AL STEWART

Year Of The Cat: 45th Anniversary Box Set CHERRY RED

What’s new, pussycat? Live albums and are new mix are added to this classic.

That acoustic guitar solo gives way to that electric guitar solo, which in turn gives way to that alto sax solo, as the piano holds the melody together and we ponder Al Stewart’s romantic tale of deciding to stay in Africa a little longer with a mysterious woman. Is there a more perfect coda in the history of soft rock than the showboating play-out of Year Of The Cat? Exquisite, swoon-inducing, deeply unfashionable, it’s perhaps a Marmite moment, its class and politeness anathema to rioting punks. But if you’re sold on its beauty it never, ever grows old.

Actually, it turns out it does, as this is the album’s 45th anniversary. This limited edition box set adds a new

5.1 surround sound mix – so you hear the deftness of Alan Parsons’ production even more clearly – plus two live sets from the accompanying tour, tracked in Seattle in October ’76. There’s also a contemporaneous Abbey Road track, Belsize Blues, wherein Al sings of getting flooded at his home in north-west London.

Yet these extras are just a side-dressing to what remains the main event: Stewart’s seventh album, recorded in early ’76, and the one that radically reshaped his career from wordy folkie to US radio favourite. He’d worked with Parsons before, on Modern Times, but this was where the marriage of Stewart’s feathery songs and gentle vocals and Parsons’ cinematic arrangements really blossomed. A Top 5 platinum-seller in the US, its mildmannered yet come-hither atmosphere reveals secrets gradually. Tunes which seem negligible at first covertly drive hooks into you, the instrumental passages abound with astuteness, and Stewart sings of quiet love, quaint history and, in Broadway Hotel, a rendezvous narrated with the sly sleight of hand of a brilliant short story writer. On The Border, flecked with flamenco, is a paragon of understated drama. And then that consummate, elegant title track just flows, an easy river, feline groovy. The masterpiece of both singer and producer.