Why Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street is the perfect pop song

"Every time I pass through Baker Street on the tube, a saxophone line unfurls inside my head and I find myself humming “Winding your way down to Baker Street …”. The song is lodged inside me, and it only takes a little trigger to set it off, a map reference, an overheard phrase. “Another year and then you’ll be happy … but you’re crying, you’re crying now …”
Beautiful and bittersweet, luxuriously textured, with a gentle melancholic verse melody counterweighted by a lusciously explosive instrumental chorus, it’s one of those rare songs that everyone responds to. Baker Street is Rafferty’s claim to immortality, and, without delving into his difficult childhood as the son of a violent alcoholic, it tells us everything we need to know about why his life unfolded in the way it did. The characters he addresses are all versions of himself, caught between town and country, despair and hope, drunken nights and regretful mornings: “He’s got this dream about buyin’ some land / He’s gonna give up the booze and the one night stands / And then he’ll settle down, there’s a quiet little town / And forget about everything …”
That’s the dream. Here is the wistful acceptance of his own reality: “But you know he’ll always keep moving / You know he’s never going to stop moving / Cause he’s rolling / He’s a rolling stone …”
And there, perhaps, is the reason the song resonates so powerfully with everyone who hears it. Because there is surely nothing more human than the triumph of hope over experience. And it plays on in my head and my heart as I rattle down the Bakerloo line, with that beautiful guitar solo shooting like fireworks and the tenor saxophone weeping."
RIP Gerry Rafferty.

via Telegraph Blogs by Neil McCormick/read more