When I take a break from lawn mowing I like to play a bit of guitar.
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Surprisingly, the two activities do have something in common despite the deafening clatter and blundering destruction of one and the calming rhythm and dexterity of the other.
Lawn mowing and guitar-playing both require living in the present moment.
You can’t flick through #castlesofscotland or #gentleminions Tik Tok reels while negotiating a tricky bend around a flower bed.
Similarly, you can’t mull over rising interest rates and past recipe disasters while attempting Here Comes the Sun in picked fingerstyle.
Also, both activities require a warm-up before getting down to business.
Before I mow the lawn I fiddle with the carburettor choke and before I play anything on the guitar I need to get my fingers working.
My go-to warm-up tune is a fingerpicking chord progression I first learned when I was about 15 or 16.
Ralph McTell’s Streets of London is an irresistible thing for acoustic guitarists.
The melody is contained within the chords so you don’t even have to sing over them for anyone to recognise the tune.
The sequence is challenging but when you get it right, the notes dance like cascading water across the strings.
More than this – McTell’s sequence in the key of C contains more than a passing reference to Pachalbel’s majestic 300-year-old Canon in D; the chords rise and fall in a circular journey before they return to the opening chord of C to begin all over again.
They become a mantra in which time disappears.
A lot of people will know Streets of London from the lyrics, which have become a hymn to the sufferings of the lonely, the forgotten and the homeless who populate the streets of all our cities.
Have you seen the old man
in the closed down market
Kicking up the papers
With his worn out shoes?
When it comes to the chorus:
So, how can you tell me you're lonely
And say for you that the sun don't shine?
Let me take you by the hand
And lead you through the streets of London
Show you something to make you change your mind:
the words and melody join so perfectly it becomes an incantatory experience.
The lyrics can be a bit sentimental and simplistic, particularly the reminder that others have it worse.
But this all disappears under the overwhelming seduction of the music.
Reason always surrenders to emotion when combined with a beautiful tune.
The song was first released on McTell’s second album Spiral Staircase in 1969, but was only known in British folk clubs until it was released as a single in 1974.
The song exploded and rose to number two in the pop charts, at one point selling 90,000 copies a day.
It became an anthem for street buskers, was taught to schoolchildren across the world in choirs or as poetry and as a lesson in empathy, and it has been covered by more than 200 other artists.
McTell is now an ambassador for the Streets of London charity, which supports the London homeless.
The song earned McTell a fortune but it became a curse as well as a blessing.
Despite a catalogue of more than 300 songs, McTell was only ever really known for this one single composition and at 77 he is still expected to play it at every appearance.
Nevertheless, its power remains undiminished.
It speaks of the fundamental human fear of being left alone and every listener connects to it in their own way.
Every time I play it I hold images of the homeless and the sick living in cardboard boxes, in doorways or under bridges from my years travelling the streets of London as a motorcycle courier in the 1980s.
It has never become outdated because its message, sadly, is still with us.
British DJ Gwen Ever, who became homeless in the 1980s, summed it up on the 50th anniversary of the song’s release as a single:
“Streets of London should be a marker of a time that’s gone past – but it’s not”.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News
Columnist