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Remembering Gerry Rafferty , rock's most reluctant star by Paul Rees (Classic Rock) January 04, 2018 Classic Rock  

By 1972, Rafferty had moved his family to Tunbridge Wells in Kent. It was to there that he gathered about him the musicians who would make up the first line-up of Stealers Wheel. Joe Egan also moved down south from Paisley; Roger Brown, an American who’d been a member of the Humblebums backing band, joined him, as did Rab Noakes who Rafferty had become acquainted with on the Glasgow folk circuit. Rafferty had a piano set up in the front room, around which he and Egan would write songs.

“That was a tremendously fertile period,” explains Noakes. “The house was full of songs the whole time, morning, noon and night. Someone would pick up a guitar and start singing and other people would join in. You wouldn’t call Gerry the leader of it, but it was his vision that brought the whole thing together.

“Gerry and I did a flurry of shows around the area in the summer of 1971. It was a two-voices-and-guitar kind of thing. He’s probably the person that I’ve loved singing along with more than anyone else. Yes, he was complex, but also deep, thoughtful and highly creative. He had a large degree of self-determination. Some people can find that kind of focus a wee bit difficult to deal with, but to me it was hugely inspirational.”

Not that this state of creative bonhomie was made to last. After the band were signed to A&M, the label insisted upon drafting in new musicians to work around Rafferty and Egan and also paired them with veteran producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, famed for their association with Elvis Presley. The revered duo’s working partnership with Stealers Wheel was not nearly so well defined. In particular, Rafferty was unsettled by Leiber’s and Stoller’s strictly old-school approach to making records.

“I think he viewed us as the enemy,” Stoller observed years later. “There was something very distasteful to him about us, what we represented to him, crassly commercial, what have you. Gerry was difficult to work with from the get-go.”

Nonetheless, propelled by Stuck In The Middle With You, Stealers Wheel’s debut proved to be both a creative and commercial success. The band was made to tour relentlessly behind it, prompting Rafferty to quit, claiming later that he had been on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He was persuaded to return to make 1974’s Ferguslie Park album, named after a notorious Paisley estate. With nine musicians backing Rafferty and Egan, it was lush and extravagant, but didn’t sell. A third album, Right Or Wrong, followed in 1975, but by that point Stealers Wheel was already over, broken on the wheel of their own internal bickering and the collapse of their management. The whole experience coloured Rafferty for the rest of his days.

“He was obsessed with keeping control,” opines Barbara Dickson. “And he didn’t trust anybody in the music business. By definition, if they were in the business they were a bunch of shits and he thought they were going to feck him over. His work and his world were very precious to him. Also, he saw himself as a serious writer, which indeed he was, but being a pop star is a Faustian pact. You cannot start dictating the terms two years into it.”

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