Seshmeister
01-04-2011, 06:31 PM
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8239825/Gerry-Rafferty.html
Tuesday 04 January 2011
Gerry Rafferty, the singer and songwriter who died on January 4 aged 63, had a smash hit in 1978 with Baker Street, a world-weary classic based on his experiences busking in the London Underground as a struggling young musician.
While a memorable line in his best-known song included a promise to “give up the booze and the one-night stands”, Rafferty never conquered his private demons. In London, in 2005, he collapsed, reportedly from a drugs overdose; and the following year, when he flew from California to visit a friend in Scotland, he was so drunk that he had to be carried off his privately chartered aircraft in a wheelchair.
Rafferty’s first chart success had come in 1973, as a member of a folk-rock band called Stealer’s Wheel. A commercially appealing single from their first album, Stuck In The Middle With You, received widespread radio airplay on account of its shuffling catchiness and went to No 8 in the British charts.
Rolling Stone magazine judged it “the best Dylan record since 1966”, and the song was later revived in a blood-curdling scene in the Quentin Tarantino film Reservoir Dogs (1992).
But it was the haunting Baker Street — with its searing saxophone riff — that propelled Rafferty into the pantheon of British rock legends. The song has remained a staple of soft-rock and easy-listening stations for more than 30 years — by 2004 it was reckoned to have received four million airplays — and at the time of his death continued to earn Rafferty around £80,000 annually in royalties.
Famously publicity-shy, Rafferty refused to promote the song in the United States, where the album from which it was taken had topped the bestselling charts and gone platinum. Instead he turned inwards, recording only sporadically and leading the life of an increasingly eccentric multi-millionaire rock recluse, last performing in public more than seven years ago.
Having sold some 10 million records in the course of his career, in 1983 he announced his intention to live in future “at my own pace, on my own terms”.
Latterly he had become embroiled in a public and acrimonious dispute with his elder brother Jim, who created a website on which he accused Rafferty — “my psychotic sibling” — of being overweight, drink-sodden and paranoid, and taunting him as “the Great Gutsby” and “the Human Bottlebank”.
Rafferty himself admitted that “there have been periods in my life where I have experienced depression", but insisted that “it has been through some of my darkest moments that I have written some of my best songs. For me, singing and writing is very therapeutic. It’s much more effective than taking Prozac.”
Gerald Rafferty was born on April 16 1947 into a working-class family at Paisley and grew up in a council house on the town’s Foxbar estate. He was educated at St Mirin’s Academy.
His Irish-born father was a heavy-drinking miner and lorry driver who died when Gerry was 16. Inspired by his Scottish mother, who had taught him Irish and Scottish folk songs as a boy, and heavily influenced by the music of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, the young Gerry started to write his own material.
As a teenager he taught himself to play banjo and busked illegally on the London Underground before returning to Scotland and a job as a clerk with the Department of Health and Social Security. By 1968, having left the Civil Service to work in a Clydeside shipyard, he was playing bass guitar in a succession of rock bands. But Rafferty soon realised that his heart lay in local folk clubs, and he joined a trio called the Humblebums with Tam Harvey and Rafferty’s fellow shipyard worker, the up-and-coming comedian Billy Connolly.
When they parted amicably in 1971 (as Connolly’s jokes became longer, the songs became shorter), Rafferty formed Stealer’s Wheel with Rab Noakes and his childhood friend Joe Egan. The group’s debut album, released in December 1972, was overseen by the American production partnership of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and featured gentle, folksy harmonies and strong melody lines.
The album included the quirky Stuck In The Middle With You, with which Rafferty and Stealer’s Wheel enjoyed their biggest hit. But while it enjoyed great chart success in May 1973, the song proved to be a one-hit wonder; and after a kaleidoscopic succession of band members joining and leaving — Rafferty himself dropped out for a couple of months before returning to record a follow-up — Stealer’s Wheel vanished into obscurity.
Although disillusioned and preoccupied with management problems, Rafferty re-emerged five years later with a solo album, City To City, which sold more than five million copies, and which included a track called Baker Street.
When this song was released as a single in April 1978, it took the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic by storm, reaching No 3 in Britain and No 2 in America.
The song transcended the regular folk genre on account of its signature saxophone riff played by Raphael Ravenscroft, who received a one-off session fee of £27. The cheque bounced, and Ravenscroft had it framed and hung on the wall of his lawyer’s office.
Ravenscroft’s bluesy riff, one of the most instantly recognisable in the entire popular canon, has since been the subject of various urban myths, including one that mystifyingly attributes it to the Blockbusters television presenter Bob Holness.
In fact Rafferty had been planning to sing the melody, but changed his mind. “At the last moment I decided the song needed a wailing, lonely, big-city sound to it,” he said. “The guy who eventually played the solo was a guy called Raphael Ravenscroft. With a name like that, I reckoned he had to be good – and he was.
“It’s every songwriter’s ambition to come up with at least one song in their lifetime that’s regarded as a classic,” he added. “And Baker Street is mine.”
After years of touring, Rafferty gave it up in 1983, declaring that he wanted to “watch my family grow”. In the same year he provided a vocal to the soundtrack of the film Local Hero (1983), and from time to time he released new material, including the albums North and South (1988) and, five years later, On A Wing And A Prayer, which featured backing vocals by his brother Jim, who also co-wrote some of the songs. The album also reunited Rafferty with his old partner from Stealer’s Wheel, Joe Egan.
Further albums were Over My Head in 1994 and Another World in 2000.
After the death of his younger brother, Joe, in 1995, a feud developed with his surviving sibling Jim, who set up a website called Effing Peasants, the insult Jim Rafferty claimed his rock star brother applied to him and his friends.
Rafferty’s last original album, Another World, was followed by a collection of his old hits Days Gone Down (2006).
In London in July 2008, Rafferty trashed his suite at a five-star hotel and was subsequently treated in hospital for liver problems. After undergoing tests on his health, damaged by years of heavy drinking, he disappeared in August that year, leaving behind his clothes and luggage. He subsequently lived in the West Country.
Gerry Rafferty married, in 1970, Carla Ventilla. The marriage was dissolved, and he is survived by a daughter.
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011Terms and Conditions Today's NewsArchiveStyle BookWeather Forecast
Tuesday 04 January 2011
Gerry Rafferty, the singer and songwriter who died on January 4 aged 63, had a smash hit in 1978 with Baker Street, a world-weary classic based on his experiences busking in the London Underground as a struggling young musician.
While a memorable line in his best-known song included a promise to “give up the booze and the one-night stands”, Rafferty never conquered his private demons. In London, in 2005, he collapsed, reportedly from a drugs overdose; and the following year, when he flew from California to visit a friend in Scotland, he was so drunk that he had to be carried off his privately chartered aircraft in a wheelchair.
Rafferty’s first chart success had come in 1973, as a member of a folk-rock band called Stealer’s Wheel. A commercially appealing single from their first album, Stuck In The Middle With You, received widespread radio airplay on account of its shuffling catchiness and went to No 8 in the British charts.
Rolling Stone magazine judged it “the best Dylan record since 1966”, and the song was later revived in a blood-curdling scene in the Quentin Tarantino film Reservoir Dogs (1992).
But it was the haunting Baker Street — with its searing saxophone riff — that propelled Rafferty into the pantheon of British rock legends. The song has remained a staple of soft-rock and easy-listening stations for more than 30 years — by 2004 it was reckoned to have received four million airplays — and at the time of his death continued to earn Rafferty around £80,000 annually in royalties.
Famously publicity-shy, Rafferty refused to promote the song in the United States, where the album from which it was taken had topped the bestselling charts and gone platinum. Instead he turned inwards, recording only sporadically and leading the life of an increasingly eccentric multi-millionaire rock recluse, last performing in public more than seven years ago.
Having sold some 10 million records in the course of his career, in 1983 he announced his intention to live in future “at my own pace, on my own terms”.
Latterly he had become embroiled in a public and acrimonious dispute with his elder brother Jim, who created a website on which he accused Rafferty — “my psychotic sibling” — of being overweight, drink-sodden and paranoid, and taunting him as “the Great Gutsby” and “the Human Bottlebank”.
Rafferty himself admitted that “there have been periods in my life where I have experienced depression", but insisted that “it has been through some of my darkest moments that I have written some of my best songs. For me, singing and writing is very therapeutic. It’s much more effective than taking Prozac.”
Gerald Rafferty was born on April 16 1947 into a working-class family at Paisley and grew up in a council house on the town’s Foxbar estate. He was educated at St Mirin’s Academy.
His Irish-born father was a heavy-drinking miner and lorry driver who died when Gerry was 16. Inspired by his Scottish mother, who had taught him Irish and Scottish folk songs as a boy, and heavily influenced by the music of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, the young Gerry started to write his own material.
As a teenager he taught himself to play banjo and busked illegally on the London Underground before returning to Scotland and a job as a clerk with the Department of Health and Social Security. By 1968, having left the Civil Service to work in a Clydeside shipyard, he was playing bass guitar in a succession of rock bands. But Rafferty soon realised that his heart lay in local folk clubs, and he joined a trio called the Humblebums with Tam Harvey and Rafferty’s fellow shipyard worker, the up-and-coming comedian Billy Connolly.
When they parted amicably in 1971 (as Connolly’s jokes became longer, the songs became shorter), Rafferty formed Stealer’s Wheel with Rab Noakes and his childhood friend Joe Egan. The group’s debut album, released in December 1972, was overseen by the American production partnership of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and featured gentle, folksy harmonies and strong melody lines.
The album included the quirky Stuck In The Middle With You, with which Rafferty and Stealer’s Wheel enjoyed their biggest hit. But while it enjoyed great chart success in May 1973, the song proved to be a one-hit wonder; and after a kaleidoscopic succession of band members joining and leaving — Rafferty himself dropped out for a couple of months before returning to record a follow-up — Stealer’s Wheel vanished into obscurity.
Although disillusioned and preoccupied with management problems, Rafferty re-emerged five years later with a solo album, City To City, which sold more than five million copies, and which included a track called Baker Street.
When this song was released as a single in April 1978, it took the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic by storm, reaching No 3 in Britain and No 2 in America.
The song transcended the regular folk genre on account of its signature saxophone riff played by Raphael Ravenscroft, who received a one-off session fee of £27. The cheque bounced, and Ravenscroft had it framed and hung on the wall of his lawyer’s office.
Ravenscroft’s bluesy riff, one of the most instantly recognisable in the entire popular canon, has since been the subject of various urban myths, including one that mystifyingly attributes it to the Blockbusters television presenter Bob Holness.
In fact Rafferty had been planning to sing the melody, but changed his mind. “At the last moment I decided the song needed a wailing, lonely, big-city sound to it,” he said. “The guy who eventually played the solo was a guy called Raphael Ravenscroft. With a name like that, I reckoned he had to be good – and he was.
“It’s every songwriter’s ambition to come up with at least one song in their lifetime that’s regarded as a classic,” he added. “And Baker Street is mine.”
After years of touring, Rafferty gave it up in 1983, declaring that he wanted to “watch my family grow”. In the same year he provided a vocal to the soundtrack of the film Local Hero (1983), and from time to time he released new material, including the albums North and South (1988) and, five years later, On A Wing And A Prayer, which featured backing vocals by his brother Jim, who also co-wrote some of the songs. The album also reunited Rafferty with his old partner from Stealer’s Wheel, Joe Egan.
Further albums were Over My Head in 1994 and Another World in 2000.
After the death of his younger brother, Joe, in 1995, a feud developed with his surviving sibling Jim, who set up a website called Effing Peasants, the insult Jim Rafferty claimed his rock star brother applied to him and his friends.
Rafferty’s last original album, Another World, was followed by a collection of his old hits Days Gone Down (2006).
In London in July 2008, Rafferty trashed his suite at a five-star hotel and was subsequently treated in hospital for liver problems. After undergoing tests on his health, damaged by years of heavy drinking, he disappeared in August that year, leaving behind his clothes and luggage. He subsequently lived in the West Country.
Gerry Rafferty married, in 1970, Carla Ventilla. The marriage was dissolved, and he is survived by a daughter.
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011Terms and Conditions Today's NewsArchiveStyle BookWeather Forecast