Dirty Old Town

Written by Ewan McColl about about Salford, the town 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, 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 and 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”. 

The Pogues' version of the song is played during the team walk-on at Salford City FC.

This is the first multi-tracked song to be used at Low Fell Ukes Zoom Sessions during lockdown… hopefully the first of many to make sessions more interesting.

Music in Appendix 1 page 50