Folk For Christabel

 7th February 1970  Leyton Senior High School for Boys

Keith Brincorn remembers..

Without a doubt, the pinnacle of the series of Leyton School folk evenings. Our average attendance of 200 was doubled for this concert, featuring one of our heroes, Al Stewart, something of a folk superstar since the success of his second album .

This concert followed on from a national tour with the Third Ear Band, which received mixed reviews , one of the harshest critics being Al himself. He had found success but had lost his muse, and was now six months into a final career-stalling break-up with Mandi.

He certainly seemed rather subdued tonight, but also relaxed in an environment more intimate than that of the concert halls of the previous month. He appeared to be abandoning the script, spontaneously slipping into an obscure Dylan cover ' I don't know why I love you like I do,' recalling memories of his youth as an employee of 'W.H, Smug & Son'. He also opened with a sparkling, rare, live performance of Memphis Tennessee (which can be heard in its pristine glory on our Down River charity CD, advertised elsewhere on this website.

He didn't ignore his own compositions. 'In Brooklyn' and the entire 'Love Chronicles' were particularly memorable; and as an unusual encore, he recited 'Gethsemane Again' as a poem. But for your humble reviewer, the highlight of the show was another Dylan cover , 'It's alright, Ma, I'm only bleeding', sung with great feeling and featuring a stunning, extended instrumental tour de force. This song also contained interesting links with past and future, moreover, both revealing the lyrical inspiration for Al's song 'Life and Life Only', and appending a mysterious postscript to the epic, which would eventually resurface 3 years later as the chorus of 'Nostradamus'. Clearly Al's writer's block at this time wasn't total !

Supporting Al, as on his tour, were Mudge and Clutterbuck , whose lost classics 'Waiting for the Robert E. Lee', 'Memory Book', 'Lowly Low', and 'Rougemont Castle' may soon be available on CD via this website, because through this wonderful medium, we have made contact with Tim Clutterbuck, and located a wealth of unreleased material by this influential cult duo.

Our residents, Colin and Terry, respectively performed the self-penned 'Song to a Snowflake', and a powerful version of Mike Heron's 'Chinese White', amongst others.

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