Search - The Best of Musikladen Live - Al Stewart (The Beat Club) on DVD

Primitive but a must for Stewart fans

James M. Shertzer | Winston-Salem, NC USA | 12/10/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Al Stewart's career in the U.S. peaked more than 25 years ago with his "Year of the Cat" and "Time Passages" LPs, both minor classics fusing pop, rock and jazz with sensitive, intelligent, nearly metaphysical musings on life, death and romance caught in the shuffle of time and the haze of history. Never a big, rock-arena megastar, Stewart made relatively few, scattered appearances in the states, usually in relatively small clubs. If you are a fan of those great LPs and were never able able to catch him back then, you'll enjoy this artifact from the era, primitive though it looks by today's standards. This DVD comes from a color videotape made in 1979, apparently for broadcast by a station in Bremen, Germany. Stewart never acquired the look, flash and polish required of good MTV material, and he's a little ill with at ease in front of the small crowd here in the studio. The camera crew isn't terribly creative, and the lighting is pretty amateurish (a shadow from the microphone sometimes is seen on Stewart's face) and Stewart and band look a bit rough and unkempt, in hippie clothings and hairstyles that were probably passe even back then. But the music is fairly well recorded (in two-track stereo), and the performances of these well-remembered classics (all, with one exception from the "Year of the Cat" and "Time Passages" albums) are very good and wonderful to see performed live. In some ways, the lack of technical polish in the DVD's favor - it's like having a treasured copy of a tape that might have been made if the band had shown up in those days in a club in your home town. Regrettably, it's also very short; apparently made to fit an hour TV time slot, the seven-song tape runs a brief 45 minutes."

Vintage Al

C. Murphy | Illinois United States | 03/04/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Highly enjoyable production from Al's commercially successful years. The only drawback is that the DVD ends much too soon."