Al Stewart (born Alastair Ian Stewart, 5 September 1945 in Glasgow) is a British singer-songwriter and folk-rock musician.
Stewart came to stardom as part of the legendary British folk revival in the sixties and seventies, and developed his own unique style of combining folk-rock songs with delicately woven tales of the great characters and events from history.
He is best known for his hit 1976 single "Year of the Cat" from the platinum album Year of the Cat.
Though Year of the Cat and its 1978 platinum follow-up Time Passages brought Stewart his biggest worldwide commercial successes, earlier albums such as Past, Present and Future from 1973 are often seen as better examples of his intimate brand of historical folk-rock - a style he has returned to in recent albums.
Stewart was a key figure in a fertile era in British music and he appears throughout the musical folklore of the age. He played at the first ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970, knew Yoko Ono pre-Lennon, shared a London apartment with a young Paul Simon, and hosted at the legendary Les Cousins folk club in London in the 1960s.
Stewart has released nineteen studio albums between Bedsitter Images in 1967 and Sparks of Ancient Light in 2008, and continues to tour extensively around the US, Europe and the UK.
He has worked with Alan Parsons, Jimmy Page, Tori Amos and Tim Renwick and currently plays with Dave Nachmanoff and former Wings lead-guitarist Laurence Juber.
Stewart grew up in the town of Wimborne Minster, Dorset, England after moving from Scotland with his mother. After that, as he sings in the song "Post World War II Blues" (from Past, Present and Future): "I came up to London when I was 19 with a corduroy jacket and a head full of dreams."
Having bought his first guitar from future Police guitarist Andy Summers, Stewart traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic guitar when he was offered a weekly slot at Bunjies Coffee House in London's Soho in 1965. From there, he went on to compere at the legendary Les Cousins folk club on Greek Street, where he played alongside Cat Stevens, Bert Jansch, Van Morrison, Roy Harper and Ralph McTell.
It was at this time that Stewart also met a young Yoko Ono, who persuaded him to part with the only £100 he had in the world to put towards her film entitled No 4, a compilation of naked bottoms.
Though he narrowly missed opportunities to join early incarnations of Procul Harum and Led Zeppelin, Stewart went on to make his name as a solo star with his own material.
Stewart's first record was the single "The Elf" (backed with a version of the Yardbirds' "Turn into Earth"), which was released in 1966 on Decca Records, and included guitar work from Jimmy Page (later of the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin), the first of many leading guitarists Stewart worked with, including Richard Thompson, Tim Renwick and Peter White. Stewart then signed to Columbia Records (CBS in the UK), for whom he released six albums. Though the first four of these attracted relatively little commercial interest, Stewart's popularity and cult-following grew steadily through albums that contain some of Stewart's most incisive and introspective songwriting.
Stewart's debut album Bed-Sitter Images was released on LP in 1967; a revised version appeared in 1970 as The First Album (Bed-Sitter Images) with a few tracks changed, and the album was reissued on CD in 2007 by Collectors' Choice Music with all the songs from both versions.
Love Chronicles (1969) was notable for the 18-minute title track, an anguished autobiographical tale of sexual encounters that was the first mainstream record release ever to include the word "f***ing". It was voted "Folk Album of the Year" by the UK music magazine, Melody Maker, and also features Jimmy Page on guitar.
His third album, Zero She Flies followed in 1970 and included a number of shorter songs which ranged from acoustic ballads and instrumentals to songs that featured electric lead guitar. These first three albums (including The Elf) were later released as the two CD set To Whom it May Concern: 1966–70.
In 1970, Stewart jumped in a car with fellow musician Ian Anderson and headed to the small town of Pilton in Somerset. Here, at Michael Eavis's Worthy Farm, Stewart performed at the first ever Glastonbury festival to a field of 1,000 hippies who had paid just £1 each to be there.
On the back of his growing success, Stewart released Orange in 1972. It was written after a tumultuous break-up with his girlfriend and muse, Mandi, and was very much a transitional album, combining songs in Stewart's confessional style with more intimations of the historical themes that he would increasingly adopt (e.g. "The News from Spain", with its prog-rock overtones, including dramatic piano by Rick Wakeman).
The fifth release, Past, Present and Future (1973), was Stewart's first album to receive a proper release in the United States, via Janus Records. It echoed a traditional historical storytelling style and contained the song "Nostradamus," a long (9:43) track in which Stewart tied into the re-discovery of the claimed seer's writings by referring to selected possible predictions about twentieth century people and events. While too long for mainstream radio airplay at that time, the song became a hit on many U.S. college/university radio stations, which were flexible about running times.
Such airplay helped the album to reach #133 on the Billboard album chart in the US. Other songs on Past, Present and Future characterized by Stewart's 'history genre' mentioned American President Warren Harding, World War II, Ernst Röhm, Christine Keeler, Louis Mountbatten, and Stalin's purges.
Stewart followed Past, Present and Future with Modern Times (1975), in which the songs were lighter on historical references and more of a return to the theme of short stories set to music. Significantly, though, it was the first of his albums to be produced by Alan Parsons, and Allmusic regard it as his best. While it failed to produce any hit singles, it received substantial airplay on album oriented stations and reached #30 in the US, some 30 years before Bob Dylan would release an album of the same name.
Stewart's contract with CBS Records expired at this point and he signed to RCA Records for the world outside North America. His first two albums for RCA, Year of the Cat (released on Janus in the U.S., then reissued by Arista Records after Janus folded) and Time Passages (released in the U.S. on Arista), set the style for his later work, and have certainly been his biggest-selling recordings.
As Stewart told Kaya Burgess of The Times: "When I finished Year of the Cat, I thought: ‘If this isn’t a hit, then I can’t make a hit.’ We finally got the formula exactly right."
Both albums reached the top ten in the US, with "Year of the Cat" peaking at #5 and "Time Passages" at #10, and both title songs became top ten singles in the US ("Year of the Cat" #8, and "Time Passages" #7). Meanwhile "Year of the Cat" became Stewart's first chart single in England, where it peaked at #31. The overwhelming success of these songs, both of which still receive substantial radio airplay on classic-rock/pop format radio stations, has perhaps later overshadowed the depth and range of Stewart's body of songwriting. Stewart himself has frequently expressed disappointment with the quality of his recordings during this era, commercial success notwithstanding.
Stewart then released 24 Carrots (#37 US 1980) and his first live album Live/Indian Summer (#110 US 1981), with both featuring backing by Peter White's band Shot in the Dark (who released their own unsuccessful album in 1981). While "24 Carrots" did produce a #24 single with "Midnight Rocks," the album sold less well than its two immediate predecessors.
After those releases, Stewart was dropped by Arista and his popularity declined. Still, despite his lower profile and waning commercial success, he would continue to tour and record albums. There was a four year gap between his next two albums Russians and Americans (1984) (which was highly political) and the upbeat pop-orientated Last Days of the Century (1988), which appeared on smaller labels and had lower sales.
Stewart followed up with his second live album, the acoustic Rhymes in Rooms (1992), which featured only himself and Peter White, and Famous Last Words (1993), which was dedicated to the memory of the late Peter Wood (famous for co-writing "Year of the Cat"), who died the year of its release.
Stewart followed these up with a concept album, with Between the Wars (1995), covering major historical and cultural events from 1918 to 1939, such as the Versailles Treaty, Prohibition, the Spanish Civil War, and the Great Depression.
In 1995, Stewart was invited to play at the 25h anniversary Glastonbury festival, taking to the same stage he had graced in 1970 at the first ever festival.
Stewart bade farewell to the 20th century with Down in the Cellar in 2000, a concept album themed on wine. Stewart had begun a love-affair with wine in the 1970s when, he admitted, he had more money than he knew how to spend, and so turned to fine wines.
With the arrival of a new century, Stewart has returned to his inimitable brand of historical folk-rock. In 2005 he released A Beach Full of Shells, which was set in exotic places from First World War England to the 1950s rock'n'roll scene that influenced him.
In 2008, he released Sparks of Ancient Light produced, like his previous album, by Laurence Juber. Here he weaves tales of William McKinley, Lord Salisbury and Hanno the Navigator, without losing any of the wit and crispness of delivery that made him famous.
Stewart's historical work includes songs such as:
"Fields of France", from the album Last Days of the Century, about World War I pilots
"Old Admirals", from Past, Present, and Future, inspired by Admiral Sir John Fisher of the World War I Royal Navy
"Roads to Moscow", from Past, Present, and Future, about the Wehrmacht's invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II, with references to both Wehrmacht General Heinz Guderian and also to the German Tiger tank.
"On the Border", from Year of the Cat, refers both to the basque separatists in France and to the crisis in the former republic of Rhodesia
"In Red Square", from Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, about the Soviet Union
"Sirens of Titan", from Modern Times, a musical precis of Kurt Vonnegut's novel of the same title
"Lord Grenville", from Year of the Cat, about English sailor Sir Richard Grenville
"The Palace of Versailles", from Time Passages, about the French Revolution
"Charlotte Corday", from Famous Last Words, about the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat.
"Running Man", from "24 Carrots", about Nazi war criminals hiding in South America.
"Warren Harding", from Past, Present and Future, about the scandals of the foreshortened Harding administration.
On occasions Stewart has set poems to music, such as "My Enemies Have Sweet Voices" (lyrics by the poet Pete Morgan) on the 1970 album Zero She Flies. During his 1999 UK tour, Stewart invited Morgan to read the lyrics as he performed this song in the Leeds City Varieties Theatre show of 7 November 1999.
year of the cat
Last Days of the Century
Time Passages
On the Border
Lord Grenville
Nostradamus
