Review:

on 2011-03-10 CharlesMartel Said:

Al Stewart was an artist with whom I had a fleeting affinity in the mid to late seventies, somewhat coinciding with my late school years. Quite why this should be is something of a mystery as what I was otherwise listening to was very different from Al Stewart. He was a man who had his musical roots in the sixties playing Bob Dylan covers to a student and largely Bohemian audience in London. Gradually he gravitated towards writing thoughtful music, often with a historical theme and, in my view, this was the apogee of that style and his best album.

OK it is dated as hell, but give this man some credit, will you! He sings about the most unusual topics for a modern popular music singer-songwriter. On that you can't fault the man's courage. And if you ask me on this album, it pays off. Perhaps it was the fact that I always knew that, if I went to university, it would be to study history, that drew me to this album with its historical associations. That maybe why I got into Al Stewart around the time I did.

Each song is based on a person or an incident from one of the decades of the twentieth century, with the eighth being about the sixteenth century mystic-soothsaying astrologer Nostradamus. At the time of its release there was a rise in interest about Nostradamus as a result of a popular translation of his poems into English and claims that it predicted everything from Hitler to the assassination of JFK and the ultimate coming of the anti-Christ. Of course it was all specious bullshit, but back then there were (and probably still are) people who will believe any sort of quasi-millenialist crap thrown at them. These people are the flip side of the coin of those who believe in the literal truth of the Book of Revelations and expect at any moment to be carried bodily off to heaven before four ringwraiths come riding down to fuck us all over.

The seven tracks of the twentieth century, if we can call them that, are interesting for their subject matter as much as anything and some of them are quite obscure. Admiral Lord Fisher is the supposed subject of the 1900's "Old Admirals" about a long-serving seaman who feels left out by the shift from wooden sailing ships when he began his career, to coal-powered ironclads at the end. "Terminal Eyes" deals loosely with World War One. "Warren Harding" - song and President - represents the twenties, while Hitler's rise to power and the Night of the Long Knives is the subject of "The Last Day of June 1934". Inevitably World War Two is the subject of the forties, told through the eyes of a Red Army soldier who was betrayed by Stalin in "Roads to Moscow", a song no doubt inspired by Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago which came out around the same time. The austerity and hope of the fifties is told of in "Post World War Two Blues" while "Soho, Needless to Say" talks of the swinging sixties.

Stewart collaborated with a fine set of talented musicians in his albums. Rick Wakeman and Roger Taylor feature and lend some of their distinctive styles to the music. The only negative things about this are Al Stewart's voice and the fact that the sound is now really dated. The voice is a bit high pitched and has a tendency to degenerate into a feeble whine at times. The production is really outdated now and could definitely benefit from a remastered reissue.
Rating: 7/10