‘Salford’s poverty was carved out of stone’: the incredible story of Dirty Old Town

“Ewan MacColl didn’t want to be from Salford, from what he thought of as a filthy, industrial place,” says Peggy Seeger, the late singer-songwriter’s widow. “He used to insist later he came from Auchterarder, Perthshire, and I never could understand that because it wasn’t true. His parents were Scots and he wanted to be a Scot, too. But he was born in Salford.” You can hear the folk legend’s love/hate relationship with his Northern birthplace in his much beloved 1949 song Dirty Old Town, which he originally wrote – at speed – to cover a scene change in his lost play about Salford: Landscape with Chimneys.

Seeger is speaking to me from her home in Oxford ahead of a BBC Radio 4 documentary celebrating the song’s 75th anniversary. Presented by Salford-born musician-turned-DJ Mike Sweeney, it delves deep into MacColl’s conflicted roots. It’s a song which hymns the romance of a kiss “by the gasworks croft” and catches the “spring on the smoky wind”, yet yearns to demolish the scene with an axe “like an old dead tree”.

Born in 1915 as James Henry Miller, MacColl (best known for the romantic ballad The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, famously covered by Roberta Flack and inspired by his love for Seeger) was the son of socialists and became a communist in his teens. MI5 had a file on him by the time he was 17.

The lively Seeger, 89, says that MacColl “made a move on me the day after we met” back in 1956. Seeger was only 21 and McColl was over 40 and still married to his second wife, Jean Newlove, mother of their young son Hamish. But Seeger remembers the folk singer as “a quick mover… Three to four days after we got together he took me back to Salford because he wanted me to see where he came from, or a part of him that he had left behind, or what made him.”

American-born Seeger recalls the shock of “Dickensian” Salford in the mid 1950s. “The cobbled streets. The gaslight. Rows of little chimneys smoking. I’d never seen anything like it. I grew up in Washington DC and black women did all the manual work in our house. I’d seen the black slums, which seemed more temporary. Salford’s poverty seemed carved out of stone designed to survive the crack of doom.”

From a radio studio at Salford Media City, 76-year-old Sweeney remembers his hometown as “the biggest village in the world – everybody knew you. I’m not romanticising – we fought for each other. But there was poverty, violence, domestic issues. Men were the bread-winners and top of the food chain, and women and kids suffered. MacColl loved it for its working-class support network and the weird beauty of the factories and the smoke – but he hated it for the fact that the poverty and lack of opportunity could grind you down. We had polluted rivers and one park.

“In towns like Salford back then, you did all your courting outside,” says Sweeney. “You would go to coffee bars, stand outside for a snog. It was quite innocent, and MacColl’s poetry captured the sweetness of that. I remember kissing my first girlfriend, Betty, against the brick wall of the flats we lived in. MacColl evoked those moments of becoming a young man or woman in those outdoor, in-between spaces.”

“As a young boy, Ewan was a night wanderer,” Seeger tells me. “He loved walking at night. Sometimes we would go out together and walk around our big suburban block.” She pauses. “He wanted to live there and not in the dirty old town but he also wanted to be where his son Hamish was, and Hamish was somewhere between seven and nine when he came to live with me. He adored Hamish and leaving him was a huge wrench.” 

It also turned out that Newlove was pregnant with MacColl’s second child – later the pop star Kirsty – when he left. “It was a huge mess,” stresses Seeger. “Believe me, that dirty old town of his was left in his past. Although we did often sing the song together on stage, alternating verses. He really should have sung it alone but he realised that, as a man 20 years older, he had to keep me interested and included. It worked. We were work soulmates.”

A couple of days after Seeger and MacColl began renting their first duplex together in Surrey, she recalls her horror when MacColl’s mother turned up the doorstep to move in with them. “His relationship with his mother was one of grief and guilt. She adored him and she couldn’t forgive him for leaving his son and coming to live with me. She fought with me and not with him.”

Seeger still shudders at the idea that many people still think of Dirty Old Town as an Irish song. She doesn’t like the dairy stomp of the Dubliners’ 1968 cover, even though they made a smash hit of it. And she tells me that the Pogues’ 1985 version (so popular it would become the title of the band’s Greatest Hits album) also sits on the shelf of cover versions of their material which she and Ewan nicknamed their “Chamber of Horrors”. The Irish versions are too rowdy and communal for Seeger’s taste because they lose “the loneliness of Ewan’s original”.

Sweeney admits he first heard the song via a 1963 cover by Liverpudlian band The Spinners who added a line referencing Salford. Urban myth has it that MacColl was forced to remove this line by Salford council. Sweeney can’t imagine MacColl would have stood for this. “I think he’d have given them a two-word response.”

Seeger captures that loneliness and muddy nostalgia perfectly in the gorgeous new orchestral version she has recorded for the BBC documentary. Like an old Salford stone, her voice has its cracks. When she steps into a word now, you can feel the footprints reminding you she’s passed that way a hundred times before – and yet Seeger is also a singer who’s always looking out of the windows of songs, seeking new views.

Younger fans of the song will have grown up hearing it on the football terraces. The trend started after Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr recorded a version with Celtic’s Jimmy Johnstone in 2004. In 2018, Liverpool fans changed the lyrics to honour their club’s Dutch defender, Virgil van Dijk (“He can pass the ball/Calm as you like”). But it’s still sung mostly in Manchester, and Simple Minds performed it to unify the crowds in the immediate wake of the 2017 Manchester bombing.

“Ewan would have loved that,” says Seeger. “Dirty Old Town is a song that expresses how most of us feel at some points in our lives,” says Sweeney. “We all strive for better but feel frustrated by life. We all live in an environment that isn’t quite what we want. There are new and stressful societal problems which link you back into what MacColl was writing about in the 1940s.” He leans forward on his DJ desk, gold chain swinging. 

“I hate to bang on about being working-class, but if that’s what you are then even now you will face discrimination. But gentrification has made Salford a better place to live. It’s not perfect. But I think the working class kids here are probably better for it.”

Archive on 4: Dirty Old Town at 75 is on Radio 4 on Saturday at 8pm