RALPH, ALBERT & SYDNEY
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Ralph McTell
Red Sky
Reviewed: January 2001
Genre: Folk
Label: LEOLA MUSIC
Release Date: 23-Oct-2000
For a while it looked as though Ralph McTell had dried up or buggered off to write TV themes for Billy Connolly. Then, in 1999, after a four-year silence came Travelling Man, a stately summary of his nervy live sets followed by this, an album far more substantial than could have been expected. At 75 minutes there are still a few horrors (on Lost Boys it's like listening to an old man shaking his head), but there's also plenty of the fine, observational balladry for which he made his name, the best being Easter Lilies, Bicker & Rue, and Fin, the latter a grand celebration of '60s Francophilia ("All my roads were boulevards"). The result is McTell's best record for 25 years.
Reviewed by Rob Beattie
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Ralph McTell
Spiral Staircase
Reviewed: December 1996
Genre: Folk
Label: WOODEN HILL
Release Date: 16-Sep-1996
Spiral Staircase was Ralph McTell's second album for Transatlantic Records. Released in early 1969, it signalled the arrival of a distinctive British songwriter with a penchant for the ragtime guitar of Blind Boy Fuller, the Carolina blues of such musicians as Buddy Moss (My Baby Keeps Staying Out All Night Long) and the jug band sound of the '20s (Spiral Staircase). The album also introduced the world to a song called Streets Of London. Six years later it would become the kind of hit single that, through public demand and performance, transmutes from liberal anthem to artistic millstone. Here, though, it fits the mood of the original album just fine (unlike the distracting and sentimental string arrangements).
Reviewed by John Crosby
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Ralph McTell
Spiral Staircase
Reviewed: April 1998
Genre: Folk
Label: SNAPPER
Release Date: 16-Sep-1997
Subtitled "Classic Songs", this double CD set compiles McTell's first three Transatlantic albums, released between 1968 and '69, substituting where appropriate the re-recorded versions from his label swansong, 1970's Revisited compilation. Perhaps the most English of singer-songwriters to emerge from the period's folk club boom, McTell's early music combines a fascination with jug and ragtime guitar tunes with a developing style in wistful, reflective ballads and liberal protest songs like his signature Streets Of London. While the sheer earnestness of Michael In The Garden or Father Forgive Them now grates, McTell's flair for understated melody and the warmth of Gus Dudgeon's string arrangements shine through on love songs like Nana's Song and Terminus. McTell's development is represented by Factory Girl and Clown but it's his most personal work that has best endured.
Reviewed by Mark Cooper
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Ralph McTell
The Definitive Transatlantic Collection
Reviewed: February 1998
Genre: Folk
Release Date: 30-Nov-1997
Doomed to labour forever under the singalong shadow of The Streets Of London, McTell's other work has often been undeservedly consigned to a sort of busker's bin of cosy English contemporary folk. Unfair that, as even a cursory listen to this compilation demonstrates, whether it's the ragtime, goodtimes of Spiral Staircase, the laconic stuff-youness of Last Train & Ride, or the near-surrealism - seriously - of The Fairground. It all gets a bit soppy around Kew Gardens and Silver Beech & Weeping Willow, but the vignettes are among his best - the circus clown and his solitary caravan, a factory girl running to work - and Michael In The Garden is sensational; rarely has mental illness had such an emotional, yet no-nonsense champion.
Reviewed by Rob Beattie
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Ralph McTell
Travelling Man: The Journey The Songs: 2cd
Reviewed: July 1999
Genre: Folk
Release Date: 03-May-1999
Recorded last December at the Purcell Room on London's South Bank, this is McTell as he's appeared live down the years: solo with guitar, intricately picking acoustic riffs first borrowed from blues and ragtime, adapted and enhanced to serve a songwriting canon that extends beyond the infamous Streets Of London (interestingly, the first track uof these two CDs, as if to get it out of the way). At its best, his voice was only ever a mildly athletic thing, but while the passing years have restricted its range a touch - notably on Gypsy (mercifully divested of the original's whistles and claps) - it still does the trick on a selection of personal classics: Barges, Another Rain Has Fallen, Nanna's Song, Let Me Down Easy and Terminus. Of the newer songs, Jesus Wept is a powerful Dylanesque meditation, while Peppers & Tomatoes is this decade's Red & Gold: a farmer's life, torn apart by war. And few English songwriters can pull off anything as daring as the climactic, Herman Hesse-inspired The Ferryman.
Reviewed by Rob Beattie
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Ralph McTell
Easy
Reviewed: March 2000
Genre: Folk
Release Date: 24-Jan-2000
Originally released in 1974 - the same year that his Streets Of London became a UK Number 2 hit - this was Ralph McTell's first chart album. Almost impossible to find for years, it deserves its place near the top of the McTell table thanks to a string of splendid songs: the Great War ballad Maginot Waltz, the soft-centred Sweet Mystery, along with Summer Lightning and Let Me Down Easy, a brace of love songs as good as any McTell's written. Stylistically predictable (even the presence of Danny Thompson can't turn him into John Martyn), it's nevertheless a quality album and more than 25 years on, Run Johnny Run, the escaped convict song, still contains a lyric and a half.
Reviewed by Rob Beattie
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Ralph Mctell
Sand In Your Shoes
Q Magazine
Though Ralph McTell's work can vary between wonderful and woeful, he doesn't always receive due credit for the enduring quality of his best writing and his new songs are always to be looked forward to. As often with Ralph McTell's work, there are causes and concerns by the shovelful, but here, perhaps, he's tried too hard, too often, to grapple with big themes. Sometimes, his efforts stumble towards coherence, as on The Enemy Within, about the miners' strike, or Care In The Community, about homelessness and the breakdown of social services.
Elsewhere, however, he's much more effective-as in the meditations on Jesus, in Jesus Wept, and in the powerful Peppers & Tomatoes, a portrayal of the bitter experience of a farmer in war-ravaged Yugoslavia. But alone with his guitar, on the introspective Still In Dreams, Ralph McTell's concerns are narrower-his own living and dreaming, aging and worrying. It's the record's simplest song, but it's also by far the best.
Reviewed by John Bauldie
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Ralph Mctell
Stealin' Back...
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To the considerable embarrassment of those who were once willing to argue that Ralph McTell was one of the most underrated British songwriters of the past 25 years, he spent much of the '80s frittering away his talent and credibility churning out second-rate kiddies' stuff for Alphabet Zoo (who can forget Kenny The Kangaroo?) and Tickle On The Tum. Well, Woody Guthrie did it too... Lately, though, Ralph's been looking back to his earliest days and his most lasting influences. Earlier this year he put out Blue Skies Black Heroes, a revisitation of many of the old blues songs that he's long cherished, and now there's another bunch of personal favourites. The Reverend Gary Davis's Hesitation Blues for instance, or When Did You Leave Heaven? learned from a Big Bill Broonzy B-side. There's some classic stuff-Sugar Baby, Stealin', Candy Man, Black Girl, Robert Johnson's When You've Got A Good Friend-and though McTell's never been a great blues singer, he's an excellent ragtime guitar player. Consequently, his efforts at these hoary oldies vary from the impressive to the unhappy. As an exercise in repaying dues, though-and perhaps in exorcising a few ghosts and guilts-it's not without its merits.
Reviewed by John Bauldie
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Ralph Mctell
The Boy With A Note
Q Magazine
In the 25 years since Ralph McTell recorded his debut album he's never been involved with a recording like Boy With A Note (An Evocation Of The Life Of Dylan Thomas In Words And Music). An impressionistic overview of the life of the great Welsh poet, The Boy With A Note's acoustic guitar, synthesized keyboards and orchestration evoke images and moods McTell's songwriting and narration suggest but seldom overstate. That McTell has woven several strands of the Thomas legend into a more human and acceptable story without resorting to parody, sentimentality or the creation of a competing myth, makes Boy With A Note more than just a souvenir of March's award-winning Radio Two broadcast. It makes a compelling case for both the reexamination of both the poet and McTell.
Reviewed by Sid Griffin   
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