"Baker Street" | |||||||
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Italian single picture sleeve
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Single by Gerry Rafferty | |||||||
from the album City to City | |||||||
B-side | "Big Change in the Weather" | ||||||
Released | 3 February 1978 | ||||||
Format | 7-inch single | ||||||
Recorded | 1977 | ||||||
Studio | Chipping Norton Recording Studios, Oxfordshire, UK | ||||||
Genre | Rock, jazz-rock , Soft rock | ||||||
Length |
5:59 (album) 4:10 (single version) |
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Label | United Artists | ||||||
Writer(s) | Gerry Rafferty | ||||||
Producer(s) | Hugh Murphy, Gerry Rafferty | ||||||
Gerry Rafferty singles chronology | |||||||
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"Baker Street" is a song written and recorded by Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty. Released as a single in 1978, it reached #1 in Cash Box and #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it held that position for six weeks, behind Andy Gibb's smash "Shadow Dancing". Additionally, it hit #1 in Canada, No.3 in the United Kingdom, #1 in Australia and the top 10 in the Netherlands. Rafferty received the 1978 Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. The arrangement is known for its haunting saxophone riff.
In October 2010, the song was recognised by BMI for surpassing five million performances worldwide. It was awarded Gold Certification on two occasions, on 1 April 1978 and 22 July 2013 by the BPI in the UK.
Named after Baker Street in London, the song was included on Rafferty's second solo album, City to City, which was Rafferty's first release after the resolution of legal problems surrounding the formal 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."