An Irishman's Diary

THE SONG Dirty Old Townand the word "crack" have a lot in common. They both originated on the island to our east and were once considered thoroughly British. In fact, neither seems to have visited Ireland until the 1960s. But whether it was because they had been insufficiently appreciated in their homeland or they just enjoyed life here more, they soon became permanent fixtures in these parts: gradually going native, and even – in the case of "craic" – adopting Gaelicised name spelling.

At least Dirty Old Townstill goes under the title by which Ewan MacColl christened it. But as it celebrates a major birthday – turning 60 this year – the song retains very little of its original Salford accent. After decades of hanging around with the likes of Luke Kelly, the Dubliners, the Clancys, and the Pogues, the flat Mancunian vowels have been permanently rounded. It's difficult now not to imagine the canal by which the writer "dreamed a dream" as Dublin's Royal or Grand, even when you know it's neither.

This may be partly Salford’s own fault. The story goes that MacColl’s original version included the line “smelled a spring on the Salford wind”. This was an embarrassment to the town council, however. So the line came to be sung more often as “the smoky wind”: the universality of which also appealed to the many non-Salfordians who later covered the song and helped make that version standard.

Whether it's true or not, any embarrassment suffered by the council was understandable. Dirty Old Townis predominantly a song about industrial pollution (occasionally, singers have misinterpreted "Salford wind" as "sulphured wind", which is rather apt). And the affectionate tone that most singers lend to it ignores the keynote verse, in which the author dreams of making an axe to "chop you down like an old dead tree".

Somehow that anger gets lost, especially when an audience joins in. As Bruce Springsteen discovered with Born in the USA, people don't always read the small print in songs. So it is with Dirty Old Town, which derives its anthemic quality from the soaring second line of each verse. Combined with such poetic lines as "saw a train set the night on fire", this suggests hope rather than despair. At any rate, the song always makes people want to sing and in doing so lifts their spirits.

Aptly, in view of the subsequent geographic confusion, Dirty Old Townwas written to cover a scene change in a play. MacColl's first artistic impulses were towards theatre – typically of the socialist agit-prop kind. When the staging of his 1949 drama Landscape with Chimneyspresented the stage manager with a logistical problem, MacColl had to write a two-minute tune to cover the situation. Dirty Old Townwas begun on the spot, apparently, and finished within 20 minutes.

Such ease of composition belied the deep well of feeling from which the song emerged. Here’s MacColl, elsewhere, discussing the town of his birth: “Sometimes [. . .] I would gaze out over [Salford] with its endless streets of identical houses, its rampart church spires and its innumerable factory chimneys pointing accusing fingers at the sky. Even from a distance it looked moribund, a ‘place much decayed’, and yet I was stirred by it, filled with a disturbing kind of enthusiasm. In the shabby wilderness, with its mean streets and silent cotton mills looking like abandoned fortresses, in those geometrically arranged warrens and occasional clusters of bug-infested dwellings built in the reign of daft George for ‘the better class of artisan’, in that wasteland of rotten timbers and rusting iron, of a fouled river and an abandoned canal, a quarter of a million people are born, live and die. It is my Paris. [. . .] What is it I feel for this place? Hatred? Yes, most of the time, but not all the time [. . .]

“Sometimes lying in bed at night I am overcome with the awful fear that I will never escape from this place, that I am trapped and destined to live out my life in this awful ratpit. [. . .] Of course I hate it, I loathe it, I am scared of being devoured by it; and yet, though I live to be a hundred, it is unlikely that I will ever come to know any place as well as I know this one. That smoke-encrusted brick was among the first things I ever saw. I have absorbed this place through the palms of my hands; the soles of my feet have walked, run, slid, hopped, jumped and skipped along its flagstones and cobbles, through its roads and alley-ways, its detours and short cuts, its dumps, cinder-crofts and parks.”

Reading that, it seems like an even more egregious miscarriage of justice that anyone should think the song belonged to Dublin, or to anywhere other than Salford. But many people still do. While looking it up in The Irish Timesarchive, for example, I see that even U2 played it on the opening date of their 1993 Zooropa tour.

That gig was in Rotterdam, and when Bono introduced Dirty Old Townas a "traditional Irish song", the Dutch crowd cheered their approval. Maybe they were just excited that Larry Mullen, unusually, was taking the lead vocals. But incidentally, the show also featured that other well-known British cultural ex-patriot, according to the report's headline: "Where Ireland means craic and U2".