In 1975, the Scottish folk-rock singer Al Stewart was touring the southern states of the US, playing to crowds who hated him. He had been signed up as support to Linda Ronstadt on the basis of the success of Past, Present and Future, an album of songs about the highways and byways of history. When he promised them “country and eastern” and played “Roads to Moscow”, an eight-minute epic about Operation Barbarossa loosely based on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alabama audiences decided he was a communist.
While Stewart and his band warmed up for concerts, his piano player, Peter Wood, noodled away at a six-note fragment of melody that wormed its way into the singer’s mind. Stewart asked Wood if he could write some words for it. No, said Wood, he wanted it to be an instrumental. Stewart went ahead and wrote lyrics anyway. He remembered watching the British comedian Tony Hancock on stage in Bournemouth in 1968 complaining about his lot and saying that he wanted to die — and, Stewart wrote, “two thousand people laughing because it was Tony Hancock”. He called the song “Foot of the Stage”.
His record company pointed out that no one would remember who Hancock was — he had committed suicide soon after that performance — and airily rejected the track. Stewart fumed. As “a little bolshy” gesture, he recorded it again with new lyrics about an equestrian member of Britain’s royal family (“Princess Anne rides away … on the horse of the year”, he sang, extending the last word into a prayer). This time, he did not bother to share it.
But the melody was still stuck in his head. When his girlfriend left a book of Vietnamese astrology open at the page for the Year of the Cat, then just beginning, the words fitted the same four notes — and also contained the word “of”. Stewart was obsessed with Bob Dylan’s “‘of’ songs” — “Masters of War”, “Chimes of Freedom”, and presumably in 1975, “Simple Twist of Fate” — believing that the preposition made them sound “portentous”. When he watched Casablanca on television, an opening couplet came to him: “In a morning from a Bogart movie, in a country where they turn back time/ You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre contemplating a crime… ”
At Abbey Road studios, he and a group of musicians, including Cockney Rebel’s rhythm section, gathered to record a new album. What became its title track, “Year of the Cat”, started with a minute of Peter Wood’s piano introduction, honouring his intention of an instrumental, before Stewart sang his verses, now about a traveller taking the coach to Africa and becoming diverted into a romantic reverie in Morocco. (The hippie trail was well-travelled at the time, though Stewart was fonder, he says, of “Château Margaux and cotton sheets”.) Tim Renwick threw in an acoustic and then an electric guitar solo. Alan Parsons, who was producing, added a string section and “all of a sudden it was this big thing”. At the last minute, Parsons suggested a saxophone: over protests from Stewart, Phil Kenzie was summoned from an evening watching television, added his solos and went straight home.
The song, which helped the album (released in 1976) to a top five slot in the US charts, is perhaps too idiosyncratic to have been widely covered. Versions by Finnish singer Hector and Argentine singer Erica García are disappointingly faithful; an English-language cover by the French singer FR David even more so. Experimental band Psapp made a laptop-folk cover on impossibly cheap-sounding instruments, complete with growling mews and purrs.
Its most frequent performer is of course Stewart himself. “Year of the Cat” became his best-known song, though not necessarily his favourite, and a continuing source of income even though some of the bestselling editions were miscredited bootlegs that yielded no royalties. The music business, he shrugs wryly now, is a “din of inequity”.
It is rare to hear it with full instrumentation: in the early years after its release, as he rode the wave of its popularity, his pianists would extemporise on the opening, throwing in snatches of “As Time Goes By”. At the Royal Festival Hall in 1991 he introduced “a Russian pianist who knows not a word of English, and knows not much about English music, apart from the fact that she’s learnt one of my songs. Will you please welcome Miss Vilnia Chukovskaya!” The pianist was in fact Tori Amos, appearing years ahead of her Festival Hall debut in her own right (she was concerned about a possible visa infraction: hence the pseudonym). Stewart disguised her under the surname of Solzhenitsyn’s fellow novelist and dissident, Lydia Chukovskaya.
“Year of the Cat” is still an obligatory part of Stewart’s set, no matter how much he demurs. Nowadays he often performs solo or with one other guitarist, transposing the 88 keys effortlessly on to six strings, still turning back time.
What are your memories of ‘Year of the Cat’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Rhino; Siboney Oy; UMC (Universal Music Catalogue)
Picture credit: Redferns