Stephen McGinty: Rafferty's iconic song is a lesson in life

No-one thinks good thoughts at three o'clock in the morning as you trundle through the darkness, especially someone like Rafferty, a shy, sensitive singer-songwriter and the son of a violent alcoholic whose path, sadly, he was destined to follow.

The reason for the repeated night trains was to meet his lawyers in London, for he was in the midst of a legal dispute with the management of Stealers Wheel over royalties and a current contract as restrictive as a mink-lined straight-jacket. At the end of a long day chewing through the fine print and twisted legal shenanigans of an industry which once bought the song rights of black musicians for the keys to a brand new Cadillac, which was rented, Rafferty would head over to stay with a friend who had a small flat just off Baker Street. As he said: "We'd sit and chat or play the guitar there through the night."

It took three years until Rafferty was legally entitled to record again under his own name, by which time he had accrued enough songs for a new album, City to City, which was recorded for 18,000 at a small studio in Chipping Norton. On the day in 1978 when Baker Street was scheduled to be laid down, Raphael Ravenscroft, a young saxophonist, was unsure whether it was worth his while going along. The booking was last-minute and it offered only the union minimum of 27.50. Ravenscroft was too young to drive and would have to pay for a lift as well as accommodation in the little Oxfordshire town.

He decided to go along, and contributed a brief soprano saxophone part. Rafferty had planned a guitar solo to run through the song, but when the guitarist was 90 minutes late, Ravenscroft pointed out that he had an alto saxophone out in the car and did he want him to play instead?

The rest, as they say, is history.

Baker Street

Windin' 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 taking you so long

To find out you were wrong

When you thought it had everything The saxophone solo in Baker Street led to the biggest boom in sax sales since the jazz boom of the 1920s, and while Ravenscroft's original cheque bounced, he was more than compensated by the advertisement for his skills which saw his day-rate rise to 5,000 for clients such as Abba and Pink Floyd.

You used to think that it was so easy

You used to say that it was so easy

But you're tryin'

You're tryin' now

Another year and then you'll be happy

Just one more year and then you'll be happy

But you're cryin'

You're cryin' now

Way down the street there's a lad 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"

So, why is the song such a classic? What prompted radio DJs around the world to play it five million times by October 2010, ensuring its author an annual paycheck of 80,000?

I think it's because we've all been to "Baker Street", not the London residence where Sherlock Holmes was supposed to inhabit number 221B, but the psychological geography framed by the verses. Rafferty was once asked what theme ran through his work and he replied: "Alienation". And Baker Street is a hymn to dislocation, to the sense of being an outsider both in one's locale and in one's own life, to the inability to fit in.

Neil McCormick, the music critic of the Daily Telegraph, captured this in his blog: "It's a song full of paradoxes, a gentle reminiscence of the hardness of city life whose beauty makes it a paean to the city itself; it's got a pessimistic vision of inbuilt failure somehow imbued with the optimism of an escapist dream."

I think alcohol glugs through the song, mirrored in the soaring highs of the saxophone solo and the miserable depths of the chorus. When you are depressed and drunk, you tend to stumble on moments of contented clarity when you see the right path as if through an endless chain of open doors:

He's got this dream about buyin' some land

He's gonna give up the booze and the one night stands

And then he'll settle down there's a quiet little town

And forget about everything

But you know he'll always keep movin'

You know he's never gonna stop movin

Cus he's rollin'

He's the rollin' stone

But then the doors clang shut and so you remain locked in a maze of your own creation. There is an argument that artists require alcohol and drugs to allow them to tap into a higher consciousness, that without "the thirsty muse" the work would be somehow diminished. But it's an argument I don't buy, despite the continued presence of Keith Richards as a living riposte.

Gerry Rafferty, it is understood, drank himself to death, and this is a form of madness few people truly understand. It's like the girl who starves herself to death convinced she remains too fat.

The alcoholic, literally, cannot stop. There is a malevolent engine in his head that urges him each day to pick up another drink. The evidence may be all around him in the form of broken relationships, busted friendships, trashed rooms that this will not end well, but there remains an "insane" hope that this time will be different.

Perhaps a football analogy works best. To an alcoholic, picking up a drink is like running on to the pitch - alone - against Celtic's first team confident that this day will bring victory. In Days of Wine and Roses, a celebrated film about alcoholism, it was said an alcoholic picking up a drink is like a man stepping off a tall building with the intention of only falling one floor.

And yet for all the sorrow in a life pickled in drink - and, yes, there must have been some good times before the champagne bubbles burst - Gerry Rafferty left us a glorious legacy from that day in 1978. He reached out and touched us in our own alienation. In the space of 31 lines spread over four minutes, he brought a degree of comfort to the lonely and dispirited who, thanks to the song, now know they are not alone, that such emotions are just part of the human condition.

Stroll along to the end of Baker Street and you'll find hope at the corner. It's a false hope, one you don't quite believe, but you need to try to buy in order to keep going.

In many ways, Baker Street is a lesson in life, one its author couldn't learn, but we should thank him no less for his subsequent failures. So perhaps we shouldn't think of Gerry Rafferty as he was at the end, but instead who he was when he returned to that little flat when all the legal complications had finally been cut away, and the future seemed bright with possibility.

And when you wake up it's a new mornin'

The sun is shinin' it's a new morning

You're goin'

You're goin' home.