In April this year, 25 saxophonists raised their horns in Paisley, near Glasgow, to blast through the celebrated solo from Gerry Rafferty’s soft-rock classic, “Baker Street”. As their fingers scurried up the riff’s opening glissando from octave D to high D, they marked 40 years since the song’s 1978 release on the day that Rafferty (who died of liver failure in 2011) would have turned 70.
The unwanted third son of a violent, alcoholic, Irish-born coal miner, Rafferty grew up in Paisley’s infamous Ferguslie Park estate. His musical career began with a Beatles/Stones covers band, but in 1969 he joined Billy Connolly’s folk act The Humblebums, until Connolly made a break for the comedy scene. After a solo debut flopped, Rafferty formed Stealers Wheel with old schoolfriend Joe Egan, scoring a 1973 hit with the Dylan pastiche “Stuck in the Middle with You”(given a second wind when Quentin Tarantino used it for the torture scene in his 1992 film Reservoir Dogs).
The implosion of Stealers Wheel left Rafferty bitter and broke. It took him three years to disentangle himself from his exploitative contracts. “Baker Street” was written during this period, when Rafferty was commuting between his home in Glasgow and his lawyers in London. “I knew a guy who lived in a little flat off Baker Street,” he said. “We’d sit and chat or play guitar there through the night.”
Switching between major and minor chords, the song set Rafferty’s early hopes (“You used to think that it was so easy…”) against his disillusionment with the music business and his increasing alcohol dependency (“…but you’re crying, you’re crying now”). His relief at the resolution of his legal battle is palpable in the final verse: “The sun is shining it’s a new morning/ And you’re going, you’re going home.”
“He ultimately was looking for that place to call home inside himself,” Rafferty’s daughter Martha told the BBC in 2017. “He had many moments along the way where he did experience that, but it wasn’t permanent.”
That sadness is perfectly offset by the exhilarating release of the six-note riffthat Rafferty originally wrote for guitarist Hugh Burns, but passed on to session saxophonist Raphael Ravenscroft. Rafferty’s early demos disprove Ravenscroft’s claim to have composed the riff himself. But it’s still possible that Rafferty pinched the riff from New York jazzman Steve Marcus’s 1968 track, “Half a Heart”, to which it bears a striking resemblance.
Ravenscroft — who went on to work with Pink Floyd and Daft Punk — also claimed he was paid only £27 for the session and that the cheque bounced. Meanwhile the single shifted more than five million copies. It was included on Rafferty’s second solo album, City to City, which knocked the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack off the top of the US charts and made the shy Scotsman an instant millionaire. He refused to tour or play the media game, but the song continued to net him a reported £80,000 a year until the end of his life.
Artists of all genres — from glam-rock to reggae — have been lured on to the rocks by “Baker Street”’s siren sax but nobody has added value. Notable failures include The Shadows’twanging (1979), Waylon Jennings’s earnest country (1987) and Undercover’sunaccountably successful dance chugger (1992). Three years after the suicide of his heroin-addicted former-bandmate Kurt Cobain, The Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl swapped the saxophone for a guitar, and upgraded the line about giving up “the booze” for “the crack”.
Through it all endures the bizarre urban myth that it’s Bob Holness, upright TV quiz-show host, who is blowing that raucous sax. But even there, the origin story gets murky. Two different broadcasters — BBC 6Music’s Stuart Maconie and LBC’s Tommy Boyd — both claim to have started the rumour. “I would have loved to have been responsible for that tremendous sax solo,” said Holness, who died in 2012, “but I can't play a note.”
Which version of “Baker Street” is your favourite? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song: The fascinating stories behind 50 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Parlophone UK, UMC (Universal Music Catalogue), Warner Music Group - X5 Music Group, Parlophone UK, Altra Moda Music
Picture credit: Eugene Adebari/REX/Shutterstock