Pop Song 568 of 1000 'Dirty old town' Ewan MacColl 1949 cover by The Dubliners and The Pogues

Pop Song 568 of 1000 'Dirty old town' Ewan MacColl 1949 cover by The Dubliners and The PoguesShow more

Watch the MV of the Pogues version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s11BuatTuXk

The song was written about Salford, then in Lancashire, England, the area where MacColl was born and brought up. It was originally composed for an interlude to cover an awkward scene change in his 1949 play Landscape with Chimneys, set in a North of England industrial town,[1][2] but with the growing popularity of folk music the song became a standard. The first verse refers to the gasworks croft, which was a piece of open land adjacent to the gasworks, and then speaks of the old canal, which was the Manchester, Bolton & Bury Canal. The line in the original version about smelling a spring on “the Salford wind” is sometimes sung as “the sulphured wind”. But in any case, most singers tend to drop the Salford reference altogether, in favour of calling the wind “smoky”. (This is the case in MacColl's own 1983 recording of the song