"Baker Street" is a song written and performed by Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty. It won the 1979 Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically and achieved high chart positions in the UK, US and elsewhere. The arrangement is known for its saxophone riff.
Origins
Named after Baker Street in London, the song was included on Rafferty's second solo album, City to City (1978), which was his first release after the resolution of legal problems surrounding the break-up of his old band, Stealers Wheel, in 1975. In the intervening three years, Rafferty had been unable to release any material because of disputes about the band's remaining contractual recording obligations.
Rafferty wrote the song during a period when he was trying to extricate himself from his Stealers Wheel contracts. He was regularly travelling between his Scottish family home in Paisley and London, where he recalled often staying at a friend's flat in Baker Street:
The resolution of Rafferty's legal and financial frustrations may have accounted for the exhilaration of the song's final verse:
Rafferty's daughter Martha suggested in 2012 that he could also have taken inspiration from a book he was reading while he was travelling between the two cities, Colin Wilson's The Outsider (1956), which explored ideas of alienation and creativity and a longing to be connected.
Studio
"Baker Street" was recorded in 1978 at Mike and Richard Vernon's Chipping Norton Studios, Oxfordshire, during the sessions for City to City. The album City to City (1978), including "Baker Street", was co-produced by Rafferty and Hugh Murphy.
Saxophone riff
In addition to a searing guitar solo, played by Hugh Burns, "Baker Street" featured a prominent eight-bar saxophone riff by session musician Raphael Ravenscroft, played as a break between verses. Rafferty claimed that he composed the hook, with the original intention that it be sung, but Ravenscroft remembered things differently, saying that he was presented with a song that contained "several gaps". "In fact, most of what I played was an old blues riff," Ravenscroft said. "If you're asking me: 'Did Gerry hand me a piece of music to play?' then no, he didn't."
Ravenscroft came to the studio to record a soprano saxophone part on the finished track, and suggested that he use instead his alto saxophone. The distinctive wailing, bluesy sound of the sax riff on "Baker Street" was a result of the alto being tuned slightly flat, and Ravenscroft later considered this to have been a mistake. He said, in an interview in 2011, that listening to the song irritated him because he was out of tune. His contribution to "Baker Street" was termed by one writer as "the most recognizable sax riff in pop music history", and it was said to have been responsible for a resurgence in the sales of saxophones and their use in mainstream pop music and television advertising.
The 2011 reissue of City to City included the demo of "Baker Street" with the saxophone part played on electric guitar by Rafferty. A very similar sax line was originally played by saxophonist Steve Marcus for a song called "Half a Heart", credited to vibraphonist Gary Burton, that appeared on Marcus's 1968 album Tomorrow Never Knows.
Urban myths
According to one story, Ravenscroft received no payment for a song that earned Rafferty an income of £80,000 per annum. A session fee cheque for £27 given to Ravenscroft was said to have bounced, and been framed and hung on his solicitor's wall. The bouncing cheque story was denied by Ravenscroft during an interview on BBC Radio 2's Simon Mayo Drivetime show on 9 February 2012.
The saxophone riff was also the subject of another urban legend in the UK, created in the 1980s by British writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie. As one of the spoof facts invented for the regular "Would You Believe It?" section in the NME, Maconie falsely claimed that British radio and television presenter Bob Holness had played the saxophone part on the recording, and this claim was widely repeated.