Gerry Rafferty – Baker Street

The Session Musician Who Got £27 For Pop’s Most Famous Sax Solo

Released in February 1978, Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” arrived during a pivotal moment in the Scottish singer-songwriter’s life. The single climbed to number three in the UK and held the number two spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for six consecutive weeks, blocked from the top only by Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing.” What audiences didn’t know was that this smooth, melancholic masterpiece was born from three years of legal hell and regular overnight train journeys between Scotland and London.

The chart story gets even more intriguing when you consider the competition. “Baker Street” reached number one on the Cash Box Top 100 and topped charts in Canada for four weeks, as well as hitting the summit in Australia and South Africa. The parent album City to City would actually knock the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack from the top of the Billboard 200, ending its 24-week reign. By October 2010, the song had been certified for surpassing five million performances worldwide. Rafferty would win the 1979 Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically.

Rafferty wrote the song while trapped in contractual disputes following Stealers Wheel’s breakup in 1975. For three years he couldn’t release any music, instead making endless trips between his family home in Paisley and London, where he often crashed at his friend Iain Campbell’s flat just off Baker Street in Marylebone. The lyrics paint a picture of alienation and exhaustion: winding your way down Baker Street, dead on your feet, drinking the night away in a city desert that’s got no soul. Campbell, a fellow musician, was the real-life “rolling stone” who never settled down. Rafferty’s daughter Martha later suggested the book The Outsider by Colin Wilson, which explores themes of alienation and creativity, also influenced the writing.

The recording sessions at Chipping Norton Studios in Oxfordshire during 1977 produced something unexpected. Rafferty had originally written the famous eight-bar riff intending it to be sung or played on guitar. Guitarist Hugh Burns tried it but it sounded weak. Co-producer Hugh Murphy suggested saxophone after hearing a Joni Mitchell record. They brought in session musician Raphael Ravenscroft, who arrived to record a soprano sax part but suggested using his alto sax instead, which he grabbed from his car. That decision created what Billboard would later call the most recognizable sax riff in pop music history. The solo sparked what became known as the “Baker Street phenomenon,” a massive resurgence in saxophone sales and their use across pop music and television advertising throughout the late seventies.

“Baker Street” was the second single from City to City, Rafferty’s first solo release in six years. The album also spawned hits “Right Down the Line” and “Home and Dry,” but nothing came close to the impact of “Baker Street”. For Rafferty, this was both vindication and curse. After years of commercial disappointments with the Humblebums, his solo debut Can I Have My Money Back?, and even Stealers Wheel, he finally had undeniable success. But the sudden fame thrust him deeper into the image-obsessed music industry machine he despised.

The song’s influence rippled across decades. Slash cited it as an inspiration for his “Sweet Child o’ Mine” guitar solo in 1987. Dance group Undercover took it to number two in the UK in 1992 with a club remix. Foo Fighters covered it in 1998. The Blockbusters TV host Bob Holness became the subject of a bizarre urban legend when NME writer Stuart Maconie created a spoof claiming Holness had played the sax solo. The myth spread so widely that when both Holness and Rafferty died, “Baker Street” trended on Twitter. Meanwhile, Ravenscroft earned a standard union session fee of £27.50 and spent decades fielding questions about a solo that, as he admitted in 2011, irritated him because it was slightly out of tune.

Rafferty rarely performed live after 1983, choosing to watch his family grow instead. He continued recording, but nothing matched City to City‘s commercial peak. Years of heavy drinking took their toll, leading to his death from liver failure in January 2011. Yet “Baker Street” endures, played millions of times on radio worldwide, earning royalties long after its creator’s passing. Rafferty once reflected with characteristic modesty on his most famous creation, comparing it to classics like “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” acknowledging he’d achieved every songwriter’s ambition: creating at least one song regarded as timeless.