Al Stewart

Al Stewart, born in Glasgow in 1945, came up through the British folk revival and found a trick nobody else was really pulling off: folk-rock songs that tell stories about people and events from history, sung with a light touch and a novelist's eye. His first album, Bed-Sitter Images, arrived in 1967, and he was all over the scene in those years, hosting at the Les Cousins folk club in London, sharing a flat with Paul Simon, knowing Yoko Ono before John Lennon did, and turning up at the very first Glastonbury in 1970.

For the purists, the peak is Past, Present & Future from 1973, the album that gave us "Roads to Moscow" and the clearest statement of his intimate, history-book folk-rock. For everybody else it's "Year of the Cat", the 1976 hit off the platinum album of the same name, a smoky, cinematic record that made him a name far beyond the folk clubs. Time Passages followed in 1978 and went platinum too.

He never stopped. Across 16 studio albums and four live ones he has worked with Alan Parsons, Jimmy Page, Richard Thompson, Rick Wakeman and Tori Amos, among others, launched his own label, Wallaby Trails Recordings, with Uncorked in 2009, and kept on touring, and later records circled back to the historical storytelling he started with.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.