AL STEWART

Time Passages CHERRY RED

Undervalued follow-up to Stewart’s breakthrough asserts its aesthetic allure.

Often pigeonholed as the slightly less successful sequel to Year Of The Cat, 1978’s Time Passages in fact comes within a whisker of being an even better album. If its predecessor was the commercial breakthrough (and a sublimely crafted work of elegance and grace), this younger sibling noted the way it had married Stewart’s deft wordplay and Alan Parsons’ lush production – and doubled down. Sure, the title track is textbook application of the repeat-theformula maxim, right down to the interwoven sax and guitar motifs. Yet so plaintive is its core, so melancholy is Stewart’s muse with regard to love and mortality, that it bursts into a second life, asserting its own close rapport with beauty. Al landed another US Top 10 single and album, thus ensuring he’d never be labelled a one-hit wonder. Except, somehow, he still is.

Time Passages now bursts into yet another second life, perhaps to rectify that. Compiled with the same detail and care as the recent Year Of The Cat package, this comes as a three-CD/DVD set, with the original remastered by

Parsons, bonus tracks of demos and single versions, and a fulllength Chicago radio concert from October ’78. While, in some ways, the whole point of Al Stewart albums of this era is the ridiculously smooth yet cinematic studio flawlessness, these live readings offer much fascination.

His ensemble at the time, as borne out on the records, was a matchless fusion of form and function.

Whether singing of historical grandeur and name-dropping Robespierre in The Palace Of Versailles or catching the essence of what later generations might call a manic pixie dream girl on Almost Lucy, Stewart was in his imperial phase here. So confident were he and Parsons now that the smirkingly titled Song On The Radio shoehorned in a big sarcastic sax solo to appease the radio pluggers without forsaking its innate sonic deliciousness. A charming construct, very of its time yet strangely timeless, this enchantment is the cat’s pyjamas.