Al Stewart
Bed-Sitter Images

THE REVIEW

The singer-songwriter wave of the late '60s and early '70s, freely paraphrasing De Gregori, was something unrepeatable: the generation of Ralph McTell, Cat Stevens, Donovan, and by widening horizons to the other side of the Atlantic, one could also include Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot, Don McLean, Mickey Newbury, and a few years later, Jackson Browne and Tom Waits would officially take the stage. In short, it was a continuous explosion of pure talents, poets of the song and aesthetes of sound, each with their own attitude, personal vision of music, style, and unique and unrepeatable characteristics: unfortunately, many of these great artists never achieved real, stable, and continuous success, often overshadowed by infinitely less talented and deserving figures but infinitely more cunning and populist.

This fate also befell one of the most crystalline talents expressed by the golden generation of the British folk revival, namely Al Stewart, a Scotsman from Glasgow, an eclectic shaper of melodies and a volcanic lyricist who shares with me a great passion for contemporary history and its characters, which over the years will become a personal trademark and a constant source of inspiration for wonderful songs. It's truly a shame that in common mentality the '60s are musically associated with The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd for some; it's perhaps because I detest stereotypes that with this crude and simplistic equation, many great masterpieces of those years have been lost, relegated to an almost archaeological dimension: I wonder if in twenty years there will be a curious young person who will manage to discover Al Stewart, Donovan, or Ralph McTell, or if the legacy of these Artists will sadly die out over time.

His dazzling debut, "Bedsitter Images," dated 1967, significantly departs from his later productions: a great baroque folk-pop masterpiece, orchestral, lacking the predominantly folk-rock matrix that will distinguish him from 1969 onwards. This dimension particularly enhances the artisanal compositional refinement, thanks to the orchestrations curated by Alexander Faris, a renowned composer of film and musical soundtracks. Indeed, the album is strongly characterized by a very vivid musical and narrative style, immediate, where the theatrical background of the arranger is immediately perceived. The title track, which has recently been honored with a beautiful cover by Marc Almond in his "Stardom Road," is the perfect example with its emotional tension perfectly amplified by the masterful arrangement, which in the sumptuous ballad "Swiss Cottage Manoeuvres" and the velvety minuet "Cleave To Me" creates a blurred, dreamy, velvety atmosphere, a retro charm amplified by Al Stewart's voice, which in its slightly nasal tone somewhat closely resembles David Bowie's, with something of Donovan's light and engaging style. The orchestrations, however, are not the main component of "Bedsitter Images," but "only" an important and characterizing trait: some of the best episodes of the album are held by Stewart's lively acoustic guitar melodies, above all the fun and carefree vaudeville of "Scandinavian Girl" or the intimate sweetness of "Samuel, Oh How You’ve Changed", whose chords were well reused by Ralph McTell in his "Streets Of London," the subtle irony of a mellow "The Carmichaels", which shows attention to everyday life events and not yet to the great history and the autobiographical, elegant "Long Way Down From Stephanie", wonderfully framed by the trembling sound of a harpsichord, an instrument that will be dear to Elton John in his "Empty Sky," two years later, which owes much to the style of "Bedsitter Images."

For its style and the setting of its songs, "Bedsitter Images" is undoubtedly an unmistakably British album, yet Al Stewart already shows that he can look ahead, towards those Slavic influences, Balkan, which a few years later will fascinate Cat Stevens, and he does so with "Ivich", an instrumental infused with severe and cadenced drama, far from the opulence, albeit magnificent and never ostentatious, of the rest of the album, thus paving the way for "Beleeka Doodle Day", which ideally picks up the spleen of the initial "Bedsitter Images" in a completely different form, a long, intense, and gripping folk ballad, rich with that ancient charm much admired by Ritchie Blackmore, a visionary kaleidoscope of Dylan-style images rhythmically supported by an almost martial drum, a grand closing for a sublime album, which I am proud does not fall into the rankings drawn by pseudo-musical magazines of low caliber, but that truly made history, not fake, just at the level of "attire" like Elvis Presley, but offering a sound from which many will draw inspiration to give life to other great expressions of art, and especially an album of disarming beauty, to be obligatorily listened to before dying, seriously.