SONG OF THE WEEK – NOSTRADAMUS

The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament starts this week.  I need to get my bracket filled out; and to psyche myself up, I picked Al Stewart’s “Nostradamus” as Song of the Week.

As you probably know, Nostradamus was a 16th Century Frenchman who is famous for publishing hundreds of quatrains in a book entitled Les Propheties (“The Prophecies”).  Nostradamus was born Michel de Nostredame (“Michael of Notre Dame’ – not to be confused with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, who was Quasimodo and not Michael) in 1503.  He initially worked as an apothecary and developed a reputation as a healer.  After his first wife and children died – presumably victims of the plague – he traveled throughout France and Italy, married a rich widow with whom he had six more children and developed an interest in the occult.

The occult was not looked upon as a good thing, especially by the Catholic Church, so to avoid persecution, the prophecies he wrote were intentionally obscure.  In the nearly 500 years since they were written his readers and the popular press have conjectured that he has accurately predicted such things as the London Fire of 1666, Napoleon, Hitler and World War II, the Kennedy assassinations, 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden, etc.

Who knows?  Maybe he did.  Most of his verses are simply too obscure to really know.

Nostradamus died in 1567 from complications of gout.

Skipping forward four centuries brings us to Al Stewart, who was born in Scotland in 1945 and was an influential figure in the British folk music revival of the 1960s.  He seemed to know everyone, perhaps because he was a host at the Les Cousins Folk Club in London where many soon-to-be-famous musicians got their start.  Paul Simon was his roommate for awhile and he knew Yoko Ono before she ever met John Lennon.  He reached that level of influence primarily because he was a fine musician and singer and an excellent songwriter.

His song writing is especially notable for its incorporation of literary and historic references.  For example, his best known song, “Year of the Cat,” mentions a morning from a Bogart movie and Peter Lorre contemplating a crime.  He wrote about the French revolution in “Charlotte Corday” and the escape of the last Shah of Iran during the Iranian Revolution in “Shah of Shahs.”  His “Sirens of Titan” is based on Kurt Vonnegut’s novel of the same name.

The historical bent to his writing is perhaps most obvious in Stewart’s 1973 album, Past, Present and Future.  In the liner notes, he states that he originally intended the album to have a song for each decade of the 20th Century.  It didn’t quite work out that way, but there are songs based on the life of Admiral Lord Fisher (“Old Admirals”); Warren G. Harding and his scandals (“Warren Harding”); Hitler’s purge of political opponents, known as “The Night of the Long Knives” (“The Last Day of June 1934”); the German defeat in Russia and Stalin’s subsequent gulags (“Roads to Moscow”) and British politics following the Second World War (“Post World War Two Blues”).

There was a major flaw in Al Stewart’s concept.  The 20th Century still had several decades to go in 1973.  He neatly solved that problem by finishing the album with “Nostradamus” – a look back at prophecies supposedly fulfilled and forward to the future events that may have been included in Nostradamus’s prophesies.

Stewart’s interpretations of those prophecies were based on the work of an English Scholar named Erika Cheetham, who published The Prophecies of Nostradamus: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow in 1965.  Many years ago, after hearing this song, I was initially quite impressed with Cheetham’s work.  I am not so impressed any more.  I won’t go into detail, but will simply say that her translation is not always accurate and her interpretations seem more geared toward selling books in the mid-1960s than really trying to understand what Nostradamus had written. (The same problems with trying to interpret the quatrains as applying to contemporary events may be seen in the images that are part of the YouTube video embedded below.)

One final comment and then I will quit.  This a long song – nearly 10 minutes.  There is a guitar break that is a good show of Stewart’s musicianship, but it could have been shortened.  The last two minutes or so are a semi-operatic vocalization (without words – so that the same as humming?) by a fine singer named Krysia Kocjan.  Perhaps that could have been shortened, too; though I think it gives the song a mystical quality that fits perfectly.

Now, on to basketball . . . .

Continue reading