Music Arcades: Ralph McTell: Streets of London

Back in Sheffield at the start of this century there was a guy who promoted a lot folk and alt.country gigs for the older music fan — Bob Harris listeners, essentially, plus me sometimes. I think he called himself Jewel Promotions, and his day job — the one that made him the money he lost by promoting gigs — was running a jewellery shop. But I could have that wrong: Google can't find anything to back me up.

Anyway, when Laura Cantrell or the Cowboy Junkies were in the UK, Jewel Promotions got them to play in Sheffield, and I was very grateful for that. More often it was people like Rodney Crowell and that bloke in The Byrds that wasn't as famous as the other ones; yep, Chris Hillman, that's the one.

I'm sneaking up slowly on the point behind all this, Ralph McTell. I think Ralph played Sheffield a couple of times early in the 2000s. I didn't go. But I remember the blurb on the Jewel Promotions flyers that were strewn all round the posh bit of Sheffield, where I lived: "There's more to Ralph McTell than Streets of London". Which, when you think about it, is a pretty fatuous statement of the obvious. But quite a good advertising tagline nevertheless (or, perhaps, good because it's fatuous).

I'm sure that line was in my head and influenced by decision to buy this CD in HMV in January 2005. Other influences were that I had HMV gift vouchers, there was bugger all else to buy in there, and it was dead cheap.

As with Nuggets, I copied the album onto iTunes and my iPod to ensure that I would listen to it. But it didn't work: according to iTunes only about three of the songs had been listened to more than twice. It didn't help that my original iPod died shortly after that, to be a replaced by a Shuffle model that could only hold 100 songs.

Is this the best of Ralph McTell? Wikipedia would surely have a "citation needed" next to that claim. The fact that all the songs were published between 1968 and 1970 makes me suspicious, for surely no one does all their best work in just three years and then the rest of their career is crap. Well, OK, apart from Simple Minds. So this is probably just a cheapo licensing cash-in like The Best of Marianne Faithfull.

But it's kind of interesting nevertheless, because it seems to show a singer trying on different trends and tropes to see if one of them will fit and help him forge his own identity. So you get one song that sounds a little Syd Barrett, another that's vaguely early Tyrannosaurus Rex, one that could have come off Tim Buckley's Goodbye and Hello if it had a bolder, jazzier arrangment. And elsewhere, Ralph sticks to folk-blues roots like Wizz Jones. My favourite, and not just for its obvious sentimental relevance to me at the moment, is Daddy's Here. But none of that mattered, for destiny decreed that Ralph's public identity would be manacled to Streets of London — even though there's more to him than that.