Story of the Song: Dirty Old Town by Ewan MacColl

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on ‘Dirty Old Town’ by Ewan MacColl

Ewan MacColl wrote some matchless international hits (Alamy)

For a man who disliked American-inflected pop, Ewan MacColl wrote some matchless international hits. “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, covered by the Chicago soulstress Roberta Flack, is as graceful as any love ballad from the American songbook. Conversely, “Dirty Old Town” is smudged in postwar England’s blackened smokestacks and back-to-backs.

In fact, it was in Salford that MacColl was born plain Jimmy Miller (the name-change came in the mid-Fifties). After the Second World War, he co-founded a socialist drama project, Theatre Workshop, with his first wife, the radical theatre innovator Joan Littlewood. Their documentary play about the railway town, Landscape with Chimneys, braved the boards in 1950.