“Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty

Gerry Rafferty released "Baker Street" in February 1978, off City to City, his second solo album and his first after three years stuck in legal limbo following the collapse of Stealers Wheel. He wrote it while fighting his way out of those old contracts, shuttling between his family home in Paisley and London, where he'd crash at a friend's flat on Baker Street in Marylebone.

That restlessness is all over it, but what everyone remembers is the saxophone: a soaring, lonesome riff Rafferty wrote and Raphael Ravenscroft blew. Cut at Chipping Norton in 1977 and co-produced with Hugh Murphy, it went top three in the UK and the US and won an Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.