In ‘Energy For The Nation’ a few months ago, I implied that I’d spare you my thoughts about Ralph McTell. And at the time I meant it. But a recent FB thread changed my mind – sorry.

Not Till Tomorrow – Ralph’s fifth album – was released in 1972 and for several years was part of the ‘wallpaper’ sound of my childhood. I can’t remember now whether both my sisters had copies or whether it was ‘passed down’, but I know they both listened to it. But it wasn’t just wallpaper. When no one was around to worry about me scratching the disc, I played it too. When I listen now, it’s hard to banish the idea that I’m somewhere between 10 and 12 and it’s a hot summer in the Thames Valley.

Having ignored the album for the best part of forty years, what made me suddenly return to it and – since it’s not on iTunes – order a CD? I’m not sure, but I think I had a loud thought about ‘the one about the tulips’.

Which is a sad and lovely piano song called “Sylvia”. Back in 1973 I had no concept of Sylvia Plath or Ariel or anything like. So I was left with a guy singing a song about a woman called Sylvia who was a) troubled and – because I was a romantic ten-year-old – beautiful and b) most likely dead. I probably heard it – wrongly – as an ‘if only you’d known me, I could have saved you’ lament.

Also misheard: I had no idea what “Zimmerman Blues” was on about because my ‘Bob phase’ – as yet unfinished – hadn’t started then.

In general, then as now, the more ‘English’, intimate songs spoke to me more than the more bluesy ‘American’ songs, though if you listen to “Birdman” you’ll know that, as well as being a good songwriter, Ralph McTell is a damn-fine geetar-player. “Nettle Wine” sounds – in a good way – like something that Brian Cant might have picked for a Camberwick Green for grown-ups. “Another Rain Has Fallen” is a lovely piece of English pastoral. “First Song”, I now realise, is one of my favourite love-songs ever. And “Barges”, even if it’s about the ‘wrong’ bit of Oxfordshire, is so nostalgic that I can smell the nettles and dock and cow parsley and get hay fever just listening to it.

And the album ends with  “Gypsy”, an epic song about the Roma. Even now, the 15- second guitar intro gives me goose-bumps.

For a better and more detailed account of how the album came into being, click here for Ralph McTell’s own website.

Ironically, I consigned Not Till Tomorrow to the past at precisely the moment when it would have chimed very well with my own life, taking solitary walks along the river and discovering Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and, inevitably, Sylvia Plath.

Which brings me back to ‘the one about the tulips’. Ralph, I can’t say whether you said it ‘for the many’ or ‘for the few’. But you said it for me, and now, in middle-age, I find you’re saying it for me again.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m sharing this.