The popular ballad Dirty Old Town is to be given a new lease of life — 75 years after it was first released. The hit song has always been a favourite of Irish music fans, given that both the Dubliners and the Pogues recorded and performed their own versions of it. However, those who might believe the song is about Dublin would be wrong — as it was actually penned about Salford in Greater Manchester.
Now the song is getting a revamp, with an orchestral accompaniment recorded in the city which inspired its lyrics. READ MORE - Tributes paid following death of The Dubliners' Barney McKenna's son Daragh READ MORE - Shane MacGowan's €10,000 parting gift was The Pogues legend's epic last wish Peggy Seeger (88), whose late husband Ewan MacColl wrote the song, has recorded the track with an accompaniment from the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and will perform an abandoned verse from it at a festival soon. Seeger, an American folk singer, said it was the first of MacColl’s music she heard him perform, after they met when she came to the UK in 1956.
She said: "I think he was infatuated with me at the time. He was 41, I was 21. And he brought me to Salford to show me where he had grown up.
"So I tied Dirty Old Town to Salford in an indissoluble knot. It told me about where he’d been brought up." The song, first released in 1952, went on to be covered by The Dubliners in the 1960s and again by The Pogues in the 1980s.
MacColl, the father of late singer Kirsty MacColl, also wrote Th.
