Al Stewart At Eighty — A Life In Song

What will you do on your eightieth birthday, assuming you live that long? On his, Al Stewart gave a concert at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, Pennsylvania with his long term support band The Empty Pockets. Although he will hopefully be with us for a good few years yet, or even a decade or two, this show was billed as part of The Farewell Tour.

Later in the month, he and the band will cross the Atlantic where they will perform one date in Amsterdam before returning to the British Isles. Their first concert on that date will be on October 1 at Bournemouth, a town which Al views with great affection, because it is the place he lost his virginity. Too much information? Not at all! So where do we begin?

Although he has a massive loyal fan base of three even four generations as can be seen from his concerts, Al is known almost solely to the general public for his massive 1976 hit Year Of The Cat from the eponymous album. This peaked at number 8 in the US charts, but could manage only 31 in the UK; still, its commercial success enabled him to relocate to the West Coast.

Al’s official biography was published by Neville Judd in 2002 with a revised, updated edition in 2005, but you don’t have to read that to learn about the man. Many of Al’s early songs are partly or totally autobiographical and contain information that does not appear on his Wikipedia page, so let’s begin at the beginning.

His 1973 album Past Present And Future contains an uptempo song called Post World War Two Blues which begins:

“I was a post-war baby in a small Scots town

I was three years old when we moved down south

Hard times written in my mother’s looks

With her widow’s pension and her ration books”.

Alistair Ian Stewart was born posthumously at Greenock, Scotland on September 5, 1945 to an English mother. The widow Stewart was taken in by Al’s paternal grandfather but Al was sent to boarding school in Gloucestershire. Having learned the guitar, he joined a band in Bournemouth playing with Tony Blackburn, who is better known as a DJ.

It was at Bournemouth that Al met The Beatles - by artifice - an anecdote he loves to recount to his audience, and it was in the pleasure gardens at Bournemouth that he had his first sexual experience.

This tale was recounted in his epic song Love Chronicles from the eponymous album which Melody Maker made its Folk Album Of The Year for 1970. The 18+ minute title track contains a solitary use of the F word, which although used almost routinely today including on TV, caused something of a controversy, especially in the United States.

By this time, Al was an established figure on the folk circuit. Back to Post World War Two Blues:

“I came up to London when I was nineteen

With a corduroy jacket and a head full of dreams

In coffee bars I spent my nights

Reading Allen Ginsberg, talking civil rights”.

In 1965, he was offered a weekly spot at a coffee house in London’s Soho; Bunjies is now long gone, but Al lived in Soho for a time which inspired the title track of his debut album, Old Compton Street Blues on Love Chronicles and Soho (Needless To Say) from Past Present And Future. Old Compton Street Blues is about a prostitute who like Al came up to London with “a head full of dreams” but unlike his musical career, her modelling career - well, join up the dots.

As well as Soho, Al lived in Kensington and wrote a morose song about it called Elvaston Place, which did not appear on a regular album at the time. There is a long story behind that, and although it was recorded before she was born, Erika Brett of The Empty Pockets knew the story behind the song and the anecdote that does not appear in it, namely Yoko Ono visited him there and recorded Listen, The Snow Is Falling for the first time, in that basement flat.

Al was never romantically involved with Yoko Ono but another female visitor was very special. Al met Mandi at the Central School Of Speech And Drama in early 1967. She makes her first appearance on his third album, Zero She Flies in Manuscript, the first song in the genre of historical folk-rock. It is only a passing reference, but the song mentions too the death of his grandfather, though it is not clear if this was his paternal or maternal grandfather.

Mandi also appears without being named in the song Clifton In The Rain, on the 1970 re-release of his debut album, Bed-Sitter Images; the title track is actually rendered as Bedsitter Images.

The year 1972 saw the release of Orange which contains three mentions of Mandi, again without her being named. You Don’t Even Know Me is fairly straightforward but The News From Spain and Night Of The 4^th Of May require some explaining. Although they appear in this order, the second song comes first and concerns a party at the home of John Martyn on May 4, 1969.

Although the album version contains a full arrangement, Night Of The 4^th Of May was often performed with solo acoustic guitar. The News From Spain about the end of their relationship is a truly beautiful if morose song that features a long piano solo.

Al was primarily a solo artist, but he also recorded with other musicians outside the studio. Year Of The Cat is primarily piano-based and was co-written with Peter Wood who died in December 1993 aged just 43.

Al writes almost all his own songs, but he has collaborated with other artists. My Enemies Have Sweet Voices is a poem by Pete Morgan he set to music, and is possibly the only song in history to have been co-written by an Englishman living in Scotland and a Scotsman living in England. He co-wrote The Loyalist with his acolyte Dave Nachmanoff. He has also based some of his songs on ancient melodies; for example, Palace Of Versailles is based on The Earl Of Salisbury by the Elizabethan composer William Byrd.

His 1980 album 24 Carrots was recorded with Shot In The Dark as his backing band. His acoustic sets have included work with Peter White, Laurence Juber and most of all with Dave Nachmanoff, and sometimes a bass player. For the past decade and more, he has been backed by The Empty Pockets who perform their own set before he comes on. The band includes husband and wife Josh Solomon on lead guitar and Erika Brett on keyboards and vocals. Al also ropes in a saxophonist for live performances.

After the massive Year Of The Cat came Time Passages in 1978 which includes a disguised autobiographical song. Ostensibly, Almost Lucy is about a female performer, but in reality it is about his relocation to the West Coast and the well-earned rewards of commercial success. The clue is in the title. Almost Lucy was written primarily as a guitar-based song but when performed with the band, Al duets with Erika.

Performing in Connecticut, last month.

After finally exorcising the ghost of Mandi, Al married late in life, to an American fan. They tied the knot in 1993 and divorced in 2005. He has two daughters by his first marriage. In December 2011, his youngest daughter made her musical debut on the cello. There has been little or no mention of her since. He remarried in 2020 and his new wife travels with him.

Although he hasn’t released a new studio album since 2008 and his songwriting output has slowed considerably, he continues to churn out the occasional song including Primo, about the boxer Primo Carnera which dates to around 2019.

A must to mention are Al’s epic songs, we have already discussed Love Chronicles, but there are three others: Nostradamus and Roads To Moscow from Past Present And Future, and the much later Class Of ’58.

The first two are both acoustic numbers which are performed either by Al solo or with a second guitarist who plays the lead. Roads To Moscow has always been an extremely popular historical number.

As might be suspected, Class Of ’58 is a personal song (largely). The version recorded for the 2005 album A Beach Full Of Shells runs to a mere 4 minutes, 10 seconds but the full single version is 13 minutes 10 second while the extra long version runs to 17 minutes, 19 seconds. The song harks back to his youth and his days playing with the beat group.

As we grow older, we tend to spend more time looking back than forward, but doubtless he is looking forward to visiting the land of his birth for very likely the final time. They play Glasgow on October 17.