Gerry Rafferty - Right Down the Line (Lyric Video) - Youtube Music 5 hit in 1979. [3][4] Rafferty loathed the 1992 dance music cover version of "Baker Street" by Undercover, describing it as "dreadful, totally banalit's a sad sign of the times". It makes me think of home, nostalgia and happiness. As he explained in a press release heralding the new record in November 2000: "My heart and soul have gone into this album, and by releasing it in this way my creative influence has not been diluted in any way. Months later, says Brewer, I get this call from Artie Mogull to say, Congratulations you have a number one album in America! I went, Are you out of your mind? He said, No, its at number one.. Barry Recap: A Tragic Death Shakes Up Bill Haders Dark Satire "[7] On weekends he and a classmate, future Stealers Wheel collaborator Joe Egan, played in a local group named the Maverix, mainly covering chart songs by groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Affiliate programs and . Succession Recap: Logan Roy Makes Shock Return, Shiv and Tom Get Kinky. For institutions, Rock's Backpages is provided as an unlimited access subscription, meaning that all staff, students and library patrons have The sax solo did sound vaguely familiar, so perhaps I have heard this in the past on the radio somewhere along the way. "Gerry Rafferty and his songs of alienation", "Stealers Wheel | Biography, Albums, Streaming Links", "BBC Radio 2 Sold on Song TOP 100 number 48 Baker street", "Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" Revisited", "Gerry Rafferty Biography: 'Right Down the Line' Liner Notes", Musician Gerry Rafferty took refuge in farm at height of fame, "The Proclaimers - Letter From America (Band Version)", "Archived version of Gerry Rafferty's Website (6 December 2000)", "News section postings dated 23 February 2004 and 31 March 2004", "Tickets & Eintrittskarten online kaufen | Hypertension Music", Gerry Rafferty's funeral is held in Paisley, "Obituary: Gerry Rafferty, singer and songwriter", 'I lost my soulmate' says Gerry Rafferty's fiancee, "Gerry Rafferty, 'Baker Street' Singer, Dies at 63", "The lonely road from 'Baker Street' to skid row", "Gerry Rafferty's struggle with demons, and the Willie Whitelaw connection Telegraph Blogs", "Missing Baker Street singer Gerry Rafferty is living in hiding", "Gerry Rafferty happily stuck in the middle of Tuscany", Neighbours of Baker Street star Gerry Rafferty speak of shock at his collapse, Hope for family as Rafferty is taken off life support machine, "Gerry Rafferty's daughter sings at his funeral", "Baker Street singer Gerry Rafferty died at his daughter's home in Stroud", Mourners' Farewell To Singer Gerry Rafferty, "Gerry Rafferty's girlfriend loses battle for inheritance", "Baker Street singer Gerry Rafferty dies at age of 63", "Finbar Furey leads tributes to the late singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty", "Star tribute as Gerry Rafferty Drive opens", "Bring It All Home Gerry Rafferty Remembered", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gerry_Rafferty&oldid=1150587964, Musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, This page was last edited on 19 April 2023, at 00:00. If I dont, Ill give you 75. Im like, You cant sign an artist of mine and not listen to the record! He says, Thats the deal. [60], In the last decade of his life, having taken pains to shun the fame and celebrity that accompanied his musical achievements, Rafferty found himself making headlines once again as he struggled with alcoholism and depression and the increasingly erratic behaviour they spawned. In 1978, he recorded his second solo album, City to City, which included "Baker Street", his most popular song. In the summer of 1978, Gerry Rafferty's song "Baker Street" became a top-five hit in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. In an interview with BBC Radio 2 in September 2000, Gerry Rafferty himself explained the reasoning behind his decision not to tour. To Raffertys utter disbelief, his parody of Bob Dylans paranoia, tossed off as little more than a joke, struck pay dirt in the States by which time he had already said goodbye to the band. Let's Talk About Night Owl - Rock and Roll Globe tenor sax player who toured with the jazz great Buddy Rich. Brewer's offices were just across the road. It was a pretty scary kind of feeling. ), The video for Baker Street has been viewed over 5 million times. Things came to a head when the star told Brewer that he was planning to go on the David Frost TV show. In 1965, 18-year-old Rafferty met 15-year-old Carla Ventilla, an apprentice hairdresser from an Italian family in Clydebank, at a dancehalla story he later recounted in the song "Shipyard Town" on North and South. Brewer was a big fan of Stealers Wheel and met Rafferty in London. Michael Gray, Rafferty's former manager, agreed: "The audible proof is there from the demos that Rafferty himself created the riff and placed it within the song's structure exactly where it ended up. For decades in England, for instance, there was a widely believed urban myth that Bob Holness, the buttoned-up British gameshow host, had actually performed the saxophone solo in Baker Street.. "And that's when the fun started," says Brewer. [70][71], A requiem mass was held for Rafferty at St Mirin's Cathedral in his native town of Paisley on 21 January 2011. The career of Gerry Rafferty from folk-roots to multi-million selling success and alcohol-fuelled demise was one of amazing highs and lows. Apart from Ravenscroft, most of the musicians on City to City are old friends. He told me that he and Marcus had been best friends at a time and wanted to know what the connection to Steve Marcus was, since Ravenscroft is listed as the saxophonist on Baker Street. When I replied that Raffertys song sounded suspiciously familiar to Marcuss song Half a Heart, he didnt buy it on principle. And for good reason. Maybe I should have realised, but I didn't. Gerry Rafferty, a Scottish singer and songwriter who combined a gift for melody, a distinctive voice and a fatalistic worldview to produce 1970s hits like "Stuck in the Middle With You" and. In an interview that year with Colin Irwin to promote the album, Rafferty mentioned that he was interested in doing more production work and writing film soundtracks, and even floated the idea of writing a musical about the life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Gerry in a very rare interview from a radio scotland programme in 2003.This is a rare insight into the world of one of the past centurys greatest songwriters. August 1975. He was Editor in Chief of Classic Rock magazine for 10 years and Editor of Total Guitar for 4 years and has contributed to The Big Issue, Esquire and more. To be a star in inverted commas -that is probably the last thing I want. [69] Rafferty died of liver failure at the home of his daughter Martha in Stroud, Gloucestershire, on 4 January 2011, at the age of 63. Accept | Cookies policy | Privacy policy, Click here to sign in via the UK federation WAYF. Bonnie Raitt recorded a reggae treatment of "Right Down the Line" for her Slipstream album released 10 April 2012. Billy Connolly on Gerry Rafferty (Conan O'Brien, 2012) - YouTube Letters: Supernova Sleuth; Gerry Rafferty : NPR The lyric and the melody fuse beautifully and the lyric is complemented by the melody. Has he undergone, by any chance, a religious experience? After the completion of Another World in 2000, Rafferty planned to move back to Scotland and bought Eaglestone House,[57] "a substantial listed 1860s mansion" in the Highland village of Strathpeffer,[58] although he sold the property two years later and never actually moved in. Liner notes for the compilation album Right Down the Line (prepared with Rafferty's close co-operation[33]) confirmed this several years later, noting the singer was now "finding himself at the crossroads and looking to replace the treadmill with a new dimension in his life". He was a very humble man. Burns also nodded to the songs unusual structure, which he compared in its unorthodox nature, to Queens Bohemian Rhapsody., Its not just opening, verse, chorus, he said. 28 in the US Top 40 in early 1979. CIA Director, Noam Chomsky Named in Epstein's Private Calendar: Report "[5] Two decades later, speaking to the press after Rafferty's funeral, Charlie Reid of The Proclaimers confirmed Rafferty's dislike of celebrity: "He was not entirely comfortable with fame. A Scotsman bred on traditional music, he was never a proper folkie - not really - and his alliance with Billy Connolly in The Humblebums at the end of the '60s always seemed a bizarre blend of opposites, though Gerry maintains it was . England and Wales company registration number 2008885. Many of them collaborated with Rafferty (who plays rhythm guitar and rudimentary keyboards) on an excellent but little-noted 1971 solo album, Can I Have My Money Back? There was change too in the songs. "[53] Barbara Dickson also paid tribute to her friend, whom she described as a "luminous, glorious Scottish musician". I went to the studio after I played the gig and I think one of the first songs we played was Baker Street. And I said, This is fantastic. this can result in this site earning a commission. Thats not to diminish Ravenscroft because, denuded of the sax, Baker Street sounds like another middling acid trip of a song in a decade full of them. Gerry Rafferty - Right Down the Line (Lyric Video) 'Right Down the Line' is taken from the album 'City to City'. After they disbanded in 1971, he recorded his first solo album, Can I Have My Money Back? Words and phrases he used years ago crop up in similar contexts on City to City. Contributing artists included his friend Rab Noakes, The Proclaimers, Barbara Dickson, Ron Sexsmith, Jack Bruce, Paul Brady, Emma Pollock, James Vincent McMorrow and Betsy Cook. The disputed history behind Gerry Raffertys 1978 hit. Right Down the Line - Wikipedia Gerry Rafferty in Amsterdam, 1972. Marcus passed away in 2005 and none of the tributes to him seem to make mention of it. "[52] Reid believed Rafferty was fundamentally unsuited to the pressures of celebrity: "He struck me as a very, very sensitive man and for someone like that, fame was probably not appropriate. Nor have the preoccupations of Raffertys lyrics changed all that much. [27] But it earned him another 1.5million, selling around three million copies in Europe and America. Boys, girls, large packets of drugs that was payola.. Released as a single in July 1978, it reached #12 on the U.S. Gerry Rafferty. The Mystery Behind Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street' - The Atlantic And managers cant fucking tell you whats best for you in terms of when you should do gigs, rates and so on. Gerry Rafferty is one of the more elusive and enigmatic figures on this increasingly strange roundabout. [citation needed], Subsequent albums, such as Snakes and Ladders (1980), Sleepwalking (1982), and North and South (1988), fared less well, perhaps due partly to Rafferty's longstanding reluctance to perform live, with which he felt uncomfortable. The Celtic thing is the drone, you know -its fifths, the same as in country music, a lot of which comes from Scotland and Ireland, anyway. The Internet is a conspiracy-theory clearing house, and yet the connection between Baker Street and the opening riff of Half a Heart lives in semi-ubiquity. A lot of great music was made that way. [51], On 3 September 2021 Parlophone UK released "Rest In Blue" an album on which Martha Rafferty completed a project started by her father from demos left by Rafferty. Gerry Rafferty: A Brilliant Tortured Soul - YouTube He has a flight to catch. Billy said, We got 10 points if they passed out, 5 points if they screamed He was a wonderful character in those days., When City To City was finished, Brewer shopped it around record companies. [18] The album sold over 5.5million copies, toppling the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in the US on 8 July 1978. 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His solo hits in the late 1970s included "Baker Street", "Right Down the Line", and "Night Owl". In the My Sweet Lord case, Harrison admitted he simply hadnt realized that the song so closely resembled Hes So Fine, made most famous by The Chiffons. Gerry Rafferty signed up with Brewer and his production company funded the making of new album, City To City. was a flop. Tue 4 Jan 2011 14.01 EST. According to guitarist Hugh Burns, Murphy's death was "a great blow to Gerry"[42] and marked the end of a creative partnership that had lasted almost 30 years. "Stuck in the Middle With You" has received over 4million plays worldwide, and "Right Down The Line" has had over 3million plays. 17 in the US. [62] While the news stories focused on Rafferty's binges, they revealed nothing of the impact on his family and friends. Signing up for the RBP newsletter provides access to a limited number of free articles, as well as six new free articles every week. 'Can I Have My Money Back?' He did it really well and he was respected in both camps. In a blog posting dated 31 March 2004 he wrote: "Let's get back to music: after all that's the only reason that this website has been set up." Still, they managed to record a brilliant second album, Ferguslie Park, which was produced, like its predecessor, by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Joel Whitburn, "The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits (6th Edition)", p. 493. When he gets there, Artie Mogull is in a hurry. Jon Brewer now a successful documentary maker (opens in new tab) managed Rafferty through his most successful period before their relationship ended in acrimony. We want to hear it. He was the third son of Irish miner and lorry driver Joseph Rafferty and Rafferty's Scottish wife Mary Skeffington. In 2010, Baker Street was honored by BMI for achieving 5 million radio plays worldwide. From a Richard Thompson interview this spring, discussing the shelved Rafferty-produced 1980 sessions prior to the. [34] According to Michael Gray, Rafferty's personal manager at the height of his success, he turned down many opportunities to work with other artists:[38] " he retained a healthy scepticism not just about the music industry but about society, money and politics in general. In the same interview, he said that the entire record had been made for approximately 200,000, with half spent on travel, the recording system costing 75,000, and the website and marketing adding 25,000. There is a mid-Atlantic blandness lurking behind the rococo roots veneer. Though they had drifted apart by 1968, Burton visited in the studio while he was recording Tomorrow Never Knows. Breaks Down His Killer White House Correspondents Dinner Set, Bernie Sanders: Many GOP Leaders 'Don't Even Believe in Democracy'. Rafferty married his fellow Scot, hairdresser Carla Ventilla, in 1970, and here he pays tribute to how she stuck by him through thick and thin. Cherishing the Gerry Rafferty album "City to City" Baker Street singer Gerry Rafferty dies at age of 63 - BBC News It goes through a little kind of journey, it takes you through a journey and so, in some sense, its a very complete composition, which is unusual for popular music at that time. Jerry Gilbert, Rafferty recorded a new version of his Humblebums song "Her Father Didn't Like Me Anyway" on the album Over My Head (1994). At first it was part of the melody, and Rafferty reckoned hed sing it. Rafferty was born on 16 April 1947 into a working-class family of Irish Catholic origin in Underwood Lane in Paisley,[1] a son and grandson of coal miners. Gerry Rafferty at home. - YouTube Maybe some new project would suddenly happen, but I knew he'd crossed the line as far as the record business went. Baker Street Singer Gerry Rafferty Dead At 63 - Rolling Stone What is it going to take?, Jerry says, Jon, Ill tell you what well do: 3, 2, 1., He says, 3% on the first album, 2% on the second album and 1% on the third., I went, Oh, cmon, there must be another way., So that was the deal. He turned that down too. Rafferty continues to ponder and juxtapose the differences between urban and pastoral life, and many of his new songs (especially, and most eloquently, Whatevers Written in Your Heart) still seem attempts to bridge the communication chasm between a man and a woman. He may be sitting on top of the world as he gives interviews in his. Im going to steal something from you., Now, Id always said to my staff, You must never involve yourself in a relationship with any of my artists or else Ill be forced to fire you. Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs and Gerry Rafferty. City to City - HeraldScotland [59], Rafferty enjoyed alcohol from a young age,[20][37][42][60] and early songs, such as "One Drink Down", "Baker Street", and "Night Owl", freely mention the subject. Rafferty grew up in a council house on the town's Glenburn estate and attended St. Mirin's Academy. Rafferty and Fuschini rented a large home together in Upton, near Poole. [20], In 1980, Rafferty and Murphy produced a record for Richard and Linda Thompson; though never released, it eventually evolved into their album Shoot Out the Lights. The album City to City went to No. [citation needed], By the end of the 1990s, new technology enabled Rafferty to distance himself even further from the conventional approach of the music industry and work entirely on his own terms. I said, If you go on David Frost, Im finished. The track appeared on Dickson's albums Don't Think Twice It's All Right (1992) and The Barbara Dickson Collection (2006). Gerald Rafferty (16 April 1947 4 January 2011) was a Scottish singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. Ravenscroft considered his contribution to Baker Street to be substantial enough to warrant a songwriting credit or a percentage of publishing money. Breaks Down His Killer White House Correspondents Dinner Set Bath [12] Yet although the album was a critical success, it did not enjoy commercial success. [citation needed], Other artists continue to be inspired by Rafferty's work. I never heard before until I just now listened, but I am sure if I had actually written the song back in the day I would have retained my copyright as I always did and would have been aware of it. And he also seems to have overcome what he admits was a fondness for one drink too many (as we talked, he royed with a glass of water). Gerry Rafferty: Folk Roots Interview (1988) - Redstone Tech Its a topic thats since been remaindered to the small music forums at the dusty edges of the Internet. The group was beset by legal wranglings, but had a huge hit with "Stuck in the Middle with You", which earned critical acclaim as well as commercial success: a 1975 article in Sounds described it as "a sort of cross between white label Beatles and punk Dylan yet with a unique Celtic flavour that has marked all their work". Enter your email address in the field below and we'll send you a password to read all free articles on RBP. [5], In his next album, Sleepwalking (1982), Rafferty took a very different approach to his work. ZigZag, His girlfriend Enzina Fuschini said she "felt that he was under some sort of evil spell. Best Gerry Rafferty Songs: 10 Greats From Scotland's Beloved - Dig! I thought, well, if a little bit of that rubs off on us, perhaps we'll get in the charts as well, but actually, in practice, it was kind of a claustrophobic experience.
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