Still Walking the Streets of London

Peter Robertson chats to Ralph McTell 50 years after his classic single became a hit

- Peter Robertson

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."