Gerry Rafferty
Gerald Rafferty was a Scottish singer-songwriter. He was a founding member of Stealers Wheel, whose biggest hit was "Stuck in the Middle with You" in 1973. His solo hits in the late 1970s included "Baker Street", "Right Down the Line" and "Night Owl".
Rafferty was born into a working-class family in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland. His mother taught him both Irish and Scottish folk songs when he was a boy; later, he was influenced by the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. He joined the folk-pop group the Humblebums in 1969. After they disbanded in 1971, he recorded his first solo album, Can I Have My Money Back? Rafferty and Joe Egan formed the group Stealers Wheel in 1972. In 1978, he recorded his second solo album, City to City. A heavy drinker for much of his life, Rafferty died from liver failure in 2011.
Early years
Rafferty was born in 1947 into a working-class family of Irish Catholic origin in Underwood Lane in Paisley, a son and grandson of coal miners. His parents were Joseph Rafferty and Mary Skeffington, and he had two brothers, of which he was the middle sibling.Rafferty grew up in a council house in the town's Ferguslie Park, in Underwood Lane, and was educated at St Mirin's Academy. His Irish-born father, an alcoholic, was a miner and lorry driver who died when Rafferty was 16. Rafferty learned both Irish and Scottish folk songs as a boy. He recalled: "My father was Irish, so growing up in Paisley I was hearing all these songs when I was two or three. Songs like 'She Moves Through the Fair', which my mother sings beautifully. And a whole suite of Irish traditional songs and Scots traditional songs". Heavily influenced by folk music and the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, Rafferty started to write his own material.
Musical career
Rafferty left St Mirin's Academy in 1963. He then worked in a butcher's shop, as a civil service clerk, and in a shoe shop. However, he explained in an interview, "But there was never anything else for me but music. I never intended making a career out of any of the jobs I did." 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. In the mid 1960s Rafferty earned money, for a time, busking on the London Underground. In 1966, Rafferty and Egan were members of the band the Fifth Column. The group released the single "Benjamin Day"/"There's Nobody Here", but it was not a commercial success.The Humblebums and Stealers Wheel
In 1969, Rafferty became the third member of a folk-pop group, the Humblebums, along with comedian Billy Connolly and Tam Harvey. Harvey left shortly afterwards, and Rafferty and Connolly continued as a duo, recording two more albums for Transatlantic Records. A 1970 appearance at the Royal Festival Hall, supporting Fotheringay with Nick Drake, earned a positive review from critic Karl Dallas, who noted that all three acts showed "promise rather than fulfilment", and observed that "Gerry Rafferty's songs have the sweet tenderness of Paul McCartney in his 'Yesterday' mood". In his own stand-up shows, Connolly has often recalled this period, telling how Rafferty made him laugh and describing the crazy things they did while on tour. Once Rafferty decided to look in the Berlin telephone directory to see if any Hitlers were listed.After the duo separated in 1971, Transatlantic owner Nathan Joseph signed Rafferty as a solo performer. Rafferty recorded his first solo album, Can I Have My Money Back?, with Hugh Murphy, a staff producer working for the label. Billboard praised the album as "high-grade folk-rock", describing it as Rafferty's "finest work" to date: "His tunes are rich and memorable with an undeniable charm that will definitely see him into the album and very possibly singles charts soon". Yet although the album was a critical success, it did not enjoy commercial success. According to Rafferty's daughter Martha, it was around this time that her father discovered, by chance, Colin Wilson's classic book The Outsider, about alienation and creativity, which became a huge influence both on his songwriting and his outlook on the world: "The ideas and references contained in that one book were to sustain and inspire him for the rest of his life." Rafferty later confirmed that alienation was the "persistent theme" of his songs; "To Each and Everyone", from Can I Have My Money Back?, was an early example.
In 1972, having gained some airplay from his Signpost recording "Make You, Break You", Rafferty joined Egan to form Stealers Wheel and recorded three albums with the American songwriters and producers Leiber & Stoller. 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". Twenty years later, the song was used prominently in the 1992 movie Reservoir Dogs; Rafferty refused to grant permission for its re-release. Stealers Wheel also produced the lesser top 50 hits "Everyone's Agreed That Everything Will Turn Out Fine" followed by "Star", and there were further suggestions of Rafferty's growing alienation in tracks such as "Outside Looking In" and "Who Cares". The duo disbanded in 1975.
''City to City'' and ''Night Owl''
Legal issues after the break-up of Stealers Wheel meant that, for three years, Rafferty was unable to release any material. After the disputes were resolved in 1978, he recorded his second solo album, City to City, with producer Hugh Murphy, which included the song with which he remains most identified, "Baker Street". According to Murphy, interviewed by Billboard in 1993, he and Rafferty had to beg the record label, United Artists, to release "Baker Street" as a single: "They actually said it was too good for the public." The single reached #3 in the UK and #2 in the US.The album City to City sold over 5.5 million copies, toppling the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack from the top of the Billboard 200 album chart in the US on 8 July 1978. Rafferty considered this his first proper taste of success, as he told Melody Maker the following year: "...all the records I've ever done before have been flops. Stealers Wheel was a flop. 'Can I Have My Money Back?' was a flop. The Humblebums were a flop... My life doesn't stand or fall by the amount of people who buy my records."
"Baker Street" features a saxophone riff played by Raphael Ravenscroft, although the origins of the solo have been disputed. As the singer recalled in a 1988 interview with Colin Irwin:
In a 2006 interview with The Times, Ravenscroft said he was presented with a song that contained "several gaps":
In his interview with Colin Irwin, Rafferty disputed this and said that Ravenscroft had been his second choice to play the saxophone solo, after Pete Zorn, who was unavailable: "The only confusion at the time that I didn't enjoy too much was the fact that a lot of people believed that the line was written by Raphael Ravenscroft, the sax player, but it was my line. I sang it to him." When a remastered version of City to City was released in 2011, it included the original, electric guitar 'demo' version of the song as a bonus track, confirming Rafferty's authorship of the riff. In the liner notes to the album, Rafferty's long-time friend and collaborator Rab Noakes commented:
"Baker Street" remains a mainstay of soft-rock radio airplay and, in October 2010, it was recognised by the BMI for surpassing 5 million plays worldwide. "Stuck in the Middle With You" has received over 4 million plays worldwide, and "Right Down The Line" has had over 3 million plays. In a 2003 interview with The Sun , Rafferty commented on how profitable his biggest song had been: "Baker Street still makes me about £80,000 a year. It's been a huge earner for me. I must admit, I could live off that song alone." Rafferty loathed the 1992 dance music cover version of "Baker Street" by Undercover, describing it as "dreadful, totally banal–it's a sad sign of the times". However it earned him another £1.5 million, selling around three million copies in Europe and America. He never let "Baker Street" be used for advertising, despite lucrative offers.
"Right Down the Line" was the second single from City to City. The song made No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and No. 1 on the Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks charts in the US. It remained at the top of the adult contemporary chart for four non-consecutive weeks. The third single from the album, "Home and Dry", reached No. 28 in the US Top 40 in early 1979.
The lyrics of "Baker Street" reflected Rafferty's disenchantment with certain elements of the music industry. This was elaborated on by music journalist Paul Gambaccini for BBC World News:.
Rafferty's next album, Night Owl, also did well. Guitarist Richard Thompson performed on the track "Take The Money and Run", and the title track was a UK No. 5 hit in 1979. "Days Gone Down" reached No. 17 in the US. The follow-up single "Get It Right Next Time" made the UK and US Top 40.
''Snakes and Ladders'', ''Sleepwalking'' and ''North and South''
Subsequent albums, such as Snakes and Ladders, Sleepwalking, and North and South, fared less well, perhaps due partly to Rafferty's longstanding reluctance to perform live, with which he felt uncomfortable.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.
In his next album, Sleepwalking, Rafferty took a very different approach to his work. Christopher Neil replaced Hugh Murphy, Rafferty's usual producer, introducing synthesisers and drum machines that give the album a harder, less acoustic sound, and apparently eschewing the richly detailed arrangements notable on Rafferty's three previous records. According to Murphy, interviewed a decade later: "Gerry had made three albums on the trot and I think he was pretty jaded at that time and feeling the pressure and he just thought, 'Well, I'll try another tack,' which is understandable". Instead of a cover painting and hand-lettering by John Patrick Byrne, who had illustrated every previous Rafferty and Stealers Wheel album, Sleepwalking featured a simple, stark photograph of an empty road stretching to the sky. There was change too in the songs. The deeply introspective lyrics of Sleepwalking suggest Rafferty found success far from glamorous: tracks like "Standing at the Gates", "Change of Heart", and "The Right Moment" suggest the singer was exhausted, burnt-out, and desperately seeking a new direction – and continued his long-running theme of alienation. Liner notes for the compilation album Right Down the Line 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".
Rafferty sang the Mark Knopfler-penned song "The Way It Always Starts" on the soundtrack of the film Local Hero. Also in 1983, Rafferty announced his intention to take a break and devote more time to his family: "It dawned on me that since Baker Street I had been touring the world, travelling everywhere and seeing nowhere. Whatever I do in the future, it's at my own pace, on my own terms."
Based at 16th-century Tye Farm in Hartfield, near the Kent-Sussex border, Rafferty installed electric gates to protect his privacy, built a recording studio, and worked largely by himself or with Murphy. In 1987, Rafferty and Murphy co-produced The Proclaimers first UK hit single "Letter from America".
According to his former wife Carla, who discouraged visitors: "He was just stalling for time. Maybe some new project would suddenly happen, but I knew he'd crossed the line as far as the record business went." His next album, North and South, was released in 1988. 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. Reviews of the album were mixed. In The Times, critic David Sinclair was particularly scathing: "On North and South, it sounds as if he has thumbed a lift up the road to a mock-Texan bar somewhere in his native Scotland. There is a mid-Atlantic blandness lurking behind the rococo roots veneer."
In the early 1990s, Rafferty recorded a cover version of the Bob Dylan song "The Times They Are a-Changin'" with Barbara Dickson, who had contributed backing vocals to both City to City and Night Owl. The track appeared on Dickson's albums Don't Think Twice It's All Right and The Barbara Dickson Collection.