LONDON – Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty died yesterday aged 63 after a long illness.
Rafferty wrote the multimillion-selling hit Baker Street , which more than 30 years after its 1978 release, still netted him an annual £80,000.
Rafferty was born in Paisley, near Glasgow, to an Irish father and a Scottish mother.
After leaving school he worked in a butcher's shop and at the tax office. At weekends, he and a school friend, Joe Egan, played in a local group, the Mavericks. Later he and Egan quit the group and Gerry joined Billy Connolly's outfit, the Humblebums, a Clydeside folk act.
The Humblebums' first LP, on the folk-oriented label Transatlantic, predated Gerry's involvement, but he and Connolly were the group for the albums The New Humblebums (1969).
Despite US releases and John Peel sessions for the BBC, there was little reaction and tensions grew between the two. It was Rafferty who urged Connolly to go it alone as a comic.
Going solo himself his career really got going with his first album, Can I Have My Money Back? , which established him as a singer-songwriter, bringing folk fans with him and promoting his songs.
In 1972 he rejoined Egan to form Stealers Wheel, a soft-rock group. Their eponymous debut album climbed the US charts and included the million-selling Stuck in the Middle With You , memorably resurrected for a key scene in Quentin Tarantino's film Reservoir Dogs (1992).
A second solo career began with the album City to City . Fuelled by the smash-hit single Baker Street, it sold five million copies and Rafferty became a millionaire "overnight".
Refusing to go on tour in America, he played a few British dates and recorded a successful follow-up album, Night Owl (1979), which yielded further hits: Days Gone Down, Get It Right Next Time and the title track.
Rafferty had always been a heavy drinker and later in life he spiralled into alcoholism, putting on weight, which made him unhappier.
His wife, Carla, finally left him in 1990, though she remained a source of dependable help, in contact until the end.
Rafferty eventually moved to California, near his granddaughter Martha, who worked for him.
In 2008 he left America, helped from wheelchair to plane by a woman he met in a video store. They rented a house in Ireland, until taxis and doctors refused to attend him.
That August, a five-day binge at a five-star London hotel ended when the management had him admitted to hospital. He vanished in the night. After this story appeared in the Daily Mail Rafferty announced that he was "extremely well", living in Tuscany and preparing a new album. But he never made another album. – ( Guardian service)
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