{"id":27032,"date":"2014-07-27T00:03:14","date_gmt":"2014-07-27T05:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27032"},"modified":"2014-07-26T20:19:40","modified_gmt":"2014-07-27T01:19:40","slug":"al-stewart-goes-back-to-bournemouth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/27\/al-stewart-goes-back-to-bournemouth\/","title":{"rendered":"Al Stewart (finally) goes back to Bournemouth"},"content":{"rendered":"

A long time ago, in an English town most of you have never heard of…<\/a><\/p>\n

He has achieved huge success as a singer-songwriter and has \u2013 by his own reckoning \u2013 made and lost a million dollars three times.<\/p>\n

But although he long ago moved to California, Al Stewart remembers in vivid detail his life as a pop-obsessed teenager in Wimborne.<\/p>\n

He will be back in the town on Friday, August 1, for a sold-out concert at the Tivoli \u2013 and to visit his old home at Canford Bottom.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got a very nice message from the person who now lives in the house I grew up in,\u201d he told the Daily Echo<\/em> from California.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis lady invited me to look at my old bedroom. <\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

After leaving school, Stewart went to work at Beales in Bournemouth \u2013 not in the record department, but in the linen department.<\/p>\n

He also played guitar with The Tappers, who later backed a young Tony Blackburn as he attempted to become a pop star.<\/p>\n

When Stewart joined Dave La Kaz and the G-Men, Jon presented the band to the Echo<\/em>, claiming hyperbolically that the guitarist had written 40-50 songs.<\/p>\n

Bournemouth\u2019s music scene was thriving at the time.<\/p>\n

Manfred Mann were a weekly attraction throughout 1963.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He took 10 guitar lessons from Robert Fripp.<\/p>\n

But the biggest star of the local scene, he recalls, was Zoot Money, whose walk he would mimic behind the singer\u2019s back.<\/p>\n

In August 1963, The Beatles played six nights at the Gaumont cinema in Westover Road.<\/p>\n

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!<\/em><\/p>\n

Wearing suits, the pair managed to get backstage by telling the manager that they were from the Rickenbacker guitar company.<\/p>\n

Before long, they found themselves outside the band\u2019s dressing room.<\/p>\n

Having dropped the Rickenbacker pretence, they spent a few minutes chatting with John Lennon and trying his guitar.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople tend to forget that we weren\u2019t living in an age of mega-security,\u201d Stewart recalled.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t just walk backstage and talk to Justin Timberlake. In those days it was very lax.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not directly related to the story, but one of my favourite arrangements of “Year of the Cat”, in a live performance from 1979:<\/p>\n