IN 1965, 19-year-old would-be folk singer Al Stewart left his home in Bournemouth and headed for London, with, as he put it later, “a corduroy jacket and a head full of dreams.”
Ten years on, Al would be storming to the top of the US charts and, although that golden era proved disappointingly short lived, he has continued to produce enjoyable and enduring albums, all of which are collected on a new careerspanning box set The Admiralty Lights.
Right from the beginning Al seemed to have a happy knack of being in the right place at the right time, and, when he first moved to London, shared a flat with Paul Simon (he was in Other flatmates included Sandy Denny and the American folk singer Jackson C Frank and soon, like them, he was doing the rounds of the Soho folk clubs. Within two years he had an album out and by the early Seventies was a regular in the folk pages, touring regularly and putting out albums that garnered polite reviews but never troubled the chart compilers.
