Ö÷²¥´óÐã

Those of you of a certain vintage will remember the era of the TV-advertised Compilation album. Still almost with us but not like the old days. Not for today's lily-livered consumer 20 Town and Country Greats, Moments In Love or The Shadows Do Dylan. And the stamp-em-out-rack-em-out labels that spawned these compilations, Ronco, K-Tel, MFP, now largely reside crestfallen in dwindling vinyl bins of charity shops up and down the land. My folks, like most folks of their day were quite partial to a cheeky wee TV-advertised compilation album and it is because of this that something life-changing happened to yours truly.

At some point in the late 1970s a compilation album titled Good Morning America appeared in the vinyl rack (a kind of wiry oversized toast rack that held around 24 crap albums) in our front room. A cursory listen revealed that my parents had suddenly acquired stunning taste in music. This shocking development offered only one course of action - to steal the album. Once lashed to the turntable of my Fidelity UA4 record player Good Morning America offered a world of utter wonder. There was At Seventeen Janis Ian's hymn to loneliness, a version of Van Morrison's cinematic romp through early 1960s Belfast Brown Eyed Girl, and Randy Edleman's short story / song Uptown Uptempo Woman. The singer-songwriter (stated hero of this vinyl slab) was clearly some kind of alchemist as I was transported out of the window of 16 Queen's Crescent Falkirk and into a vivid new world where colour was rendered in the tone of an acoustic guitar and the novelist's eye for detail. This was not "She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah", rather "I was wearing moleskin trousers and I had a cup of coffee with one and a half sugars and you cried when I mentioned that I might be going to work abroad in two weeks but cheered up when I bought you a bag of chips with some brown sauce and vinegar on the side and now let's get onto the second line of verse one". Rich stuff.

And every time I listened to that compilation album there was one moment that stopped me in my tracks:

On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
We go strolling through the park like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime

Even in its edited form Al Stewart's Year Of The Cat was so chock full of lyrical, harmonic, performative and technical detail it was impossible to imagine how it could be over in four or five minutes. Interviewing Al for Classic Scottish Albums it quickly became clear that this reductive art is to some extent God given. Every story, every anecdote was shot through with pin sharp detail. We were there in the bedsit with Al listening as Paul Simon wrote Richard Cory next door, there on the high seas with Lord Grenville and there as Yoko Ono filmed a considerable number of nude bottoms (you can hear that particular anecdote here as a wee extra). Al's words whether in conversation or in song have the wonderful effect of painting scenes and scenarios that seem to actually live and breathe. When I started to write songs and make records for a living, inspired in many ways by that TV-advertised compilation, I always tried to remember that one could aspire to the creation of something approaching another world, another space to walk around in. Songwriters don't always quite manage that trick but when they do, oh boy, look out.

the album creates new worlds every five minutes or so thanks to an amazing marriage of imagination, words, music and the incredible arrangements and production of the albums cast. Please enjoy our tribute.

Lots of treats for you still to come in this series. Keep the comments coming in!

Classic Scottish Albums featuring Al Stewart
Classic Scottish Albums is every Monday, 1405