My music legend da was proba bipolar b he didn’t get the he he needed D ably ut lp d
Gerry Rafferty’s daughter Martha tells Joh Dingwall of the Baker Street star’s tro and how she completed his last album
SONG legend Gerry Rafferty was bipolar according to his daughter Martha – but doctors failed to diagnose the condition.
Ten years after his death, her claim comes as she releases a remarkable posthumous album by the charttopping star.
Rest In Blue includes the song In Denial, in which Rafferty deals with his alcoholism head-on.
Another, Full Moon, concerns manic depression.
Martha, 55, believes her father’s alcoholism was a by-product of his inability to deal with the undiagnosed illness.
She said: “In the first song, he’s not shying away from the fact he is talking about his struggle with alcoholism.
“That’s obviously what the song was about. He had many long periods of abstinence but, like any addiction, he had relapses.
“He wasn’t shy about being completely autobiographical.
“The first track I decided to include was him singing about alcoholism as that was what he was struggling with in the latter part of his life.
“His mental health is covered in the second track on the album. The song is called Full Moon. He is really talking about his mental health in that song.
“I think if he’d had the right diagnosis and the right support for his mental health, he might have had a better chance of longer periods of abstinence but that wasn’t the case.
“He had depression and was probably bipolar. It was certainly something he struggled with.”
Paisleyborn singer Rafferty enjoyed success in 1969 with Billy Connolly in folk act The Humblebums before splitting as a duo in 1971.
Two years later, he scored a huge hit with Stuck in the Middle With You, with his band Stealers Wheel.
But it wasn’t until 1978 that Rafferty’s greatest success came, with the release of solo album City to City.
The album reached No1 in the US, toppling the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever, which had 24 weeks at the top of the chart.
It included the hits Right Down The Line, Home and Dry and Baker Street and sold six million copies.
Martha said: “He’d knocked Saturday Night Fever off the top of the charts where it had been for six months.
“That was when he was greeted with all the trappings of enormous success. There were the stretch limos, a big suite overlooking Central Park and invites to all the celebrity parties. “But he realised that wasn’t a life he wanted to step into. “He’d seen a lot of the casualties from that world and realised it wasn’t the life he wanted for me and his family. “So he made a conscious decision to step back and just focus on his music. I’m glad he stayed with me and his family in the UK.” A follow-up album, 1979’s Night Owl, also charted. Martha, who lived with her dad in Scotland, England and in the US and nursed him in his final days, said: “I was born in 1970, so I remember the very early tracks from the Stealers Wheel and The Humblebums eras. “My dad would sing them to me. I thought they were nursery rhymes or lullabies. “I didn’t realise he had written them until much later on. I had no concept of any of that. We didn’t even have a
TV until the mid-70s. Billy Connolly would come over and sing and play guitar in the early 70s when there was lots and lots of laughter in the house.
“He and my dad were friends and there was a deep connection that remained throughout their entire lives.”
Martha added: “Billy Connolly and my dad were both clearly very talented, but have been pigeonholed as Billy being the extrovert and my dad being the introvert.
“In actual fact, my dad was really funny. Billy said he was so funny he could make a cat laugh.
“Some of Billy’s early material was made up of jokes I’d heard my dad say around the house.
“My dad was incredibly funny and very outgoing and gregarious as well. This whole thing about him being a shy recluse is just not who he was.”
Having divorced his wife Carla in 1990, Rafferty continued to release albums up until 2009, by which time he was engaged to Enzina Fuschini.
The Italian artist had met him when he fled from St Thomas’s Hospital in
London, where he w treatment for alcoholis
The couple lived Poole, Dorset, but he from liver failure, at M in Stroud, Gloucester
Martha said: “Healthw a winding decline towa
“He wrote all his son I heard all of them in from as far back as I ca
“He sang and playe house and all his work and recorded at home.
“A couple of years afte a home studio togethe that I just wasn’t ready.
“Emotionally for me it after his death to do it j
“I had to get enoug share the songs witho emotionally involved.
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guitarist Hugh Clarke, to finish off the material.
Connolly was the first to hear the album and was quick to pay tribute, saying: “I’ve never heard Gerry sing so well. He never fails to amaze me.”
Martha said: “Billy was very touched by it, particularly a version of Wild Mountain Thyme on the album. They sang folk songs together back in the day so he’ll have heard him sing that song many times. That track touched a nerve with him.
“I called the album Rest In Blue as something can rest now.
“I’m very glad I was able to complete it. It was important for me because he’s one of these artists who is often termed as ‘underrated’.
“I get a bit fed up with that because he is one of his generation’s greatest singersongwriters – he deserves to be recognised for the great talent that he was.
“Who he was known for as a musician is very different from the man who is my father.
“My childhood wasn’t easy but looking back I’m grateful even for the difficulties. “I’ll be forever in his debt because he was just a wonderful person. I feel very grateful, not only to have inherited this great legacy but also to have had him as a father. “You never know how an album like this is going to be met but, so far, everyone has been really enthusiastic and complimentary. “This album means something my dad began has come to fruition. There’s a sense of completion.”