Leaving London

"Last night the Troubadour was so full they barred the door. And I sang a song she knows quite well. But it wouldn't take too long to make up another song for a lonesome and a last farewell ..." With a nice reference to the folk club/coffee bar on the Old Brompton Road Tom Paxton's Leaving London is a beautifully bittersweet number in which he endures our "cold, hard town" while hoping to get enough money to travel home to his love assuming she remembers who he is. Tom may never have been as photogenic as Bob Dylan or Phil Ochs but many of his songs are right up there with the very best in the folk or any other world. He could write the most tender of love songs and the most scathing of political songs, and better still sometimes those lines got blurred ...