Description
Label Review.
1971 debut solo album remastered with 1 bonus track: So Bad Thinking (b-side). Esoteric.
Our Overview.
Gerry Rafferty was a popular music giant at the end of the '70s, thanks to the song ‘Baker Street’ and the album ‘City to City’. His career long predated that fixture of Top 40 radio, however by the time he cut ‘Baker Street’ Rafferty had already been a member of two successful groups, the Humblebums and Stealers Wheel.
Gerry Rafferty arrived in London in 1969 having replaced Tim Harvey alongside Billy Connolly in The Humblebums: Connolly was a musician and comedian who'd found that telling jokes from the stage was as appealing an activity to him and the audience as making music. He'd passed through several groups looking for a niche before finally forming a duo called the Humblebums with Tim Harvey, a rock guitarist. They'd established themselves in Glasgow, and were then approached by Transatlantic, one of the more successful independent record labels in England at the time, and signed to a recording contract.
For a while their different musical backgrounds provided a fertile counterpoint and yielded two collectors albums but when, in Gerry's words "Billy's jokes were getting longer and longer, the songs shorter and shorter", it was time to go their separate ways. They parted company in 1971. Transatlantic didn't want to give up one of its top money-makers, however, especially if there was a new career to be started.
Rafferty cut his first solo album for the label that year. "Can I Have My Money Back?" was a melodious folk-pop album, on which Rafferty employed the vocal talents of an old school friend, Joe Egan. The miraculous low-budget solo album Can I Have My Money Back? fulfilled the contract with Trans-Atlantic and set in progress a long, fruitful relationship with producer Hugh Murphy.