Al Stewart

Alastair Ian "Al" Stewart (born 5 September 1945) is a Glasgow-born singer-songwriter and folk-rock musician who rose to prominence as part of the British folk revival in the 1960s and 1970s. He developed a unique style of combining folk-rock songs with delicately woven tales of characters and events from history.

Stewart is best known for his 1976 hit single "Year of the Cat", the title song from the platinum album of the same name. 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....(Read more at Wikipedia)

Links to Peel
Al Stewart made his name on the mid-1960s Soho folk scene, for a time working as compere at the Les Cousins club which featured many performers who would later appear on Peel's shows, among them Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Davy Graham, John Martyn, the Incredible String Band and the Young Tradition. Like them, Stewart began to develop a wider following in 1967-8, the time when Peel was doing his early Top Gear and Night Ride programmes for the BBC. Yet before becoming an acoustic singer-songwriter, he had played electric guitar in various bands in the Bournemouth area, including one whose lead singer was Tony Blackburn.

Like most of the artists mentioned above, Al Stewart moved from folk clubs to larger venues - concert halls, college and university gigs, rock clubs and festivals - and exposure on Peel's shows, along with other BBC appearances, helped him develop a wider audience. Peel liked Stewart's work enough to book him for seven sessions between 1968 and 1974. On his final session he was backed by a band including former members of Curved Air, and this indicated the less "folky" direction he would take in his later work. In 1975 he teamed up with Alan Parsons, a producer who specialised in the kind of elaborate studio productions which were highly popular in the 1970s, yet weren't to Peel's taste. Stewart's "Year of the Cat" was a hit in both Britain and the USA, where the singer's following rapidly grew. It was the biggest commercial success by an artist who had graduated from the 1960s British folk scene, but there is no sign that Peel ever played it. After that, Al Stewart's records continued to receive airplay on BBC shows and independent radio stations, "Year of the Cat" in particular being one of the major radio hits of its era - but they were absent from Peel's playlists.

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