I was in Manchester in 1964 and we used to squat in a warehouse on the canal in Salford. An evening image I can still summon. I was with a girl whom I’d met at the Edinburgh Festival and hitchhiked back south with. Doomed teen romance. Blah blah. For me ‘Dirty Old Town’ has that pathos of young lovers in a crap environment hence wanting to take an axe to it in nihilistic rage. I’m not a great fan of McColl, never was, tbh. He seemed a relic like Seeger but much more interesting despite his politics, with the memory of the Holodomor and Stalin’s mass murders still fresh. A heavy load for all of the communists and their middle class friends to carry. Some did, many didn’t. McColl if he could perhaps have escaped his clunky politics and that awful banjo player, had the talent to have been a much more interesting figure. Imo. As a singer songwriter for me he wrote a couple of gems and a lot of dross, tied to backward facing music. Pity he didn’t get to collaborate with the true visionary in the Seeger family, the modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. But ‘Dirty Old Town’ still resonates for me. It escapes neat analysis and has a poetic truth succinctly put which is the mark of a great song. It will survive the heavy handed village Marxists.
Note of synchronicity: I saw Joan Littlewood’s production of Henry Four at the Edinburgh Festival mentioned above and it was a superb rereading which tuned into the energies of the time. Ewan’s ex wife, who said of him that he was a snob and became boring, ha ha. ‘A great talent but always plugging the same old thing.’ Quite. My youthful enthusiasm for the play was not shared by the New York Times review which I just checked to ratify the date…