Dirty old town
Ewan MacColl
RA, 2008
I met my love by the gas works wall
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
Kissed a girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
Clouds are drifting across the moon
Cats are prowling on their beat
Springs a girl in the street at night
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
Heard a siren from the docks
Saw a train set the night on fire
Smelled the spring on the smoky wind
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
From Ewan MacColl. (A version with Peggy Seeger)
About
He sang the song about his own home town, Salford, Lancashire, much to the annoyance of the town authorities.
The Pogues and the Dubliners have made it theirs, with fiddle, tin whistle and Uillean pipes (Irish bagpipes that you blow up with a bellows operated by your elbow), and people have assumed it is Irish. But Ewan MacColl was brought up in Lancashire. The third verse went ..on the Salford air ... originally.
It has a fourth verse
I'm going to make me a good sharp axe
Shining steel tempered in the fire
Will chop you down like an old dead tree
But I've never liked it. I prefer the gentle protest of how childhood memories and experiences get mixed up with the industrial wasteland. So I don't sing it. Not really fair on MacColl, but there you go.