Al Stewart - Dark Side (1991)

To complete this short series of Al Stewart rarities we have an actual fan-produced album that was put together in 2004, and even though it is composed completely of songs recorded between 1989 and 1991, only one of them has so far appeared on my mopping-up collections. 'Dark Side' and 'Fantasy' are lost demos which were intended for a follow-up to 'Last Days Of The Century', but the Enigma label went bust before it could be completed, while 'Call Of The Wild', 'Waking Years', 'Kirabati', ' I Swam', 'Told You So', 'Long Way Home' and 'Rest In Peace' were all recorded at Peter White's 4 Track Garage Studio in 1990 or 1991, so they could well have been on the cards to be added to 'Dark Side' and 'Fantasy' for a new album. 'Sailing Into The Future' was written by Stewart, Peter Wood and Jim Cregan, and recorded in 1989, while 'Four Of A Kind' was a Peter White tune that Stewart re-worked and recorded the same year. The original disc also included the unreleased 'The World According To Garp', but as we know that this was a '24 Carrots' leftover from 1980, and it's also been included on a previous post, I've removed it so that all these songs were recorded between 1989 and 1991, and could therefore have been intended for that second Enigma album. That concludes this series of Al Stewart posts, which I hope goes some way to introducing him to a listnership that might have written him off as an old hippie folk-singer, when he is actually much, much more than that. 

Track listing

01 Dark Side
02 Sailing Into The Future
03 Call Of The Wild
04 Waking Years
05 Kirabati
06 Fantasy
07 I Swam
08 Told You So
09 Long Way Home
10 Four Of A Kind
11 Rest In Peace