Al Stewart – in concert at the 1989 Cambridge Folk Festival – July 30, 1989 – BBC Radio 1 –
Al Stewart in concert tonight. One of the key players in the Folk Music revival of the 1960s, Stewart has achieved a long and enduring career as a singer-songwriter, whose music embraces a number of genres from Soft-rock to Psychedelia and who is probably best known here in the states for Year Of The Cat, which made its way to several radio formats in 1976.
Stewart developed a unique style of combining folk-rock songs with delicately woven tales of characters and events from history.
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 returned in later albums.
Stewart is a key figure in British music and he appears throughout the musical folklore of the revivalist era. He played at the first-ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970, knew Yoko Ono before she met John Lennon, shared a London flat with a young Paul Simon, and hosted at the Les Cousins folk club in London in the 1960s.
Stewart has released 16 studio and three live albums since his debut album Bed-Sitter Images in 1967, and continues to tour extensively in the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK. His most recent release, Uncorked, was released on Stewart’s independent label, Wallaby Trails Recordings, in 2009.
Stewart has worked with Peter White, Alan Parsons, Jimmy Page, Richard Thompson, Rick Wakeman, Francis Monkman, Tori Amos, and Tim Renwick, and more recently has played with Dave Nachmanoff and former Wings lead-guitarist Laurence Juber.
If you missed him the first time around, here’s a chance to get familiar by way of his appearance at the 1989 Cambridge Folk Festival, recorded and preserved for posterity by BBC Radio 1 on July 30, 1989.
