20 March : Zero She Flies

The first time I recall hearing Al Stewart would be Year of the Cat, almost certainly on the Old Grey Whistle Test but I think the first of his albums I bought was Past Present and Future on the strength of Nostradamus. My memory says that I heard Nostradamus on an Annie Nightingale Radio 1 show.

I’ve never owned Zero She Flies (US release April 1970, March 1970 in the UK) although I have a couple of tracks from it on an old compilation double album. I was a little nervous about listening to it for this–I like Stewart’s work and saw him in Edinburgh 3 years ago, but this album is still relatively early in his career. I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did.

It shows his influences from the 60s folk world and, as Robert Fripp has said a couple of times Stewart has achieved success by ignoring everything Fripp tried to teach him as a teenager in Wimbourne. Small Fruit Song is a tune by a man intimately familiar with Davy Graham’s Anji. Burbling is a lovely little acoustic instrumental, and Black Hill could be a Jansch/Renbourn piece. But for all that, Stewart’s individuality is beginning to show lyrically. Gethsemane, Again, a song that sounds an awful lot like a folk club standard should, caught my attention and held it:

In Gloucester Cathedral, on Saturday night
I came to your flower show, blown like a kite
And I stood by the tombstones, and gazed at the lights
On the altar
And the horse-faced old ladies and tweedy-toned men
Of county society they came and they went
With pamphlets and leaflets of Christian events
For the fall

And the album has one of my favourites of his early work: Electric Los Angeles Sunset that I first heard on that compilation album I got sometime in the late 70s and played endlessly.

It isn’t as polished as his later work, but I’m not really bothered; in these troubled times it was quite the tonic.

Spotify, of course, and a YouTube playlist: