For me IN MY OPINION WHICH NO ONE ELSE NEEDS GIVE A STUFF ABOUT the best version of Dirty Old Town is on The Singing Streets album. I can’t get my iPad to cut and paste the url but if you search for “Ewan MacColl Dirty Old Town” it’s the one which is only 1:06 minutes in length. Unaccompanied. If I remember right, on the lead in to it on the album “they” (probably Ewan) talk about the love-struck youth walking back through the streets on his own after seeing his girl. The song was written to cover a scene change in the play Landscape with Chimneys by Theatre Workshop and this short, whistful version is beautiful.

I can’t sing to save my life, which ironic as I spent twenty years in the NHS working as a voice therapist. So, I have listened carefully to more voices than most people are ever likely to. My liking for Ewan’s voice is purely a matter of the timbre being good for me. I also prefer the sound of a Selmer Centered Tone clarinet to any other I have heard, but it doesn’t mean it’s better than all the rest. But what I can say objectively is that I know of no other singer in this genre who had more control of his voice. It was superbly flexible - from Eppie Morie to his supporting role in The Bartley Explosion to Sweet Thames Flow Softly and that strained high pitch in The Flying Cloud. His back ground in theatre and the disciplined voice work of actors added to a naturally supple vocal instrument make, for me, an outstanding singer.

Because of those years as an actor he knew how to interpret songs to bring them to life. The Dockyard Gate on one of the two Critics Group sea song albums for example. (Despite what it says on the album, I think it’s Ewan. If not it’s a great impersonation, but I am prepared to eat any one of my five hats if someone can disprove my thinking.) Or The Molecatcher on Solo Flight. Th’Owd Chap Come O’er t’ Bank. He brings the humour out of them as only an actor could.