1969 · Behind the Songs
A 1949 love letter to Salford, carried from the folk clubs to a rock singer’s debut album.
“Dirty Old Town” was never Rod Stewart’s song — it was Salford’s. Ewan MacColl wrote it in 1949 for Landscape with Chimneys, a production by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, and every image in it belongs to the town where MacColl was born and raised: the gasworks croft, the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal. By the time Stewart cut it for his 1969 solo debut, An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down, the song had already traveled far — the Dubliners carried it onto Drinkin’ and Courtin’ in 1966 and to Ireland’s Top 10 as a 1968 single, and the Spinners took it further still. The Pogues would later drag it through Rum Sodomy & the Lash (1985) — produced by Elvis Costello — to No. 62 in the UK, No. 27 in Ireland, and a Silver disc.
What makes Stewart’s version stick is how little he changes. The Dubliners’ Luke Kelly once introduced the song as a love song written to a place rather than to a woman, and Stewart sings it that way too — borrowing another town’s memories as if they were his own. He has never let it go: a Guardian review of his 2019 Manchester Arena concert notes he was still performing it fifty years after that debut album. These days, Salford City FC play it as their team walks out. Some songs are covers; this one is an adoption.