Coordinates | °′″N°′″N |
---|---|
name | Al Stewart |
background | solo_singer |
birth name | Alastair Ian Stewart |
born | September 05, 1945 Glasgow, Scotland |
origin | Wimborne, England |
instrument | Vocals, guitar, keyboards |
genre | Rock Folk rockPop Psychedelic Rock |
occupation | Musician, Songwriter |
years active | 1966–present |
website | AlStewart.com |
notable instruments | }} |
Al Stewart (born Alastair Ian Stewart, 5 September 1945) is a Scottish singer-songwriter and folk-rock musician.
Stewart came to stardom as part of the British folk revival in the 1960s and 1970s, 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", the title song 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 to which he has returned 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 before she met John 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 sixteen studio and three live albums since his debut album Bedsitter Images in 1967, and continues to tour extensively around the US and Canada, Europe and the UK. His latest release, is Uncorked, which was released on his independent label, Wallaby Trails Recordings.
He has worked with Peter White, Alan Parsons, Jimmy Page, Richard Thompson, Rick Wakeman, Tori Amos and Tim Renwick and recently has played with Dave Nachmanoff and former Wings lead-guitarist Laurence Juber.
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 compete at the 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 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.
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 "fucking". 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 into a car with fellow musician Ian Anderson and 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 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 Joseph Stalin's purges.
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."
The most amazing fact about this album is that Stewart had all of the music and orchestration written and completely recorded before he even had a title of any of the songs. He mentioned, in a Canadian radio interview, that he has done this for 6 of his albums, and he often writes 4 different sets of lyrics for each song. The hit single Year of the Cat was originally going to be about a British comic who had committed suicide, but this was vetoed by his record company.
Both albums reached the top ten in the US, with "Year of the Cat" peaking at #5 and "Time Passages" at #10, and both albums produced hit singles in the US ("Year of the Cat" #8, and "On the Border", #42; "Time Passages" #7 and "Song On the Radio", #29). Meanwhile "Year of the Cat" became Stewart's first chart single in Britain, 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.
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 highly political Russians and Americans (1984) and the upbeat pop-oriented Last Days of the Century (1988), which appeared on smaller labels and had lower sales than his previous works.
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 25th anniversary Glastonbury festival, taking to the same stage he had graced in 1970 at the first ever festival.
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.
Stewart and guitarist Dave Nachmanoff released a live album, Uncorked (Live with Dave Nachmanoff) on Stewart's label, Wallaby Trails Recordings, in 2009.
Stewart and Nachmanoff played the Glastonbury Festival 40th anniversary in June 2010 on the Acoustic stage.
Stewart sang a duet with Albert Hammond of Hammond's "It Never Rains in Southern California" on Hammond's 2010 album "Legend."
In 2011, Stewart sang a duet with his guitarist and opening act Dave Nachmanoff on Nachmanoff's album "Step Up". The song, "Sheila Won't Be Coming Home", was co-written by Stewart and Nachmanoff.
On occasion, 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.
Category:Scottish folk singers Category:Scottish male singers Category:Scottish rock singers Category:Scottish pop singers Category:Scottish singer-songwriters Category:People from Glasgow Category:People from Wimborne Minster Category:Scottish agnostics Category:British expatriates in the United States Category:1945 births Category:Living people Category:Old Wycliffians
de:Al Stewart es:Al Stewart fr:Al Stewart it:Al Stewart he:אל סטיוארט nl:Al Stewart no:Al Stewart pt:Al Stewart fi:Al Stewart sv:Al Stewart uk:Ел СтюартThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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