Coming up next, the story of a song that was written 4 times! Al Stewart and his 70s chart classic Year of the Cat - that ranked from late 1976 into 1977… and was produced by legend Alan Parsons who engineered Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was a bit of a question mark for a while. With this 70s classic Al showed a very different side of his music. He wrote 4 different sets of lyrics for the song, that’s how badly he wanted to get it right! He put this 70s classic together like a 5000-piece puzzle. Up next We try to piece it together to figure out what Year of the Cat actually means, with interviews with singer/songwriter Al Stewart and iconic producer Alan Parsons. NEXT on Professor of Rock.
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I’ve talked about it before on here but I always love a great song that is like a puzzle. A song that you have to really listen to carefully, almost like you’re decoding it. Al Stewart's classic 1976 song Year of the Cat is definitely one of those compositions. It was released in 1976 and peaked at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977, it also went to the top 10 in Australia.
The film Casablanca was a major inspiration for the song, which name-checks actors Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre. In fact, its the biggest hit about Casablanca in history, even more successful than Casabalanca’s own popular standard, As Time Goes By, It’s interesting how a lot of pop artists at that time were inspired by Humphrey Bogart, as Rupert Holmes was very close to using the actor as the main part of the lyric to Escape the Pina Colada song, changing the lyric at the last second of if You like Pina Coladas instead and then, of course, Bertie Higgins name-checked Bogie in his 1981 Yacht Rock classic Key Largo.
Al toured with a band called the Sutherland Brothers and their keyboardist was a guy named Peter Wood. Well, Peter played this really haunting piano part at soundcheck all the time… after about 14 times hearing it, Al Stewart approached him and told him it was wonderful and that he’d like to try and put lyrics to it. Peter told him he could so Al did it. He said writing the lyrics was a huge challenge. First, he came up with a set of lyrics about an English comedian named Tony Hancock, and the song was called 'Foot of the Stage.’ this comedian had committed suicide in Australia and Al Stewart saw him right before he went there and he could tell something was horribly wrote. so he wrote the chorus as your tears fell down like rain At the foot of the stage
The American record company told Al they’d never heard of Tony Hancock. So, Al said and I quote 'Well, that's annoying so I'll take the piss out of them.'