The Duke of Ingmar wrote:left wrote:Mick Molloy wrote:It's a bazooka or bouzouki played with slide by the great Terry Woods
a bazooka
Yup, it´s quicker than making a good sharp axe and chopping you down like an old dead tree.
Hahahahahaha.
Dirty Old Town
46 posts
• Page 3 of 4 • 1, 2, 3, 4
Sun Apr 01, 2007 9:55 pm
Hahahahahaha.
- ray
- Pedrolino
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Wrexham
Sun Apr 08, 2007 12:25 pm
Wrexham FC are fretting over league status but this song is a old standard from the fans
To the tune of 'Dirty old town'
We watched the game, from the Crispin Lane
Under the old Busfields Stand
Dirty Old Stand, Dirty old Stand
In Wrexham town, its a lovely old town
Betty the tramp, she lives in a cave
In Caergwrle, In Caergwrle
She eats her chips, off the King Street floor
In Wrexham town, its a lovely old town
We go away, in a transit van
And drink loads, of Wrexham Lager (Wrexham Lager, Wrexham Lager)
We drink all day and we drink all night
And come home stoned, to the lovely old town
To the tune of 'Dirty old town'
We watched the game, from the Crispin Lane
Under the old Busfields Stand
Dirty Old Stand, Dirty old Stand
In Wrexham town, its a lovely old town
Betty the tramp, she lives in a cave
In Caergwrle, In Caergwrle
She eats her chips, off the King Street floor
In Wrexham town, its a lovely old town
We go away, in a transit van
And drink loads, of Wrexham Lager (Wrexham Lager, Wrexham Lager)
We drink all day and we drink all night
And come home stoned, to the lovely old town
- Y MOCHYN DU
Re: Wrexham
Sun Apr 08, 2007 12:57 pm
Y MOCHYN DU wrote:In Caergwrle, In Caergwrle
This looks like a tongue twister
-
Mick Molloy - Yeoman Rand
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Sun Apr 08, 2007 5:47 pm
Dirty Old Town was not originally a folk song, except in the sense that a "folk artist" (who was Scottish, not English, by the way) wrote it. MacColl's actual version is more jazz/lounge music than anything else, complete with a saxophone and co-vocals with Peggy Seeger. A very cool-sounding song.
- Guest
DIRTY OLD TOWN
Sun Apr 08, 2007 6:52 pm
Hello Mick
its a welsh village near wrexham pronounced CAE / GIRL /LY
Heres another verse I forgot
We hate the Scum, From the sealand road.
theyve got a tramp, and his name is Harry (mcnally mcnally)
His wifes a slut,, shes had all the team
and now shes got aids and a dose of VD
its a welsh village near wrexham pronounced CAE / GIRL /LY
Heres another verse I forgot
We hate the Scum, From the sealand road.
theyve got a tramp, and his name is Harry (mcnally mcnally)
His wifes a slut,, shes had all the team
and now shes got aids and a dose of VD
- Y MOCHYN DU
Thu Nov 29, 2007 2:53 pm
From Salford Star Magazine (issue 4, Spring 2007):
DIRTY OLD TOWN
Full URL
Throughout his life, Salfordian legend Ewan MacColl, made theatre, poetry, writing, acting and singing dangerous. Brought up in a two-up, two-down terraced house in Coburg Street, Lower Broughton, Ewan was beaten up by police on the hunger marches of the 1930s…trailed by MI5 for having `communist’ beliefs…and banned from performing `subversive plays’. Ewan also managed to pen probably the greatest song ever to come out of Salford…Dirty Old Town.
Here, Ewan’s third wife and long time collaborator, Peggy Seeger - for whom he wrote one of the world’s top love songs – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – gives her own personal take on Dirty Old Town, while we head off to the Flat Iron pub on the precinct to see how Salfordians relate to the anthem today…
Ewan and I got together literally on our very first meeting in March 1956. We used to travel up to Manchester to work on our weekly programme, The Manchester Ramblers, at Granada Television and Dirty Old Town was one of the theme songs. The first time we went up there he took me to Salford, to Coburg Street in Lower Broughton - his street - and he said `This is the Dirty Old Town’.
I’d been brought up in Washington DC in a very comfortable suburb, I was still green behind the ears and I remember being struck by how dirty and industrialised it was – I’d never been to a street like it in my life. There were tiny, tiny little houses all attached to one another like strings of beads, on a cobbled street. Salford itself made a huge impression on me…It was vital, very vital, one of the cogs that make things run.
Ewan talked a lot in the early days about his upbringing. I don’t know if you’ve ever been devastatingly in love but that’s one of the things you do, you want to open yourself totally to the other person and that’s what he did…he told me all his secrets and told me about his upbringing; he cried, he wrote poems and I felt it through him because I couldn’t grasp being brought up in such a place.
I don’t think Dirty Old Town is necessarily negative – it’s the same feeling that Ewan had towards Salford all his life, love and hate, that it was a place which was living and breathing, it had a pulse. He was frightened of Salford – he was frightened that he would never get out of the poverty of his childhood, and the exploitation. To him it represented what the whole industrial revolution did to people.
We visited his street several times. He didn’t like going back. He felt kind of guilty that he’d escaped the bad parts of it. But when we did go back the conversations with friends and acquaintances who hadn’t left were something to be heard, talking about all the people they knew, and he came alive in a very strange way to me. There weren’t very many of them left and they looked on him as their boy who had gone out into the world and done things. And he looked on them as heroes who had stayed there and fought at the base of operations. To me it was fascinating because he was a different person when he was in Salford.
I loved singing Dirty Old Town with him, it’s a beautiful, absolutely singable song and we always sang it when we went to Manchester or Salford. I’ve heard cover versions of it and I’ve never heard a good one. Especially The Pogues. When we first heard their rendition Ewan started laughing. He said that they didn’t understand the loneliness of the song…he wrote to, or phoned up Frank Murphy the manager of The Pogues and said `Look, this isn’t what the song is about’. What he didn’t say was that the lad can’t sing and that the group tried to turn it into a football song. And so, Ewan’s Daughter, Kirsty came along to the Singers Club with Frank, they sat in the audience and Ewan and I sang the song – not that we were the only ones who could sing it but we had the atmosphere you need on it. You need that loneliness. You really need to taste the words, as Ewan used to put it. Those words are honed, they really are, every line is reminiscent of the boy growing up there and the feeling of what the place really is. I don’t know if Shane McGowan has ever been there. Ewan thought you had to go there or be brought up in such a place to sing it properly. Anyway, we sang it and Frank came up to us at the end and he said very quietly `I see what you mean’. But The Pogues still put it out as a single.
Dirty Old Town takes a certain kind of singing. Usually, composers sing their songs in the way they mean them to be done so that the performance and the tune and the words create a unity, and I would like to hear somebody else do Dirty Old Town really well. You have to think about what the composer meant when they made those words. It’s more than just words. It requires an imagination that actually graduates into performance so that the performance shows what you are thinking about, rather than just thinking about what instruments are in your band or whether this song is in your range.
There’s another of Ewan’s songs…when I first heard Johnny Cash sing The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face I thought it was awful. But then I thought about the man and the loss of his wife, and he’s singing this song as an old man with the voice of an old man. It was just different from the way that Ewan meant it which was in the full young flush of love and passion. And it worked. So you can do songs in different ways but you have to think about what the song is about while you sing it. I don’t think that The Pogues thought about it.
The last verse of Dirty Old Town –` we’ll chop you down like an old dead tree’ - the implication to me is that we’ll chop you down and build you again the way that you should be, for the people who live there. But I don’t know that they will as long as there are `developers’ and the idea of `progress’ – they want it built more fancy, and the people who live there can’t afford it any more. It has to be the people who live there who say how it’s going to be.
Ewan was appalled when he saw what they’d done to Coburg Street – we went to look for it once and couldn’t find it, it was gone. He hated the things that were put up in its place. He loved and hated the old street but he said the new stuff was unspeakable. It was cheap, it was nasty and had no style. It was nothing but the worst for the working classes, as he put it…
They were very sociable little streets. That’s what everybody forgets, keeping the sociability going. It’s like the Baedeker Raids during the 2nd World War. Hitler sent his spies to the UK posing as tourists, using these Baedeker Guides which told you where everything historic was in England the things that England was proud of. They sent home postcards and photos of places like Coventry, London and Manchester and those were the first places that Hitler bombed - to take away our history, our national identity. And this is what’s happening in our cities now. Their sociability and community are disappearing.
The sense of identity is built up with the whole street structure, with the kind of buildings that are on the them – whatever has happened to the dirty old town of Salford has happened because of industrial rapacity but a lot of the old buildings are very beautiful and a lot of those string-of-beads terraced houses could be made into wonderful working class homes. They don’t do it – because it’s expensive but also I think because the developers who come in have no sense of the value of these buildings to the people who live there, people who have been born and brought up there.
…I don’t sing Dirty Old Town as part of my set. I probably should but I have problems singing some of the songs I sang with Ewan – I keep stopping and waiting for him to do his verses. I’m not sure I could do justice to it. What would you think of an American woman brought up in comfortable Washington DC singing that song ? It needs an accent doesn’t it ? It needs more emotional identification than I’ve got. But if I ever come to Salford again I will have a try if everyone sings along with me…
DIRTY OLD TOWN
Full URL
Throughout his life, Salfordian legend Ewan MacColl, made theatre, poetry, writing, acting and singing dangerous. Brought up in a two-up, two-down terraced house in Coburg Street, Lower Broughton, Ewan was beaten up by police on the hunger marches of the 1930s…trailed by MI5 for having `communist’ beliefs…and banned from performing `subversive plays’. Ewan also managed to pen probably the greatest song ever to come out of Salford…Dirty Old Town.
Here, Ewan’s third wife and long time collaborator, Peggy Seeger - for whom he wrote one of the world’s top love songs – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – gives her own personal take on Dirty Old Town, while we head off to the Flat Iron pub on the precinct to see how Salfordians relate to the anthem today…
Ewan and I got together literally on our very first meeting in March 1956. We used to travel up to Manchester to work on our weekly programme, The Manchester Ramblers, at Granada Television and Dirty Old Town was one of the theme songs. The first time we went up there he took me to Salford, to Coburg Street in Lower Broughton - his street - and he said `This is the Dirty Old Town’.
I’d been brought up in Washington DC in a very comfortable suburb, I was still green behind the ears and I remember being struck by how dirty and industrialised it was – I’d never been to a street like it in my life. There were tiny, tiny little houses all attached to one another like strings of beads, on a cobbled street. Salford itself made a huge impression on me…It was vital, very vital, one of the cogs that make things run.
Ewan talked a lot in the early days about his upbringing. I don’t know if you’ve ever been devastatingly in love but that’s one of the things you do, you want to open yourself totally to the other person and that’s what he did…he told me all his secrets and told me about his upbringing; he cried, he wrote poems and I felt it through him because I couldn’t grasp being brought up in such a place.
I don’t think Dirty Old Town is necessarily negative – it’s the same feeling that Ewan had towards Salford all his life, love and hate, that it was a place which was living and breathing, it had a pulse. He was frightened of Salford – he was frightened that he would never get out of the poverty of his childhood, and the exploitation. To him it represented what the whole industrial revolution did to people.
We visited his street several times. He didn’t like going back. He felt kind of guilty that he’d escaped the bad parts of it. But when we did go back the conversations with friends and acquaintances who hadn’t left were something to be heard, talking about all the people they knew, and he came alive in a very strange way to me. There weren’t very many of them left and they looked on him as their boy who had gone out into the world and done things. And he looked on them as heroes who had stayed there and fought at the base of operations. To me it was fascinating because he was a different person when he was in Salford.
I loved singing Dirty Old Town with him, it’s a beautiful, absolutely singable song and we always sang it when we went to Manchester or Salford. I’ve heard cover versions of it and I’ve never heard a good one. Especially The Pogues. When we first heard their rendition Ewan started laughing. He said that they didn’t understand the loneliness of the song…he wrote to, or phoned up Frank Murphy the manager of The Pogues and said `Look, this isn’t what the song is about’. What he didn’t say was that the lad can’t sing and that the group tried to turn it into a football song. And so, Ewan’s Daughter, Kirsty came along to the Singers Club with Frank, they sat in the audience and Ewan and I sang the song – not that we were the only ones who could sing it but we had the atmosphere you need on it. You need that loneliness. You really need to taste the words, as Ewan used to put it. Those words are honed, they really are, every line is reminiscent of the boy growing up there and the feeling of what the place really is. I don’t know if Shane McGowan has ever been there. Ewan thought you had to go there or be brought up in such a place to sing it properly. Anyway, we sang it and Frank came up to us at the end and he said very quietly `I see what you mean’. But The Pogues still put it out as a single.
Dirty Old Town takes a certain kind of singing. Usually, composers sing their songs in the way they mean them to be done so that the performance and the tune and the words create a unity, and I would like to hear somebody else do Dirty Old Town really well. You have to think about what the composer meant when they made those words. It’s more than just words. It requires an imagination that actually graduates into performance so that the performance shows what you are thinking about, rather than just thinking about what instruments are in your band or whether this song is in your range.
There’s another of Ewan’s songs…when I first heard Johnny Cash sing The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face I thought it was awful. But then I thought about the man and the loss of his wife, and he’s singing this song as an old man with the voice of an old man. It was just different from the way that Ewan meant it which was in the full young flush of love and passion. And it worked. So you can do songs in different ways but you have to think about what the song is about while you sing it. I don’t think that The Pogues thought about it.
The last verse of Dirty Old Town –` we’ll chop you down like an old dead tree’ - the implication to me is that we’ll chop you down and build you again the way that you should be, for the people who live there. But I don’t know that they will as long as there are `developers’ and the idea of `progress’ – they want it built more fancy, and the people who live there can’t afford it any more. It has to be the people who live there who say how it’s going to be.
Ewan was appalled when he saw what they’d done to Coburg Street – we went to look for it once and couldn’t find it, it was gone. He hated the things that were put up in its place. He loved and hated the old street but he said the new stuff was unspeakable. It was cheap, it was nasty and had no style. It was nothing but the worst for the working classes, as he put it…
They were very sociable little streets. That’s what everybody forgets, keeping the sociability going. It’s like the Baedeker Raids during the 2nd World War. Hitler sent his spies to the UK posing as tourists, using these Baedeker Guides which told you where everything historic was in England the things that England was proud of. They sent home postcards and photos of places like Coventry, London and Manchester and those were the first places that Hitler bombed - to take away our history, our national identity. And this is what’s happening in our cities now. Their sociability and community are disappearing.
The sense of identity is built up with the whole street structure, with the kind of buildings that are on the them – whatever has happened to the dirty old town of Salford has happened because of industrial rapacity but a lot of the old buildings are very beautiful and a lot of those string-of-beads terraced houses could be made into wonderful working class homes. They don’t do it – because it’s expensive but also I think because the developers who come in have no sense of the value of these buildings to the people who live there, people who have been born and brought up there.
…I don’t sing Dirty Old Town as part of my set. I probably should but I have problems singing some of the songs I sang with Ewan – I keep stopping and waiting for him to do his verses. I’m not sure I could do justice to it. What would you think of an American woman brought up in comfortable Washington DC singing that song ? It needs an accent doesn’t it ? It needs more emotional identification than I’ve got. But if I ever come to Salford again I will have a try if everyone sings along with me…
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MacRua - Site Janitor
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Thu Nov 29, 2007 4:57 pm
Thats an interesting read. I always assumed that most artists would welcome new interpretations of their songs, but I guess not. It is really bemusing that she didn't think that The Pogues' version was gritty enough, that it didn't have enough of a industrial feel. I've always gotten the opposite from The Pogues' version, and if anything I thought that Luke Kelly and the Clancy Brothers lacked the real grit of a dirty old town.
I've never heard Ewan's version, nor his wife's. I guess I can't blame her for being protective. But I think you would have to be pretty close minded to not appreciate someone bringing your work alive for the next generation.
I've never heard Ewan's version, nor his wife's. I guess I can't blame her for being protective. But I think you would have to be pretty close minded to not appreciate someone bringing your work alive for the next generation.
More whiskey
And fresh horses for the men!
And fresh horses for the men!
- Sportin' Life
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Thu Nov 29, 2007 5:08 pm
Sportin' Life wrote:I've never heard Ewan's version, nor his wife's. I guess I can't blame her for being protective. But I think you would have to be pretty close minded to not appreciate someone bringing your work alive for the next generation.
Well, everything I've ever read about Ewan MacColl suggests that being open-minded about music, maybe particularly his own music, was not one of his strengths. Maybe Peggy Seeger got that from him.
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Rich - Pulcinella
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Thu Nov 29, 2007 5:17 pm
Rich wrote:Sportin' Life wrote:I've never heard Ewan's version, nor his wife's. I guess I can't blame her for being protective. But I think you would have to be pretty close minded to not appreciate someone bringing your work alive for the next generation.
Well, everything I've ever read about Ewan MacColl suggests that being open-minded about music, maybe particularly his own music, was not one of his strengths. Maybe Peggy Seeger got that from him.
Yeah, I guess. I just find it unfathomable that your husband could have written a song covered by The Pogues, Luke Kelly and the Dubliners, and the Clancy Brothers and then say, "I’ve heard cover versions of it and I’ve never heard a good one". There is being unappreciative, but then there is being downright rude.
At least her husband had the upside of having great talent and had sired a great daughter. I can't quite figure out the upside of Peggy Seeger.
More whiskey
And fresh horses for the men!
And fresh horses for the men!
- Sportin' Life
- Brighella
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- Location: Seattle, America
Thu Nov 29, 2007 5:24 pm
Sportin' Life wrote:Rich wrote:Sportin' Life wrote:I've never heard Ewan's version, nor his wife's. I guess I can't blame her for being protective. But I think you would have to be pretty close minded to not appreciate someone bringing your work alive for the next generation.
Well, everything I've ever read about Ewan MacColl suggests that being open-minded about music, maybe particularly his own music, was not one of his strengths. Maybe Peggy Seeger got that from him.
Yeah, I guess. I just find it unfathomable that your husband could have written a song covered by The Pogues, Luke Kelly and the Dubliners, and the Clancy Brothers and then say, "I’ve heard cover versions of it and I’ve never heard a good one". There is being unappreciative, but then there is being downright rude.
At least her husband had the upside of having great talent and had sired a great daughter. I can't quite figure out the upside of Peggy Seeger.
Ewan MacColl was not nearly as averse to the Pogues version as Ms Seeger suggests. He eventually came to understand it as he eventually came to be reconciled with his lovely daughter and even come to terms with her "pop" music.
All the same, it can be a thorny area. I don't often comment on the cover versions of "Lorelei", "Enemies", "Faithful Departed" Thousands Are Sailing" "Televsion Screen" or the others unless they are especially distinguished. People cover your songs because they love them, they don't set out to destroy them.
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philipchevron - Harlequin
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Thu Nov 29, 2007 6:06 pm
philipchevron wrote:People cover your songs because they love them, they don't set out to destroy them.
And sometimes it's both. Ronan Keating with"Fairytale" for example.
“I know all those people that were in the film [...] But that’s when they were young and strong and full of life, you know?”
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DzM - Site Janitor
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Fri Nov 30, 2007 4:57 am
DzM wrote:philipchevron wrote:People cover your songs because they love them, they don't set out to destroy them.
And sometimes it's both. Ronan Keating with"Fairytale" for example.
Luckily he chose a song that cannot be destroyed by anyone.
"Just once I would like to see the coyote eat that feathered freak !" (Sledge Hammer)
- The Duke of Ingmar
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Fri Nov 30, 2007 9:17 am
philipchevron wrote:Sportin' Life wrote:Rich wrote:Sportin' Life wrote:I've never heard Ewan's version, nor his wife's. I guess I can't blame her for being protective. But I think you would have to be pretty close minded to not appreciate someone bringing your work alive for the next generation.
Well, everything I've ever read about Ewan MacColl suggests that being open-minded about music, maybe particularly his own music, was not one of his strengths. Maybe Peggy Seeger got that from him.
Yeah, I guess. I just find it unfathomable that your husband could have written a song covered by The Pogues, Luke Kelly and the Dubliners, and the Clancy Brothers and then say, "I’ve heard cover versions of it and I’ve never heard a good one". There is being unappreciative, but then there is being downright rude.
At least her husband had the upside of having great talent and had sired a great daughter. I can't quite figure out the upside of Peggy Seeger.
Ewan MacColl was not nearly as averse to the Pogues version as Ms Seeger suggests. He eventually came to understand it as he eventually came to be reconciled with his lovely daughter and even come to terms with her "pop" music.
All the same, it can be a thorny area. I don't often comment on the cover versions of "Lorelei", "Enemies", "Faithful Departed" Thousands Are Sailing" "Televsion Screen" or the others unless they are especially distinguished. People cover your songs because they love them, they don't set out to destroy them.
If someone takes inspiration from a song and cover it in their own way and as long as permission has been given (Mr C has taught us how important for an artist that is as its something I wouldnt have even given a thoght too in the past) then I think that can be wonderful and its what art is all about. An example would be Johny Cash's 'Hurt' and I cant quite understand why this keeps coming into my head but errrr Sid Vicious 'My Way'
- RICHB
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Fri Nov 30, 2007 9:21 am
Ha ha a funny story on how dangerous cover songs can be though. My Father in law got up on a kareoke (spelling is terrible) and picked 'American Pie' by Don Mclean. Anyway the night wore on and he hadnt been shouted up yet and everyone in the club he was with where waiting for him to get up. Eventually his name gets shouted and everyone cheers him on. He was confident as he had sang it before on other nights. However what he didnt realise is that there where two American Pies on the list. One by Don McClean and the other by Madonna. The one by Madonna is about a million times faster and unfortunately that is the one he picked. Itw as hillarious watching him try and keep up with the words with a confused look on his face. Laugh, I nearly bought a round. 
- RICHB
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Fri Nov 30, 2007 9:52 am
Sportin' Life wrote:I've never heard Ewan's version, nor his wife's. I guess I can't blame her for being protective. But I think you would have to be pretty close minded to not appreciate someone bringing your work alive for the next generation.
I used to play guitar in a pub folk session and they wouldn't even consider performing Eric Bogle's 2 big tunes, Waltzing Matilda and Green Fields as they held them in high esteem, which I really didn't get as his versions are shocking but the 2 well known covers Pogues & TMTCH are pretty much definative.
They didn't mind me playing Paranoid in a Woody Guthrie style, but I only got away with that once!
I wish I'd done biology for an urge within me wanted to do it then
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Jon - Brighella
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