Dirty Old Town
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"Dirty Old Town" is a song written by Ewan MacColl in 1949, and made popular by The Dubliners.
The song was written in reference to Salford, Lancashire, England, the town where MacColl was brought up. It was originally composed for an interlude to cover an awkward scene change in MacColl's Salford-set, 1949 play Landscape with Chimneys, but with the growing popularity of folk music the song became a standard.
The song paints an evocative yet ultimately bitter picture of industrial Northern England, and presages to some extent the Angry Young Man school of the 1950s.
In Ireland, the song is often assumed to be about Dublin.
Notable renditions of the song include:
- The Spinners, in 1964
- Rod Stewart, on his 1969 first album, An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down
- The Pogues, on their 1985 second album, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, the rendition perhaps most familiar to modern audiences
- U2 (sometimes briefly performed in concert, often with drummer Larry Mullan Jr on vocals, such as on the album Live from the Point Depot from the Lovetown Tour)
- The Mountain Goats in 2001, on their album Devil in the Shortwave
- Tom Waits, sometimes played live for example on December, 31 1988 at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles.
- Simple Minds in 2003
- Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, on their 2003 EP Tell Balgeary, Balgury is Dead and as the title song of their concert film from the same year, Dirty Old Town
- Pixies' Frank Black, on his 2006 album Fast Man Raider Man.
- Lucero often covers this song live.
- Irish Descendants album We Are The Irish Descendants
- Jason DeVore of Authority Zero covers this song on his solo album, Conviction (The Smokehouse Sessions)
- Sons of Róisín on their album Whiskey in the jar
- St.John the Gambler, expat band from Seoul, Korea did a live rendition in Marrionner Park, Seoul on St. Patrick's Day, 2007
