AL STEWART'S YEAR
If there’s one thing you should never ask Al Stewart to do, it’s choose his next single. The one drawback with Year of the Cat, he thought, upon its release in 1976, was that “I didn’t know there was a single on it.”
The one cloud hanging over his 1970 studio link-up with producer Gus Dudgeon, then riding high with Elton John, was that the resultant 45, “The News From Spain,” was destined to become his worst-performing record ever, “a long, slow, six-minute single released at Christmas time” that he reckons shifted 160 copies.
And it’s not his own records that mislead him, either. Back in 1965, Stewart found himself briefly sharing an east London house with, among others, a visiting Paul Simon.
The property was owned by Judith Piepke, “who was the parish visitor of Soho. She had an apartment in the east end, and she let folksingers stay there. I’d heard about this and I was measuring out the money because I was trying to live fairly cheaply (at the time). I went round and she said, ‘OK, you can have this room,’ which I had for two or three months until, one day, she came to me and said, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t have the room anymore, because there’s this American named Paul Simon and, every time he comes to England, he stays here and that’s his room.’
“So I got bumped out of the nice room into the little cupboard next door and Paul moved in. Now the advantage of this was, I got to hear him write a whole bunch of songs through the wall, and it was great. I’d hear him sing a line, there’d be a long pause and he’d try out three or four different words until he
