Ralph McTell shares his memories with Laura Davis ahead of his gig at Pacific Road Arts Centre

BILLY CONNOLLY tells a story that he was once hopelessly lost in the capital with Ralph McTell. “But you wrote streets of London!” he joked to the disorientated guitarist.

McTell was only 24 when he first recorded the ballad, which wasn’t released as a single for another five years.

Selling 90,000 copies a day at its peak, the song reached Number 2 in the UK charts and won him an Ivor Novello Award and a Silver Disc.

Over the past four decades it has been covered around 200 times.

McTell, who is performing at Wirral’s International Guitar Festival tonight, says he never tires of the piece.

“It’s literally changed my life and I don’t just mean from a financial side of things because, like a lot of young men, I signed my song away,” says the 64-year-old musician.

“It sounds strange because I’ve been on the road a long time, but it’s just beginning to sink in that it is quite a nice thing to have been able to do.”

He is remarkably modest about his creation’s success.

“I think it would have been written by somebody at some point because if you play those chords in sequence, even if you don’t play the melody, you hear the Streets of London come out,” he explains.

“People are very reverential towards it. There’s a tangible change in the room when you play it. That’s why I don’t like to play it at the end because I don’t want people to think that everything else I’ve done isn’t as important as that.”

McTell’s first instrument was a plastic mouth organ – “a present from Father Christmas”. He saved up for a real one.

“All little boys in the 50s seemed to have harmonicas and I was inseparable from mine,” he recalls.

“I loved everything about it, the way it looked, the way it shined, the print on it, the sound...”

Then his grandfather gave him a one-string (top E) fiddle he’d made out of a cigar box and a broom handle, which he played using a virtually hairless bow. From there McTell progressed to the ukelele and finally on to the guitar. Until he could afford a Gibson J45, he settled on a Harmony.

“A lot of guys swear by the classics like a Martin, which is the American king of guitars I suppose, but a lot of Blues players didn’t have much money and the Gibson was a kind of working man’s guitar,” says the musician, who lives in London with his wife Nanna. They have three sons, a daughter, and an ever-increasing number of grandchildren.

“There was something extra in the sound to my ear that endeared me more to it, and there’s a slightly shorter scale length which means the frets are just milimetres closer together and my hand fits it better.”

He doesn’t read music and learned by listening to LPs purloined from friends and damaged from picking up and replacing the needle over and over again while he copied the phrases he heard.

Then an acquaintance of his younger brother loaned him an album called the The Country Blues. Track three was Statesboro Blues by American guitarist Blind Willie McTell.

“I think the blind guitarists are among the best the world has ever produced,” he says.

“Their focus is totally on the sound and that means that their fingering and the way they would play would be unorthodox and thankfully that has produced styles that wouldn’t have come from a sighted player.”

Blind Willie gave the young guitarist a new surname (he was born Ralph May), but his first came from the world of classical music – English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

McTell only discovered this fact recently, when talking to his 93-year-old mother. His father Frank left the family in 1947.

“She said my dad worked as a labourer at some point on his estate and when I was due he said he liked the name and I think he also liked the music, but I never knew my dad really,” he explains.

“That was a revelation to me.

“I think it’s pronounced ‘Rafe’ Vaughan Williams, but that’s not very Croydon.”

McTell’s songs are often inspired by real people, everyone from poets and other musicians to boxers.

“It’s easy to become cynical but I really do believe in people and their my spiritual guide that I don’t get from religion,” he says.

“I want to pass that on by finding something poetic in them and in their lives – it’s a tribute really.”

Despite being uncomfortable with religion in the traditional sense, Christian hymns have been a great influence on McTell’s writing.

“We’re blessed with some of the most beautiful hymn tunes in the world – lovely chord changes, they’re joyful and melancholy, they change every bar,” he explains.

“They have influenced a lot of the chord structures to my songs because I’ve absorbed them, but I don’t have to believe the stories that they tell.”

RALPH MCTELL is performing at the Pacific Road Arts Centre, Birkenhead, tonight. Tickets £16 (£14 concs), www.bestguitarfest.com