Published on 25 Oct 2013
Al Stewart, Lord Grenville, Royal Albert Hall October 15th 2013
From the Facebook page:
You simply don’t want to miss Al Stewart with a full band, led by musical director Peter White, at the Royal Albert Hall in London – 16 May & the second night, 22 May 2015. They added the second night due to the high demand for tickets. They’ll perform the albums “Past Present & Future” and “Year of the Cat” in their entirety. Grab those tickets now.
Vicki L. Kroll talked to Al Stewart for the Toledo Free Press:
“I often say I only have two talents in life: I can rhyme just about anything, and I can read a wine list. And as it happens, these are the two things that you need to do my job,” he said and laughed.
Most know the artist for the jazzy, piano-driven “Year of the Cat” with its memorable sax and guitar solos and clever lyrics. The cool song was a surprise hit in 1977 during the disco era.
“We really didn’t see that coming,” Stewart said. “I purposely tucked [“Year of the Cat”] away at the end [of the album of the same name] because I thought it was the least commercial track. I had no idea. I tend to put the long songs at the end.”
[…]
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Stewart grew up in Bournemouth, England, telling everyone he was going to be a rock musician.
“I discovered to my horror when I bought an electric guitar that I really didn’t have a talent for it,” he recalled. “I was really hovering in total anguish at 17. Then at 18, along comes Bob Dylan; he pretty much saved my life because he couldn’t sing or play either, but, of course, he was able to unspool these vast amounts of words by, as one of my songs says, ‘throwing them like fireworks in the air.’
“And I thought: I can do that. I can’t do it exactly the same as Bob Dylan, but I get the principle: You buy an acoustic guitar and then you write hundreds of words in songs and turn them into stories. So I sold my electric guitar and became a folk singer.”
A long time ago, in an English town most of you have never heard of…
He has achieved huge success as a singer-songwriter and has – by his own reckoning – made and lost a million dollars three times.
But although he long ago moved to California, Al Stewart remembers in vivid detail his life as a pop-obsessed teenager in Wimborne.
He will be back in the town on Friday, August 1, for a sold-out concert at the Tivoli – and to visit his old home at Canford Bottom.
“I got a very nice message from the person who now lives in the house I grew up in,” he told the Daily Echo from California.
“This lady invited me to look at my old bedroom.
[…]
After leaving school, Stewart went to work at Beales in Bournemouth – not in the record department, but in the linen department.
He also played guitar with The Tappers, who later backed a young Tony Blackburn as he attempted to become a pop star.
When Stewart joined Dave La Kaz and the G-Men, Jon presented the band to the Echo, claiming hyperbolically that the guitarist had written 40-50 songs.
Bournemouth’s music scene was thriving at the time.
Manfred Mann were a weekly attraction throughout 1963.
Stewart knew Andy Summers, later of the Police, and remembers sitting in Fortes coffee shop off Bournemouth Square with star-to-be Greg Lake and Lee Kerslake, who would later become drummer with Uriah Heep.
He took 10 guitar lessons from Robert Fripp.
But the biggest star of the local scene, he recalls, was Zoot Money, whose walk he would mimic behind the singer’s back.
In August 1963, The Beatles played six nights at the Gaumont cinema in Westover Road.
Not only were Al Stewart and Jon Kremer there on the first night, but afterwards, they contrived a ruse to meet the band. Stewart tells the story on stage, while Jon Kremer set it down in his memoir Bournemouth A Go! Go!
Wearing suits, the pair managed to get backstage by telling the manager that they were from the Rickenbacker guitar company.
Before long, they found themselves outside the band’s dressing room.
Having dropped the Rickenbacker pretence, they spent a few minutes chatting with John Lennon and trying his guitar.
“People tend to forget that we weren’t living in an age of mega-security,” Stewart recalled.
“You can’t just walk backstage and talk to Justin Timberlake. In those days it was very lax.”
Not directly related to the story, but one of my favourite arrangements of “Year of the Cat”, in a live performance from 1979:
Published on 16 Oct 2013
Al Stewart YOTC Classic Album concert. Extended version of this classic song with Al mixing up the words for fun
This was a performance at Tawse Winery on June 18, 2011 for the winery’s 10th anniversary. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend, as I was at the opposite end of Lake Ontario that day.
H/T to Dave Nachmanoff, who is performing with Al in this clip.
It’s rather late notice, but if you’re an Al Stewart fan, you might want to visit Tawse Winery today for their 10th anniversary celebration:
Canadian music icon and friend Jim Cuddy returns to Tawse Winery along with “Year of the Cat” singer/songwriter Al Stewart, to help celebrate our 10th anniversary. This very special ‘al fresco’ concert promises to be the event of the summer, and one not to be missed!
Unfortunately, I’m at the other end of Lake Ontario today, visiting CFB Kingston.
I got tagged with this Facebook meme by David Stamper a little while ago, but I’m only now just getting around to addressing it. Here’s the description I was sent:
The rules: Do this if it’s fun. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what albums you choose.
So, because I’m too lazy to do it in Facebook, I’m doing it here (eventually, through the magic of Twitter, the link’ll appear in Facebook anyway). Roughly in chronological order:
I had to take it in chronological order to limit it to only fifteen, so no really recent stuff . . . but perhaps that’s fair as it’ll take time to show if more recent stuff will hold up to long-term listening. Not quite making it onto the list was Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis & Gil Evans.
This was an unusually musical weekend for me, as I’d heard “The Jailer’s Daughter” on Saturday, and I got to see Al Stewart and Dave Nachmanoff at Hugh’s Room in Toronto yesterday.
It was my first visit to this particular venue, and (as always seems to happen) it took me longer to find it than I’d hoped. I actually passed it twice before noticing it — construction and road closures again figured in the disruption — and found parking a block or so away. The show was scheduled to start at 8:30, so I thought getting there by 6:30 would be more than enough time to get a good seat.
I got the very last table . . . and that only because there’d been a last-minute cancellation. The table was right at the back of the room, so my photography plans were already gang aft agley.
The food was very tasty, the wine list was okay (I ended up with a Chateau des Charmes Gamay Noir), but I’m not as comfortable eating at a tall table: my toes barely touched the ground while sitting on the barstool.
Photography was a bit fraught, as I was too far back from the stage to use my fastest lens or, for that matter, my slowest lens without adding in a 2x teleconverter. In the lighting conditions, using a 80-200mm zoom and the teleconverter, I was surprised any of the shots turned out, frankly (using a flash would only have illuminated a few dozen backs-of-heads, not the stage). I got lots and lots of not-quite-in-focus shots, and lots of nice-composition-ruined-by-camera-shake (hand-held shooting at 1/15s is very much not best practice for photography). By the end of the night, I was so happy to put the camera down . . . even with a light-body SLR, hanging a long lens and extender off the front makes for an awkward and heavy object.
Powered by WordPress