Donovan, Roy Harper, Nick Drake, Al Stewart. Could have been talking about Musketeers but we’re talking about troubadours. Dusky, loquacious minstrels with one hand holding a book of poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelly, and one hand clutching a bottle of sleeping pills, squatting in a bedsit in a leafy suburb of Dorset, telling stories about cats, old manuscripts, sunsets, prophets and obscure historical episodes over a glass of warm claret. Very clever stuff. Very tuneful and more often than not, very self-conscious. But where does Al Stewart sit amongst this little muster of awkward talents? On the bean-cushion? Crossed-legged on the carpet or on the mattress on the floor? Well neither. Al Stewart was a master storyteller, yes, a harbinger of ‘historical folk’, yes, but he was also the first person to say “fucking” on record all the way back in 1969 on an record he called ‘Love Chronicles’ (notable for its18-minute title track, an anguished autobiographical tale of sexual encounters). So this makes the Scotland-born singer-songwriter something of a maverick, nasally of voice, jaunty of delivery and as wordy as an anthology of poems. Naturally, it’s rather confessional, but unusually Stewart’s isn’t a life dogged by tragedy, bitterness and regret.
Famous for his 1975 hit, ‘The Year of the Cat’ (featured here) ‘A Piece of Yesterday’ ties in all the sprawling narrative threads of early albums like ‘Bedsitter Images’ with it’s throbbing orchestration and its conversational imagery to albums as compelling as fifth release, ‘Past, Present and Future’, featuring the song ‘Nostradamus’, a ten-minute track in which Stewart leafs through the famous seer’s writings by noting selected possible predictions about twentieth century people and events.
Heavy stuff? Not really. Stewart’s ticklish and dashing approach makes the sometimes contentious subject matter (sorcery, time, world war one, the royal navy, the former soviet union and Kurt Vonnegut, to name but a few) seem cheerily light by comparison.
‘Bedsitter Images’, ‘Samuel Oh How You’ved Changed!’, ‘A Small Fruit Song’ sound great without the distraction of modern sounds, but tracks like, ‘On The Border’, ‘Last Days of the Century’ and ‘Time Passages’ creak with the additional production values and it’s only by the time that songs like ‘Trains’ and ‘Night Train To Munich’ come rattling along that Stewart appears to have restored his former focus.
A hansom collection; interspersed with all the worst elements of mid-seventies production but redeemed by the sheer depth of knowledge of the tales recounted.