Pop Song 249 of 500 'Baker Street' Gerry Rafferty 1978 (using Tom Play)

Pop Song 249 of 500 'Baker Street' Gerry Rafferty 1978 (using Tom Play)

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 family home in Paisley and London, where he often stayed at a friend's flat in Baker Street. As Rafferty put it, "everybody was suing each other, so I spent a lot of time on the overnight train from Glasgow to London for meetings with lawyers. I knew a guy who lived in a little flat off Baker Street. We'd sit and chat or play guitar there through the night."

The resolution of Rafferty's legal and financial frustrations accounted for the exhilaration of the song's last verse: "When you wake up it's a new morning/The sun is shining, it's a new morning/You're going, you're going home." Rafferty's daughter Martha has said that the book that inspired the song more than any other was Colin Wilson's The Outsider (1956). Rafferty was reading the book, which explores ideas of alienation and of creativity, born out of a longing to be connected, at this time of travelling between the two cities.
In addition to a searing guitar solo, played by Hugh Burns, the song featured a prominent eight-bar saxophone riff played as a break between verses, by Raphael Ravenscroft. Rafferty claimed that he wrote the hook with the original intention that it be sung. 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," stated Ravenscroft. "If you're asking me: 'Did Gerry hand me a piece of music to play?' then no, he didn't."

However, 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' 1968 album Tomorrow Never Knows.

Ravenscroft, a session musician, was in the studio to record a brief soprano saxophone part and suggested that he record the break using the alto saxophone he had in his car.The distinctive wailing, bluesy sound of the sax riff on 'Baker Street' was a result of the tuning of the alto being slightly flat, and Ravenscroft later considered this to have been a mistake. He said, in an interview in 2011, that listening to 'Baker Street' irritated him because he was out of tune.

The saxophone part led to what became known as "the 'Baker Street' phenomenon", a resurgence in the sales of saxophones and their use in mainstream pop music and television advertisin