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MUSICAL EXPRESS NME November 11th, 1972
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RALPH, ALBERT & SYDNEY NME It’s a myth. OK, so Cat Stevens prowls with a band, Taylor uses one frequently, and Stills has Manassas. But Ralph McTell continues to stride forward. Probably a hundred thousand people will pay to see McTell this year. Because there is still a place for intelligent, substantial music. The only problem is that with the market geared to chart success, McTell’s popularity goes unmeasured. He doesn’t see his type of performer disappearing: only changing their approach. “If they do disappear,” he muses, “it’ll be their own fault – because too many of them have been too introverted. “But I think the tack will change. Singer-songwriters will be less convoluted and more straightforward – with a straight-from-the-shoulder kind of approach. There will always be room for that.” McTell himself actually has serious misgivings about getting up on stage and performing on his own. He says, “I always want to be able to do more, and you can’t really do that with one guitar.” He has another problem: “I wish I could play guitar standing up. I used to. I think there’s a great difference between a guy who sits on a stool and a guy who stands up. I mean, Dylan was a really fine performer when he was solo, and part of it was the way he used to stand – like leaning to one side and beating hell out of the old box.” Anyway, in order give more, McTell is now considering augmenting himself with a couple of musicians, mainly to improve his own work. “You can do so much on your own,” he remarks, “and then you begin to wonder how you’re going to do the next album. Will the stimulus be there? I think another couple of musicians would open that out for me. Or at least stop me worrying about it. I could just do a fun album – still with good songs.” On stage you could say McTell is now offering less to an audience, since he’s stopped using piano and harmonium. The reason, he says, is because he’s not good enough a player, and his pedal box can’t take the strain. “I’m trying to make up for it by playing the guitar slightly differently…I’ve changed my approach to that in the last year. “Tom Paxton once said he doesn’t stop for tuning…why the hell start messing around with tuning when you’ve got an atmosphere going? Just get on and play it, and let the songs do the rest. So I’d really like to get that together.” A fair comment on the exclusion of other instruments from his act would be he’s more critical of himself. And giving only what he feels he’s capable of doing well. “There’s more pressure on me because of the success I’ve had,” he says. “Inevitably you must become more critical. I think I’ve always been my own worst critic. I know when I’ve played badly, even if somebody says, ‘ooh, it was great tonight’. I’ve got to satisfy myself. “Before it was alright, because I was just an average guitar player, and a very average singer – I haven’t got much of a voice at all. So I have to use what I’ve got, and get the most out of it: exploit it to the best. So I do worry, especially now when I’m doing gigs.” The realistic view is that McTell is presenting himself in a simpler way. This is reflected on his album “Not Till Tomorrow”, where the songs have basic group arrangements instead of the lush strings and brass predominant on “You Well-Meaning”. The set could have more appeal to his concert audiences, and maybe having a greater selling potential because it is more representative of him. Going deeper into the music, past the less-involved arrangements, there’s the indication that McTell’s writing itself is becoming less complicated. His songs on the new set are simpler, he says. But it’s not contrived simplicity he feels he’s shown in the past. The motivations and ideas for themes and subject are less involved. On this album, he says, he’s become more detached about the songs. “Before, I used to write out the words to a song and balance it so it was all right. Then I’d go through it again and cross out words and re-phrase things, and swap lines about. Then I’d put it away and re-write it later. “Like ‘Factory Girl’ took a hell of a long time – just simple little words, but they had to be the right ones. “This one I tended to go…well, it started with ‘First And Last Man’ because that was a spontaneous thing. I wrote all the song out and it didn’t rhyme at all – it was going to be a poem. I was never going to sing to it. “Then I was playing and I started singing the words and they fitted. So I did that, and made it a song. Except it didn’t all rhyme – there were a couple of verses that didn’t. In the past I’ve always tied myself religiously to a rhyming scheme and a metre scheme, and a verse-chorus type of thing. This time I didn’t.” The set suggests to me that McTell is re-examining his career; going into blues again, and also picking up on one of the inevitable themes in “When I Was A Cowboy”, that of moral codes. “Well the last album was definitely a re-examination,” he agrees, “And this one is too. Really they show that I probably haven’t adjusted to what’s happening to me. I don’t accept it that easily. People say,” and he smiles, “‘well you’re a big star’. That’s just a joke. I can’t feel that way.”
NME In an entertainment age of pyrotechnics, mountains of amplification and overt stage flash, people perhaps may be excused for presuming the Lone Singer-Guitarist is now relegated to the folk clubs, but they’ve forgotten about Ralph McTell. Sure, you remember Ralph. Your memory just needed a little prodding, right? He’s the denim clad, clean shaven dude who strolls onto the concert stage, picks up an acoustic guitar and proceeds to tell the audience about Michael the lunatic, a day trip to Brighton in the early 1900s, or about what he and his brother got up to during childhood. After about an hour and a half, like his set at the Stockton Globe Theatre last Tuesday, you feel as though you’ve been sitting having a quiet drink with your mate in the local – such is his degree of communication. That’s McTell’s forte, he can relate to his audience. But for him to do just that is theoretically difficult, because he relies only on his guitar, vocals and the warmth he can project, and never on the wriggle of his rump or spot lighting. Yet, I have never once seen him present a bad show or fail to create what is generally known as an intimate atmosphere. His vocals are relaxed and his delivery good as he works his way through some rather excellent songs, most notably “Michael in the Garden”, “Barges”, “The Maginot Waltz” and “Streets of London”. Naturally, the form of these songs depends largely on his guitar expertise, which has seemingly improved recently to become extraordinarily complex. But the important aspect of Ralph’s performance is that he paces his act well. There is, predictably, a certain amount of his earlier material, but the majority of his set comes from his more recent recordings, including a preview of his next album with “Grande Affaire”. And of course, to lift the atmosphere he puts in a couple
of good ol’ rag time numbers, which he has usually pinched from Blind Blake. NME Tact
is obviously not a quality bestowed upon too many of the gentlemen who work at
the BBC Television Centre, especially when they encounter something which is,
for them, considerably far from the usual. Ralph
McTell had taken his appearance on TOTPs quite seriously by exchanging his usual
blue denim clothing for a pair of Carnaby Street trousers (the closest he has
yet come to compromising with the trends of the Industry) only to be requested
by someone from Auntie to change into his
costume for the full dress rehearsal. To
add insult to stupidity, a Beeb executive – who, Ralph claims, had apparently
consumed more alcohol than was good for him – turned round and asked our young
minstrel just how it felt to be
making a come-back! Obviously
the guy was unaware that McTell has been involved in music for the last ten
years, during which time he has built up a devoutly loyal audience who enable
him to sell-out most venues he plays, including the 6,000 seater Royal Albert
Hall, as well as guaranteeing respectable album sales. It’s
just that he’s never had a hit record. But
even the song “Streets of London”, which has caused his name to stick out of
the glittering array of personalities in the charts like an erection at a
Eunuch’s Ball, is something like eight years old. To
a certain extent it was one of the two cuts on McTell’s second album,
“Spiral Staircase”, released in 1969, which established the basis of his
present reputation, the other being the title track. Even
though McTell says “Streets” is listed in Capital Radio’s Top 100 Hit
Singles, it has in fact never been released in 45 versions by him previously in
the country, due to contractual restrictions. It
was, however, released in Holland where it reached number four in their charts,
and there have been innumerable cover versions in Norway, Germany, Sweden,
Denmark, France, Italy, Australia, Canada and America. Face
it, anybody who hasn’t heard the song before must have been living like an
Ostrich, and its familiarity has obviously contributed to the current success
McTell’s single is enjoying. But
will stardom and recognition by the masses change the normally good-natured
McTell? A man of such humility that
he’s never even broken wind in mixed company. I
don’t think so. “I’d
like to thank Dave Cash and Noel Edmonds,” says McTell early in the interview,
“who have never stopped playing “Streets of London” since it originally
came out on album. Its success is largely due to them. “I
suppose,” he adds modestly, “it has benefited from eight years of promotion,
but this really is the best version without a doubt. “If,
however, it had been released as a single when it was first recorded – and
it’d been a success – I doubt if I could have dealt with the following-on
situation. “That
I’m an overnight sensation in eight years is a gas, because I don’t need it.
If I never have another hit it doesn’t matter to me, it can’t hurt
me, because my thing is already set. I’ve
got my audience, my gigs, my tours . . . and my records do sell.” Yet
“Streets”, although an important facet of McTell’s career, has also proved
to be something of a handicap in the past, causing him (on occasion) to dispense
with it for his stage act. “I
only got fed up with the song and went through a period where I didn’t want to
do it because I felt people were just coming for that one.” Bit
of an albatross, eh? “Right
– and it isn’t.” Obviously
not. “When
I finished my set on the last tour,” he explains, “I came out and said,
‘Right, is there anything you want to hear?’ and some nights there were as
many as a dozen different titles that I hadn’t sung in the set being shouted
out by the audience. “Now,”
he adds, “it’s a question of introducing the new audience I’ve got to my
other material.” But
another aspect of the song which has constantly been misconstrued is its
meaning. The Capital Radio DJs
proclaim it to be a social comment, almost every day – when it was originally
intended to encourage one of McTell’s friends, being written at a time when
McTell and this guy were busking in Paris.
“There’s only one stage down from there,” he comments, “and that
was begging.” His friend felt
continually depressed, so McTell’s reaction was to ask how he could be in such
a state when they’d witnessed the poverty of the Parisian dead-beats. On
returning to London Ralph wrote the song, but based the lyrics around the London
outcasts. “The
first verse in the song is about Surry Street Market in Croydon where I used to
work as a kid, doing little bits and pieces for a couple of bob a day.
And there was this old fellow who used to come through . . . picking up
orange wrappers and potatoes and things that had slipped off the carts. “Then
I remembered the old girl with the carrier bags and the all-night café
situation, like Mick’s in Fleet Street. “The
last verse wasn’t really about a Seaman’s Mission, but a working men’s
hostel that used to be very near where I lived where they put old labourers who
had no family. “When
I first finished the song I offered it to someone who was working gigs and he
said, ‘Oh, I can’t do it. It’s
too sad.’ “It’s
been construed as a social conscience song, but I don’t in fact believe it is.
That certainly wasn’t my motivation for writing it.” Mistaking
the song for Social Comment is quite understandable though, because on
McTell’s following album to “Spiral Staircase” (“My Side of Your
Window”) some of the songs were very loaded with Social Awareness such as
“Michael In The Garden”, “Factory Girl” and “Clown”. “I’m
sure,” he says, “that the success of “Streets of London” dictated songs
like that. It’s no coincidence
that they were all on the same album.” And
describing that as a “flirtation” he decided to move on to broader subjects
basically because he was being saddled with an image he didn’t care to have.
“I hated being called a folk singer,” he says with some distaste for
the term, “I was always appearing on the folk page in music papers, but folk
songs tend to be social, about some pit disaster or whatever. “As
I got older I listened to more things. I
used to listen to the Woody Guthrie people a lot, and the country-blues
performers. I then realised that
I’d got a much broader base than I’d previously been confining myself to.” The
result was material on a succession of albums which covered a much greater scope
of subjects, eventually leading up to what Ralph describes as a “natural
break” with his last album “Easy”. “There
were songs on it which I think could have had really good arrangements,” he
continues, “which would have made them real middle of the road things.
Some could have become standards.” Even
the album he has just completed – which will be released sometime in January
once one side has been re-cut to include his current version of “Streets”
– he calls “mainstream”. “I’m
never going to be a rocker – I’m too old now at 30, and I wouldn’t want to
shake my ass around and wear silly clothes.” But
doesn’t he resent “Streets” being the track to clean up when other songs
he has recently laid on album – such as “When
I Was A Cowboy”, “Maginot Waltz” or “Barges” – are more
representative of his present artistic aims? “The
thing is that this song has really opened the gate for me.
Now I’ve become known to a lot of people who didn’t know me
before.” But
what quality does McTell have that has enabled him to continue for ten years
with a substantial following, especially when the fashions of the Biz have run
against the acoustic guitarist/singer? “Maybe
it’s because I never tried to achieve anything.
I only tried to be good at what I was doing.
I didn’t try to be on Top Of The Pops, and I didn’t try to fill the
Albert Hall, but I really don’t know why I should have survived.” NME Ralph McTell was famous, without being a smash, for
perhaps 10 years. There can scarcely be an institution of further
education in this country which has not benefited from a seminar on
Home-Spun Philosophy by Professor McTell.
The guy was one of those ever-dependable folkies on the
Transatlantic label whose albums sold mainly to students and other people
living in bedsits. If Ralph came from California and was a buddy of Neil
Young, he’d have had a massive unchallenged reputation long ago.
There’d be gossip in “Random Notes” and import albums would change hands at vastly
inflated prices. As it is,
he’s local, and taken for granted. So a lot of people were pleased when Ralph scored
with “Streets of London”.
It’s a charming song with a wistful melody, even if the
underlying sentiment is a little trite. Sure, it’s true there are always people worse off
than you are. But it is also
true there are always people better off.
And there’s the rub. Still, the portraits of dossers are sketched with a
care and sympathy that are increasingly rare qualities in rock
songwriters, and McTell’s authoritative vocals must do at least as much
to create an amiable mood as his lyrics. The mood on most of the cuts here is very agreeable
and reassuring. Perhaps the people who bought the single had been
waiting for years for the song to be taken off an album.
So a follow-up may not do so well. But if one’s wanted, then a couple of tracks on
side two – “Pity The Boy”
and “Interest On The Loan”,
seem likely contenders. The first is about the perils of getting married for
a variety of reasons. The
second, as the title suggests, is about debts.
Banal, everyday subjects, you might think, a far cry from the grand
themes tackled by more fashionable singer-songwriters. It’s surely a pleasant change, though, to hear
songs written with honesty and accuracy about ordinary people. “Streets of London” inevitably stands out from the rest of the material. When you’ve written a song as good as that, an encore is bound to be tricky.
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