‘Winding your way down on Baker Street … The sun is shining, it’s a new morning’

‘Winding your way down on Baker Street’ … traffic winding its way down Baker Street this week (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Patrick Comerford

I have passed by Baker Street in London many times, and I have been on the Bakerloo Line, but finding my way along Baker Street yesterday [19 September 2018] on my way to and from the meeting of USPG trustees left the tune of ‘Baker Street’ in my head for the rest of the day.

‘Baker Street’ is the most popular song written and recorded by the Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty. It was released as a single in 1978, and the arrangement is still known 40 years later for its saxophone riff.

It hit No 3 in the United Kingdom in 1978, held the No 2 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks, and it was also a No 1 hit in Canada, Australia, and South Africa.

Gerry Rafferty also received the Ivor Novello Award for the Best Song Musically and Lyrically that year for ‘Baker Street.’ In 2010, the song was recognised by BMI for surpassing five million performances worldwide, and it was awarded Gold Certification twice, in 1978 and in 2013, by the BPI.

Gerry Rafferty (1947-2011) was a Scottish singer-songwriter and is known not only for ‘Baker Street,’ but also for ‘Right Down the Line’ and ‘Night Owl,’ as well as ‘Stuck in the Middle with You,’ recorded with the band Stealers Wheel.

He was born into a working-class family of Irish origins in Paisley, Renfrewshire. His mother taught him both Irish and Scottish folk songs as a boy, and later he was influenced by the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

He joined the folk-pop group the Humblebums in 1969. After they disbanded, he recorded his first solo album, Can I Have My Money Back?, in 1971. Rafferty and Joe Egan formed the group Stealers Wheel in 1972 and they recorded several hits, including ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ and ‘Star.’

In 1978, he recorded his second solo album, City to City, which included ‘Baker Street,’ which became his most popular song.

City to City was his first release after he had resolved legal problems created by the break-up of Stealers Wheel in 1975. In the three years in-between, he was unable to release any material because of disputes over the band’s recording contracts.

Rafferty wrote ‘Baker Street’ during a time when he was trying to free himself from those Stealers Wheel contracts. He travelled regularly between his family home in Paisley and London, where he often stayed at a friend’s flat on Baker Street.

As Rafferty put it, ‘everybody was suing each other, so I spent a lot of time on the overnight train from Paisley to London for meetings with lawyers. I knew a guy who lived in a little flat off Baker Street. We’d sit and chat or play guitar there through the night.’

Baker Street was the home of many famous writers and composers in the 20th century, including HG Wells and Eric Coates (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Other famous writers and composers had lived on Baker Street earlier in the 20th century, including HG Wells and Eric Coates, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have us believe Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson also lived on Baker Street.

‘Baker Street Muse’ is a song on Jethro Tull’s album Minstrel in the Gallery, released in 1975, three years earlier that Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker Street,’ and Baker Street is frequently mentioned in the lyrics of Jethro Tull songs.

In those three years, privately, Rafferty also spent a lot of time drinking, and refers to this in the lyrics, ‘light in your head and dead on your feet.’

The resolution of Rafferty’s legal and financial frustrations accounted for the exhilaration of the song’s last verse:

When you wake up it’s a new morning
The sun is shining, it’s a new morning
You’re going, you’re going home.

Rafferty’s daughter Martha has said that the song was also inspired by the book he was reading at the time, The Outsider (1956) by Colin Wilson (1931-2013). As he was travelling between Glasgow and London, Rafferty was reading this book, which explores ideas of alienation and of creativity, born out of a longing to be connected.

The album City to City (1978) was co-produced by Rafferty and Hugh Murphy. In addition to a guitar solo, played by Hugh Burns, ‘Baker Street’ features a prominent eight-bar saxophone riff played by Raphael Ravenscroft as a break between verses.

Ravenscroft recorded the break using the alto saxophone he had in his car. The part led to what became known as ‘the Baker Street phenomenon’ – a resurgence in the sales of saxophones and their use in mainstream pop music and television advertising.

Ravenscroft has said recently he thinks the solo is out of tune. He adds that he was not able to re-record the take because he was not involved when the song was mixed.

According to one story, Ravenscroft received no payment for a song that went on to earn Rafferty £80,000 a year. A £27 cheque given to Ravenscroft bounced and was framed and hung on his solicitor’s wall. However, story of the bouncing cheque was denied by Ravenscroft in a BBC interview in 2012.

On the corner of Baker Street and Marylebone Road on my way to a meeting (Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Baker Street, lyrics by Gerry Rafferty

Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well, another crazy day
You’ll drink the night away
And forget about everything

This city desert makes you feel so cold
It’s got so many people, but it’s got no soul
And it’s taken you so long
To find out you were wrong
When you thought it held everything

You used to think that it was so easy
You used to say that it was so easy
But you’re trying, you’re trying now

Another year and then you’d be happy
Just one more year and then you’d be happy
But you’re crying, you’re crying now

Way down the street there’s a light in his place
He opens the door, he’s got that look on his face
And he asks you where you’ve been
You tell him who you’ve seen
And you talk about anything

He’s got this dream about buying some land
He’s gonna give up the booze and the one-night stands
And then he’ll settle down
In some quiet little town
And forget about everything

But you know he’ll always keep moving
You know he’s never gonna stop moving
’Cause he’s rolling, he’s the rolling stone
And when you wake up, it’s a new morning
The sun is shining, it’s a new morning
And you’re going, you’re going home

‘Baker Street’ lyrics © BMG Rights Management

London sculptures serve as reminders of mission priorities at USPG meeting

The sculpture by David Evans above the entrance to Methodist Church House depicts the call of the disciples, the draught of fish and the great mission commission (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Patrick Comerford

I have spent most of today [19 September 2018] at a meeting in London of the trustees of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel).

USPG is in the middle of moving offices from Great Suffolk Street to Trinity Street, with temporary offices in the Mothers’ Union Building at Mary Sumner House on Tufton Street, Westminster. So, today’s meeting took place in Methodist Church House on the corner of Marylebone Road and Nottingham Place, almost opposite Madam Tussauds and beside the Marylebone campus of the University of Westminster.

I caught the Stansted Express to Liverpool Street and the tube to the nearest underground station at Baker Street. Of course, I missed my routine from previous board meetings of walking from Liverpool Street to Saint Paul’s Cathedral, across the Millennium Bridge to the Tate on South Bank, and continuing on the USPG offices in Southwark.

Those early morning walks and the return walks in the late afternoons, provided opportunities for visiting one or two unexplored Wren churches along the way, or visiting other architectural or archaeological locations.

However, today’s walks between Baker Street to Marylebone Street offered new delights and fresh insights.

When the three main branches of British Methodism came together in 1932, their mission societies also came together to form the Methodist Missionary Society, and ‘Mission House’ was begun as their headquarters in 1939, a symbol of this unity in action.

It seemed so appropriate today that the oldest Anglican mission agency should meet in what was once the principal office of Methodist mission work.

The great commission … a detail on the sculpture by David Evans (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

The former Methodist Missionary Society building was built in 1939 and was designed by the architects Paul V Mauger (1896-1982), a Quaker who designed many Quaker meeting houses, Arthur J May and Leo Sylvester Sullivan (1878-1964).

The BBC leased this building until 1946, and for over 20 years the building has been known as ‘Methodist Church House,’ since it became the offices for the major part of the British Connexional Team in 1996.

This is a plain, almost brutalist building, of the functional design that I associate with war-time buildings. The most interesting part of the building is the collection of relief sculptures adorning the building, the work of the sculptor David Evans (1893-1959) in 1941.

Evans was born in Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, Manchester, in 1893 and began his art studies in Manchester in 1912. He won a scholarship in 1914 to the Royal College of Art, where he studied in 1914-1915 and again in 1918-1921 after World War I.

Evans was awarded the Rome Scholarship in Sculpture in 1923, and spent the next two years studying in Italy (1924-1926). After returning to Britain in 1927, he obtained a solo exhibition at the Goupil Gallery of works he had completed in Rome. These included portraits of the staff at the British School, some ideal subjects and statuettes.

Evans executed two important commissions for Liverpool Cathedral, a memorial to Bishop Francis Chavasse (1846-1928) and the Nurses’ Memorial. He also made portraits of John Galsworthy, Sir Hugh Walpole and Sir Arthur Evans, the archaeologist at Knossos in Crete.

Evans spent some time working in the US, beginning with two years teaching at Cranbrook Academy of Art (1929-1930). There he completed works for the Rockefeller Center, Radio City, Brooklyn Post Office, a bank on Wall Street, Saint Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue and a memorial to Hicks, an early member of the American Society for the Protection of Animals.

Evans also created ‘Christ in Prayer’ for the doorway to Christchurch, Cranbrook, Michigan, which he considered one of the most important commissions of his career.

The draught of fish … a detail on the sculpture by David Evans (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Evans was back in Britain from 1933 and continued to work on memorials, reliefs and portraits. These include a memorial at the Revd W David Kelly College in Tavistock, two small sculptures of ‘Science’ and ‘Letters’ flanking a doorway to the central reading room in Cambridge University Library (commissioned by the architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, 1933-1934), and panels surrounding the main entrance to County Hall, Carmarthen, a building designed by Sir Percy Thomas in 1935.

Evans contributed to the large-scale decorative scheme erected on the exterior of Selfridge’s in Oxford Street to mark the coronation of George VI. He made a life-size bust of Captain Thomas Coram for the Foundling Hospital, and a relief and six panels for a bronze door at the Methodist Missionary Society.

He also restored a wooden frieze for Saint James’s Church, Piccadilly, made the RAF Memorial at Saint Clement Danes Church on the Strand, a wood carving for University College London, and a figure of ‘Father Thames’ for the Watling Street façade of New Change Buildings.

However, the work for which Evans is best known was recreating the huge wooden figures of ‘Gog’ and ‘Magog’ in 1953 for the Guildhall, London, based on the originals that had been damaged in a bombing raid in 1940.

Evans also worked in the film industry, where his work included a statue in plaster of Henry VIII for the Boulting Brothers’ film The Guinea Pig (1948). He died in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, in 1959.

The low relief over the front door or main entrance of Methodist Church House shows Christ calling the Disciples, telling them he will make them ‘fishers of men’, and the Great Commission.

To emphasise their enthusiasm in the task of mission and their success, a large number of fishes’ heads peer out from the stern of the boat. It is also a reminder of the miraculous draft of fish, the first post-Resurrection miracle (John 21: 1-14).

A nurse among the portraits above the first floor (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

High up, above first floor windows on the Marylebone Road side of the building, are three portraits by Evans illustrating Methodist missionary priorities: a nurse cradling a baby, and an African and an Indian Christian.

The cornerstone is inscribed:

The Methodist Church

The foundation stone of this
Mission House was laid by
the President of Conference
the Rev W L Wardle MA DD
28th June 1939

‘I look upon the whole world as my parish’
John Wesley

Today’s meeting ended with time to remember people linked with USPG who have died in recent weeks, including Bishop Edward Malecdan of the Philippines, Margaret Messer, a former SPG missionary in India, Brother Giles SSF, Sheila Budge, the Revd Robert Browne, the Revd Alan Talbot, and Doulgas Yates, a former chair of trustees.

Of course, John Wesley was once an SPG missionary too, which added an interesting context to our location today and our closing prayers this afternoon.

The foundation stone at Methodist Church House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)