Al Stewart

Alastair Ian Stewart is a British singer-songwriter and folk-rock musician who rose to prominence as part of the British folk revival in the 1960s and 1970s. He developed a style of combining folk-rock songs with tales of characters and events from history.
Stewart has released 16 studio and four live albums since his debut album Bed-Sitter Images in 1967, and continues to tour extensively in the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK. He is best known for his 1976 hit single "Year of the Cat", from the platinum album of the same name. 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 to which he returned in later albums. His 2009 release, Uncorked, was released on his independent label, Wallaby Trails Recordings, and was followed up by Al Stewart and The Empty Pockets Live in 2024. Stewart has worked with Peter White, Alan Parsons, Jimmy Page, Richard Thompson, Rick Wakeman, Francis Monkman, Tori Amos, and Tim Renwick, and more recently has played with Dave Nachmanoff and former Wings lead-guitarist Laurence Juber.
Stewart appears throughout the musical history of the folk revivalist era. He played at the initial Glastonbury Festival in 1970, knew Yoko Ono before she met John Lennon, shared a London flat with Paul Simon, and hosted at the Les Cousins folk club in London in the 1960s.

Early life

Although born in Greenock, Scotland, Stewart grew up in the town of Wimborne, Dorset, England, after moving there with his mother, Joan Underwood. His father, Alastair MacKichan Stewart, who served as a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, had died in a plane crash during a March 11, 1945 training mission, six months before Al was born. Stewart attended Wycliffe College, Gloucestershire, as a boarder.
Of his musical beginnings, Stewart has said, "I grew up down the street from Robert Fripp. We used to take the bus together when he was 15 and I actually took 10 guitar lessons from him. He taught me all these jazz chords that I never used again in my life." Stewart learned songs by The Shadows, joined an instrumental group, and played village dances. When The Beatles broke in 1963, the band began incorporating vocals. As Stewart has said, "Around 1963-65 I was playing in local beat groups in Bournemouth." In August of 1963, the Beatles performed in Bournemouth. Stewart and a friend concocted a scheme to get backstage and meet the group by posing as representatives for Rickenbacker guitars. The ruse worked and they were ushered to the dressing room, where they found the Beatles between performances. John Lennon chatted with Stewart and his friend and let Stewart play his black Rickenbacker 325 guitar.
Stewart soon discovered the music of Bob Dylan. According to Stewart's later song, "Post World War II Blues" : "I came up to London when I was 19 with a corduroy jacket and a head full of dreams." Having bought his fourth 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 serve as master of ceremonies at the Les Cousins folk club on Greek Street, where he played alongside Cat Stevens, Bert Jansch, Van Morrison, Roy Harper, Ralph McTell, and Paul Simon with whom he shared a flat in Dellow Street, Stepney, London.

Career

Stewart's first recording was on Jackson C. Frank's debut album, 1965's Jackson C. Frank, playing guitar on "Yellow Walls". His first record was the single "The Elf", which was released in 1966 on Decca Records and included guitar work from Jimmy Page. Stewart and Page became friendly, with Stewart teaching Page open-D tuning and Page teaching Stewart octaves and harmonics. Stewart had learned the Irish ballad “Blackwaterside” from watching Bert Jansch; he showed Page how to play Jansch's arrangement of the song, which would eventually appear on the first Led Zeppelin album as “Black Mountain Side”.
Stewart signed to Columbia Records, 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.

Early albums (1967–1973)

Stewart's debut album, Bedsitter Images, was released in 1967. A revised version appeared in 1970 as The First Album with a few tracks changed, and the album was reissued on CD in 2007 with all tracks from both versions.
Love Chronicles 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 "fucking". It was voted "Folk Album of the Year" by the UK music magazine Melody Maker and features Jimmy Page and Richard Thompson 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 were later released as the two-CD set To Whom it May Concern: 1966–70.
In 1970, Stewart and fellow musician Ian A. Anderson headed to the small town of Pilton, Somerset. There, 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 breakup 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.
The fifth release, Past, Present and Future, 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 track in which Stewart tied into the rediscovery of the claimed seer's writings by referring to selected possible predictions about 20th century people and events. While it ran too long for mainstream radio airplay at that time, the song became a hit on many US FM and college radio stations, which were flexible about runtime.
Airplay helped the album to reach No. 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 G. Harding, Ernst Röhm, Christine Keeler, Louis Mountbatten, and Operation Barbarossa.

Alan Parsons years (1975–1978)

Stewart followed Past, Present and Future with Modern Times, 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.
In a highly positive retrospective review of Modern Times, AllMusic senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine described the album as "exquisite". Erlewine wrote that the album "establishes Stewart's classic sound of folky narratives and Lennonesque melodies, all wrapped up in a lush, layered production from Alan Parsons. The production gives epics like the title track a real sense of grandeur that makes their sentiments resonate strongly."
Modern Times produced Stewart's first hit single, "Carol". The album reached No. 30 in the US and received substantial airplay on album-oriented stations 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 and Time Passages, set the style for his later work and have been his biggest-selling recordings.
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."
Stewart had all of the music and orchestration written and completely recorded before he had a title for any of the songs. He mentioned in a Canadian radio interview that he has done this for six of his albums, and he often writes four different sets of lyrics for each song.
Both albums reached the top ten in the US, with Year of the Cat peaking at No. 5 and Time Passages at No. 10, and both albums produced hit singles in the US. In Canada, Year of the Cat reached No. 13 and Time Passages No. 8, and both albums produced hit singles there too with "Year of the Cat" No. 3, and "On the Border", #47; "Time Passages" No. 10 and "Song on the Radio", #29. Meanwhile, "Year of the Cat" became Stewart's first chart single in Britain, where it peaked at No. 31. It was a huge success at London's Capital Radio, reaching number 2 on their Capital Countdown chart. The overwhelming success of these songs on the two albums, 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.

1980s

Stewart then released 24 Carrots and his first live album Live/Indian Summer, with both featuring backing by Peter White's band Shot in the Dark. While "24 Carrots" did produce a No. 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. Despite his lower profile and waning commercial success, he continued to tour the world, record albums, and maintain a loyal fanbase. There was a four-year gap between his next two albums, the political Russians and Americans and the upbeat pop-oriented Last Days of the Century, which appeared on smaller labels and had lower sales than his previous works.