lastair Ian Stewart is a Scottish singer-songwriter and folk rock musician who rose to prominence as part of the British Folk revival in the 1960’s and 70’s. He developed a unique style of combining folk-rock songs with delicately woven tales of characters and events from history. 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 MC at the Les Cousins 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.
Stewart’s debut album, Bedsitter Images, was released in 1967. A revised version appeared in 1970 as The First Album (Bedsitter Images) with a few tracks changed, and the album was reissued on CD in 2007 with all tracks 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**king”. 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 (including The Elf) 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. The small fruit song from Zero She Flies was my first introduction to Al Stewart, when I came upon it as a track on a CBS compliation album ‘Fill Your Head With Rock’.
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 (e.g., “The News from Spain” with its progressive 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 rediscovery of the seer’s writings by referring to selected possible predictions about 20th century people and events.
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. 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. Stewart’s contract with CBS expired at this point, and he signed to RCA for the world outside North America. His first two albums for RCA, Year of the Cat and Time Passages (released in the U.S. on Arista), 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. 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 (“Year of the Cat” No. 8, and “On the Border”, 42; “Time Passages” No. 7 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.
In 1995, Stewart was invited to play at the 25th anniversary Glastonbury Festival. In May 2015, Stewart performed the albums Past, Present and Future and Year of the Cat in their entirety at the Royal Albert Hall with a band that included Tim Renwick, Peter White and Stuart Elliott, who had appeared on the original recordings. In April 2017, Stewart was given a Lifetime Achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, presented by Tony Blackburn, with whom he had once played in a band in Dorset.
