It's a big year for singer/ songwriter and guitarist Ralph McTell. "He'll be turning 80 in December, and in the same month will celebrate 50 years since his classic single Streets of London became a hit.
He's playing Glastonbury for the fourth time and Cambridge Folk Festival for the sixth time.
"I will obviously do a medley of my greatest hit," Ralph jokes. "But there are other songs that have passed into the folk tradition of which I'm very proud".
Indeed, he had a No 36 hit a year later with Dreams of You.
"I never used to end my set with Streets of London until recently, but that was like trying to treat it like all my other songs. I think I've written better songs, but they haven't touched the public mind in the same way. A great deal of my career has been based on the success of that song.
When audiences sing it with me it can be very moving." There have been more than 400 registered covers of Streets of London, including by Roger Whittaker, Sinéad O'Connor, and punk band Anti-Nowhere League in 1981. "I thought it was a gimmick to get the Anti-Nowhere League noticed and it achieved that. People thought I'd be really upset, but I met a bloke in a pub in Cornwall who said: "The reason I know about you is I was an AntiNowhere League fan and now I buy all your records."
Ralph May was born on 3 December 1944 in Farnborough, Kent, and raised in a Croydon council flat. Legend has long had it that his estranged father Frank May was gardener to the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, hence the name Ralph. "I never knew my dad, but my mum said he simply wanted names for my brother Bruce and I that couldn't be shortened. And he once dug a hole in Vaughan Williams' garden but no more than that."
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Denne historien er fra July 2024-utgaven av Best of British.
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Forties Post – Plastic Fantastic – Andrew Wilson shines the spotlight on a pioneering plastic surgeon
A hero in many people's books and even a war hero to others - John was recognised in his lifetime by his contemporaries, his patients and in letters that made their way into the local newspaper, the Staffordshire Sentinel. Over time that gradually fell away, to the point where, if asked, few people would ever have heard of John Grocott - apart from his former patients, for whom the universal question appears to have been: "How do you say thank you to someone who has made my life worth living?"
POSTCARD FROM HERTFORDSHIRE
Bob Barton makes plenty of connections to the film world as he returns to the county of his birth but still finds time for a vintage bus ride
Still Walking the Streets of London
Peter Robertson chats to Ralph McTell 50 years after his classic single became a hit
The Tears of a Clown
Chris Hallam remembers Bob Grant, a troubled star of On the Buses
David Wilkie
Peter Robertson pays tribute to one of Britain's most successful athletes
A Century of Smiles, Ceremonies and Celebrations
Claire Saul visits a new exhibition at Buckingham Palace's King's Gallery that reveals life on both sides of the lens of royal photography
A HARD DAY NIGHT
Greg Morse celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Beatles' first film
Terrific Tucktonia
Susan Brewer remembers the UK mainland's first theme park
A Chip Off the Old Block
Colin Allan looks back on the tennis career of Stanley Matthews Jr
The Bucolic Frolic
Martin Claytor celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Knebworth Festival
