What’s it about?’ and I’d noticed alienated people from a very early age.  I’d noticed tramps and people living on the street.  I talked to them as well, and when a friend of mine and I were in Paris he got into smack in a big way.  It was quite deliberate – he wanted this and we couldn’t pull him back.  You can’t pull a junkie back, they’ve got to want to get right, otherwise there’s nothing you can do.  And he was coming off one time, and we were sitting… And I sort of thought ‘How can you tell me you’re lonely’, and I had this nice chord sequence.  I think it’s a naïve song in some respects, but it’s a young song, a sincere song.  And I wrote it for him.  It was the chorus first.  The old man was a guy who walked through the street where I lived, and the old lady – they’re all real characters.” 

In the early 70s, McTell became something of an English counterpart of James Taylor – an accessible writer of literate, largely acoustic, guitar-based songs, who was finding considerable success in the mainstream pop world as part of the first wave of folk-based singer/songwriters who attracted major label attention, a group that also included people like Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell, but although he had long been playing major concert halls, McTell was apparently uncomfortable with the pop star role that culminated with the 1975 chart success of “Streets Of London”.  He took a brief leave from performing and when he resumed touring and recording in 1976 it seemed that his inner muse had won out over the demands of commercialism.  While he continued to play large halls for a while – for example, recording a live album in 1977 at the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Sydney Opera House in Australia – his music remained clearly oriented towards a folk audience, rather than mainstream pop, and his songwriting skills were still directed in a largely alternative direction, towards listeners who were willing to think about the often serious and sometimes enigmatic lyrics. 

Over the years McTell’s material has included only a few of the sort of love songs that dominate the repertoire of most American singer/songwriters.  “I think I try to avoid that,” he said.  “I tried to avoid that even when I was 18 or 19.  By the time I was 23 I was married, and you can write about aspects of married love, but they don’t always connect, and there are other things out there that need looking at.”  History, for example – songs like the unsettling “Maginot Waltz” about carefree picnickers on the eve of World War I, or “Red and Gold”, an epic about the 1644 English Civil War battle at Cropredy Bridge.  “I am fascinated by the past,” he explained.  “I’d love to be able to walk into an old photograph and pick up the action.  I’m terribly nostalgic and a bit sentimental and romantic.” 

McTell’s songs often reflect a humanistic concern for fairness and justice and a sympathy for the fears of the alienated and lonely.  Aside from “Streets Of London”, there are a few overtly topical songs like “Bentley and Craig”, a blues about a Croydon teenager who was hanged for murder after an accomplice shot a policeman during a robbery, and a striking new song about the Bosnian war called “Peppers and Tomatoes” that chillingly outlines how easily people can find excuses for hating each other.  Many more have a subtler message, like “Bridge of Sighs”, about two people meeting in the middle of some unspecified but menacing situation, the much-covered “From Clare to Here”, about a homesick Irish worker in London, or songs of reassurance to troubled friends like “Weather The Storm”.  Some songs are highly symbolic, too, like “The Ferryman”, based on Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, or the angst anthem “Zimmerman Blues”. 

Regarding his diverse approach to song topics, McTell said, “I think people get fed up with a certain thing and need to listen to something different.  My criteria are quite different from just being able to state something; I want it to be a whole musical thing.  And if there happens to be a statement made on top it’s everything we could wish for. 

“The songs emerged in the first place, for me at least, out of guitar compositions, out of running lines, out of two-string harmonies, out of patterns that emerged which are made into tunes.  ‘From Clare to Here’ is a good air, a melody, and that’s great because people can remember it.  Some songs of mine, if you take away the guitar part, they’re not such memorable tunes.  But when you add the tune to the guitar part, they’re kind of complete.” 

The skill that is manifest in McTell’s songwriting doesn’t come quickly.  “I take ages to write a song.  Six weeks is nothing for me, six months quite often.  Six years sometimes – I’ll go back to something.  Within my limitations I really do try to craft a song together, and work it right, measure the words, listen to the way they sit, mess around with and move verses around, write, mutilate, change the key or the time signature, until it’s ready.  I’m very disciplined in that respect.  Last night I started off with a song that’s 25 years old.  They seem to last because of that. 

“I think songs that have been really crafted or worked upon, you can stand next to them years later.  I mean, I’m singing songs I wrote when I was 21.  I’m 50 now, and no, I’m not embarrassed by them.  You’re just so thrilled when it works.  You made something that wasn’t there.  I’m still able to sing 90% of the old songs without any embarrassment.” 

Like Tom Paxton and a very few of his other contemporaries, McTell has written songs which have essentially passed into folk tradition, songs like “Streets Of London” and “From Clare to Here” that have been sung so much by so many performers that people often learn them without knowing anything about the author.  McTell is happy that some of his songs have found such universal acceptance: “I love the fact that songs travel by their own momentum.  There was a period in my life when I wanted my songs to be thought of as less simple than they appear to be at first, and I made them a little more complicated – difficult time signatures or chords – which I loved doing, because I’m a musician.  But when something is open like that, a youngster can play it and get it – I mean, all you have to do is hit the chords and you hear the tune. 

“If songs do go into the tradition, I don’t see what greater compliment there could be for a songwriter.  I always remember Woody Guthrie, who said, ‘Anybody found singing this song without my due consent or permission sure is a good friend of mine, ‘cause that’s what I wrote them for, to be sung’.”  McTell paused, and then added with a laugh, “’As long as I get paid for them,’ Woody added!” 

Children’s music is another area in which McTell has made a mark, largely through a 1982 BBC television programme and companion album called Alphabet Zoo and a 1984 successor called Tickle on the Tum.  “It came at a time when I was going through one of my many periods of self-doubt,” he said, “and although I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it,’ they said, ‘That’s exactly the answer we expected.’  My manager said, ‘Everyone you’ve ever professed to admire has written songs for children – think of Woody Guthrie.’  And so we did it.

“Now I knew I couldn’t write socialist-inspired songs for this particular TV programme.  They were fun songs, narrative songs, and it was a real exercise for me.  But every time I presented one they said, ‘Great, that’s lovely.’   A couple of them became quite popular, even cultish.  The thing is to entertain children and adults was the brief I took.  Really young children need simple clap-along songs, but if you’re going to play songs over and over they can listen to them and understand the story a bit more.  No goo-goo-ga-choo nonsense songs; I wanted to write little stories.  And I’m happy to say they’re still selling to children who never saw the TV series.”   

Another BBC project, this one for radio, was a 1992 musical play on the life of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, called The Boy With a Note.  A collection of songs and spoken narratives, it was also released on CD. 

For much of his career McTell has had a close association with England’s quintessential folk-rock band, Fairport Convention.  Current and former members of Fairport such as Richard Thompson, Simon Nicol, Maartin Allcock, Jerry Donahue, Dave Mattacks and Dave Pegg have regularly played on McTell’s albums, the most recent of which was recorded at Pegg’s Woodworm Studios with Allcock producing.  McTell has often appeared at Fairport’s annual Cropredy Festival, even singing the part of the late Trevor Lucas at the band’s 25^th anniversary reunion in 1992.  Fairport, in turn, has made classics of several McTell songs, like “The Girl From The Hiring Fair”. 

“They’re my oldest pals in the business,” McTell says of Fairport.  “They’re on every bloody album for virtually the last 20 years.  ‘The Girl From The Hiring Fair’ was an attempt to write a folk-type melody from a folk-type setting with Thomas Hardy overtones.  But whereas with Thomas Hardy she would have drowned in the river or something, this one has an upturn at the ending.  It’s become a Fairport standard, and I think their treatment of the romantic interlude in the middle is beautiful.  They don’t seem to be able to drop it, which is great.” 

Other McTell songs that frequently turn up in Fairport sets year after year are the bloody historical ballad “Wat Tyler” (co-written with Simon Nicol) and the rollicking poacher’s tale, “Bird From The Mountain”.  Speaking of the latter, McTell said, “It’s actually to an Irish tune which is impossible to sing.  At least I can’t, but Dave Pegg has had a valiant stand at it.” 

For all his success in Britain and elsewhere, McTell has not played in the U.S. for 11 years prior to his autumn 1995 East Coast tour.  When asked about the long absence he laughed, “I think it was something I said!  I really haven’t a clue.  I probably took the cynical view that if I didn’t get paired up with compatible musicians I would go spinning around America forever.  And I didn’t feel that time was on my side.  The idea of walking out on stage and winning the folks over…that’s an entertainer with a big E and that’s not really the way I was.  Through management not being able to set up deals properly to their satisfaction or whatever, we just sort of concentrated on the British market and the Australian market.  And that was it.  They say if you hang in long enough it all comes round again, and there’s been a slight upsurge in interest in acoustic music recently and I’ve been hauled along by it.” 

McTell need not have feared that American fans wouldn’t remember him – his Boston-area show at the Old Vienna was sold out with a long waiting list, and the crowd was clearly composed of old friends.  His pop star days long behind him, McTell these days is a quietly intense performer, at least in a dimly lit small club setting where he often closed his eyes as he sang and swayed with the music during his 90-minute set.  He touched on all the bases of his career, from country-blues and ragtime guitar to the familiar 70s hits, to lesser-known material from his 80s albums, to new work like songs from the Dylan Thomas project and his latest album.

McTell hoped that the 1995 tour would mark a return to regular North American visits.  “I’m told there’s some interest in me coming back over here to America in May, which would be very nice, and I’ve got a new album out, called Sand In Your Shoes, and a new deal for the first time in many years with a record company in England.  I’m very happy with that.  It’s an album for a man of my age to have made.  I like to think that I’m one of the first singer/songwriters to have hit the big 5-0 that’s written about what it’s like to be 50.

“I’m working for the endless horizon, it would seem.  I would love to get into concert performer status here in the States and come here once a year, once every 18 months with a new album of new songs, and I’m having one more fling at it.”

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