I reach once more into Darren’s MP3 lucky dip and pull out:
"Baker Street", by Gerry Rafferty, a song which immediately joins the list of the fifty most important songs in my life. (What are we up to now, eight? I have in fact added one or two more, and shall provide an updated list in due course.) "Baker Street" stood out for not being anything like the songs I was listening to then: it was quiet, contemplative, melancholy (an emotion that has tremendous pull for me now, but that I didn’t then know or understand). For that reason I was always a little bit uncomfortable with the way it made me feel. I was afraid that I was being sucked into liking something that really belonged in the Enemy Camp. Now, of course, I know that there is no Enemy Camp (and I must acknowledge Darren as a source of that realisation, along with Adrienne). This is simply one of the great pop songs: like so many others that have stood the test of time, its strength, I think, is that it stands to one side of what was happening at the time (or, even, at any other time: cf "Wuthering Heights", perhaps, or "O Superman").
I haven’t quite put this as well as I would have liked; I suspect that I have made it sound like a Guilty Pleasure, but it’s not that at all, it is something that runs much, much deeper than one of those.
It also happens to have the bitchin’est guitar solo.
