TICKETS are still available for An Acoustic Evening with Al Stewart tonight, his first concert at the Grand Opera House, York, since October 2006.

The Glaswegian singer-songwriter will be accompanied by special guest guitarist Lawrence Juber, once part of Paul McCartney’s Wings and now a long-time Stewart associate.

As well as the familiar likes of Year Of The Cat, Time Passages and On The Border, Stewart will perform songs from last September’s Sparks of Ancient Light album, his follow-up to A Beach Full Of Shells in 2005.

The new numbers span at least 2,500 years of history in their tales of exotic locations and situations, tied to an underlying theme of certainty and uncertainty as his characters face the future. The album starts and ends with songs set in 1896. The opening Lord Salisbury examines Great Britain’s Prime Minister flinching from the oncoming events that threatening his policy of “splendid isolationism”, while the protagonist of the Like William McKinley finale awaits the rush of progress with calm resignation.

In between those bookends come (A Child’s View Of) The Eisenhower Years, a bouncy evocation of post-Second World War optimism; a freaked-out Elvis Presley undergoing a religious revelation as he witnesses Josef Stalin’s face morphing into Jesus Christ in a desert cloud formation in Elvis At The Wheel; and Hanno The Navigator sailing from Carthage off the end of the world to indescribable adventures 500 years before the Christian calendar.


Tickets for tonight’s 8pm gig cost £27.50 on 0844 847 2322 or grandoperahouseyork.org.uk