AL Stewart will play his classic 1976 album, At The Foot Of The Stage, in its entirety at York Barbican on Saturday night.

Scratch that, Al Stewart will play his 1976 album Year Of The Cat in its entirety at York Barbican on Saturday night, but it could have had the first title.

"Originally, the song was called At The Foot Of The Stage and was about Tony Hancock," recalls the Glaswegian singer-songwriter. "I saw him perform shortly before he died; he was cracking up on stage and pretty much everyone else in the room just thought he was being funny, but I could see he was cracking up and not well. Not long after, he committed suicide."

So how come the song and in turn the album title changed to Year Of The Cat? "The album was done in a very strange way; in fact I don't know if any other album was done like this one," explains Al. "I recorded all the music first before I wrote the lyrics; we had the entire record, all the multi-tracking, everything except for the vocals.

"The record company were horrified, saying 'Where are vocals?', but I said, 'Have faith; I can write lyrics'!" Storytelling folk-rock musician Stewart already had six albums to his name, such as his 1967 debut, Bedsitter Images, 1973's Past, Present And Future and 1975's Modern Times, so he had a point.

"What I did was play the backing tracks each day and write the lyrics to four or five versions of a song or 14 verses and then you pick the ones you like best," says Al. Hence the transformation from Stage to Cat.

Al has not been tempted to join the rush to issue every spit and cough from recording sessions as box-set anniversary editions of classic albums. "There do still exist totally different versions of the songs but they were left off for a reason," he says.

"You can over-think it, like a film director can. Probably my favourite movie is And Now My Love, a 1974 French movie, where the director [Claude Lelouch] wanted a different ending, but I don't want a new ending. It works as it is. Artists are notoriously bad at editing themselves but...I listen!"

On completion of Year Of The Cat, Al could sense his seventh album would be his most successful yet. "Every one of them had done better than the last, going up to 150,000 sales for Modern Times, so I predicted that it sounded the best one I'd done, and I thought 'this will sell 250,00 and make the Top 20," he says, but even he could not have foreseen what would happen next.

"It sold several million copies! It was a hit in places like Peru! El Salvador! Hong Kong! It touched a universal nerve, and that's not going to happen with any of my other songs," he says.

There are exceptions such as Bob Dylan or Paul Simon, suggests Al, but "most folkies, like Ralph McTell, Loudon Wainwright III, Steve Forbert, Don McLean, you usually get away with one or two hits and they become your calling card".

Where Al has joined one musical wave is in his decision to revisit Year Of The Cat in concert at the age of 69. "Well, I think it's quite popular in terms of lots of artists doing classic albums live, but when the promoter rang me and said 'Would you like to do it?', I thought, 'I don't know if I could it as normally I tour with just Dave [long-time collaborator Dave Nachmanoff], who's awfully good, but it would need more," he says.

"But once [guitarist] Tim Renwick was was able to do it too, I knew we could be like an acoustic Wishbone Ash. I knew Dave and Tim could do lead lines backwards and forwards, as we did some of the songs at Cropredy Festival last year."

An acoustic guitar trio works well, reckons Al, "Sometimes we sound like the Gipsy Kings, sometimes like a rock band," he says. "Doing stripped-down versions of the songs also highlights the lyrics, something that's close to my heart, as one of my bugbears with a full band is that the lyrics can get lost in the big halls."

Unless you stand at the foot of the stage!

Al Stewart, Year Of The Cat Tour, York Barbican, Saturday, 8pm. Box office: 0844 854 2757 or yorkbarbican.co.uk

Did you know?

Al Stewart played at the first ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970, worked with Yoko Ono pre-John Lennon and shared a London apartment with a young Paul Simon.