Sometimes the radio comes through.

So here I sit, feeling sorry for myself, when my station plays a song I haven’t heard for many years. I may not believe in God, but there are uncanny coincidences in our lives. Some of those pick you up and shake you by the shoulders at just the right time. When I went out to find the lyrics on the web to post to remind myself of this, seredipity struck again and I found Folkcorp’s Streets of London page.

Ralph began writing his most famous song in Paris in 1965. He was working with a couple of friends who were also fellow buskers around the Latin quarter and at the same time improving his guitar technique with a very fine American guitarist called Gary Peterson. Gary was both an accomplished Jazz musician and had also studied under the greatest living ragtime guitarist Rev. Gary Davis. One day Ralph decided to play a couple of instrumental pieces to his friend and it was Gary who suggested Ralph wrote some lyrics to these “pretty tunes”. The first of these was what became Nanna’s Song, the second became Streets of London. Technically these were Ralph’s third and fourth songs, his first being a song about the Klan (now lost) and the second being Sleepy Time Blues. Nanna’s Song found it’s way on to Ralph’s first album, recorded in 1967 and released the following year.

Streets of London, although first registered in 1968 had to wait until 1969 to appear on the famous Spiral Staircase album. The reasons were several and complex, the tune began as a ragtime type melody with syncopated bass but Ralph was not happy with this as the tune that is revealed under the cords is much too sweetly melancholic to sustain the jauntiness of ragtime and he began to play it slower. Ralph had been looking for a medium to write a song about his fellow street people in Paris and indeed it’s first title was Streets of Paris. On reflection Ralph thought it unfair to criticise the poverty level of the people who lives on the edge of a foreign capital and it was a fairly easy transposition to that of what he regards as his home city of London.

After returning to England he took up residence in Cornwall where he played alongside Wizz Jones and Pete Stanley and also resident in that area was a folk singer called John the Fish. Ralph was happily playing rags, blues, folk songs and some of his own compositions and offered the song Streets of London to John the Fish who declined it as being too sad!!

Ralph took this to his heart and did not play the song again for some time and also felt it was not suitable for the generally up feel for his first album Eight Frames a Second.

One night sat in a pub in the west end of London, Ralph was in deep and sometimes hilarious conversation with cockney singer and guitarist Derek Brimstone and in the time honoured manner of Hollywood films scribbled down the words on a pub napkin with the chord boxes drawn over the top and handed it to Derek who said he’d give it a try. At the time there were only three verses to the song and Ralph was not yet playing it on stage. Approximately six months past until Derek and Ralph met again and Derek revealed that the song was taking the club scene by storm and strongly recommended that Ralph begin performing it himself Ralph was already doing very well at the time but decided to write that last verse and perform the song himself Ralph recalls the first time he played it on stage because the reaction was one of the strongest that he’d ever had.

There was a brief pause when he finished which seemed to last five minutes and then sustained applause which seemed to last even longer.

In spite of all this Ralph still resisted recording the song and it was Gus Dudgeon (Ralph’s producer) that pleaded with him to put it on his next album. So whilst all the other musicians went out for a celebration drink for finishing the album Ralph did one take of Streets of London on his own for Gus and the rest as they say is history.

Finally this song was never intended to be an anthem for homeless people, it was a song for Ralph’s great friend and fellow Paris busker Martin “Tubs” Sole who in spite of eventually overcoming a serious heroin addiction was tragically killed in a caravan fire. The song was meant to lift the spirits of his lonely and often alienated friend and went on to become the most celebrated anthem of a more compassionate age.

If you would like to know more there is a whole chapter on Streets of London in Chris Hockenhull’s biography, which, unsurprisingly is called Streets of London.

Reality checks are good for the soul.