Albums That Should Exist: Al Stewart - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: More Solo Versions, 1969-1973

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Al Stewart - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: More Solo Versions, 1969-1973

First off, it's important for you to realize this is only one piece of a larger picture. Early in 2022, I posted two albums of Al Stewart's early BBC sessions. One consisted of acoustic performances and the other one consisted of band performances. But then, later in 2022, the mega-box set "The Admiralty Lights" was released. And when I say "mega," I mean "mega" - it contains nearly 50 CDs! A handful of those are BBC performances.

So I've finally overhauled my Al Stewart early BBC albums. There was so much new stuff that I split the early acoustic album in two. Earlier today, I posted the revised first part. Most of the material on it is new. So if you had the old version I made, please toss that and replace it. Here's a link to the new version, which now deals with the years 1965 to 1969:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2022/02/al-stewart-bbc-sessions-solo-versions.html

Furthermore, the album I made of early band performances for the BBC has also been drastically overhauled. Most of what I had there I'll be putting on a different album instead, so this also is mostly new stuff. Here's the link to that:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2022/02/al-stewart-bbc-sessions-band-versions.html

Now, I'll talk about what's on this album here. A majority of the material comes from the mega-box set. But given how thorough that was, I was surprised that it missed some stuff. Eight of the 18 tracks here are still unreleased. Since he acoustic performances of the same song didn't differ that much, I've only included one version of each song. In some cases, that allowed me to pick the best sounding version. So most of this sounds pretty good, but the sound quality does vary a bit from song to song.

Around 1973 or 1974, it seems Stewart went from mostly doing solo acoustic performances to playing with a band. Plus, the BBC generally moved away from live studio sessions to playing more album versions. Thus, there's no further studio sessions that I know of after 1973. However, he did play some concerts for the BBC, and I'll be posting some of those in the future.

This album is 57 minutes long.

01 talk (Al Stewart)
02 Maybe Some Day (Al Stewart)
03 Bedsitter Images (Al Stewart)
04 talk (Al Stewart)
05 Manuscript (Al Stewart)
06 talk (Al Stewart)
07 In Brooklyn (Al Stewart)
08 Burbling [Instrumental] (Al Stewart)
09 Electric Los Angeles Sunset (Al Stewart)
10 Zero She Flies (Al Stewart)
11 talk (Al Stewart)
12 A Small Fruit Song (Al Stewart)
13 Blessed (Al Stewart)
14 Night of the 4th of May (Al Stewart)
15 Once an Orange, Always an Orange [Instrumental] (Al Stewart)
16 Amsterdam (Al Stewart)
17 Soho [Needless to Say] (Al Stewart)
18 Post World War II Blues (Al Stewart)