A song about a tourist who misses his bus, built on a melody written ten years earlier about a comedian nobody in America had heard of, named after a page in somebody’s girlfriend’s astrology book.
Here is what the year of the cat is, who the woman in the market is, and why four of the six and a half minutes have no singing in them.
The Short Answer
A man on holiday somewhere warm meets a woman in a market, goes with her, and wakes the next morning to find his tour bus has left without him. He decides to stay. The title refers to a real zodiac sign, and the whole song is about the appeal of stepping out of your own life for a while.
The Story Behind the Song
The melody dates to 1966, ten years before the record. Al Stewart had watched a performance by the British comedian Tony Hancock, whose routine about being a complete loser who might as well end it all was getting laughs from the audience.
Stewart’s reaction was that the despair was real rather than performed, and he wrote a song about it called “Foot of the Stage.” Hancock died two years later. The song was never recorded.
When Stewart brought it to his American label a decade on, they had never heard of Hancock and asked for a rewrite. He came back with a set of lyrics about Princess Anne called “Horse of the Year.” They asked for another rewrite.
Where did the title come from?
A book lying open. Stewart has said a girlfriend had a book on Vietnamese astrology, and it happened to be open at the chapter on the year of the cat.
The cat is one of the twelve signs of the Vietnamese zodiac, occupying the position the rabbit holds in the Chinese one. The most recent had run from February 1975 to January 1976, so Stewart wrote and recorded the song during an actual year of the cat, which was luck rather than planning.
Who is the woman?
Never identified, and deliberately so. She appears in a market in silk, takes the narrator away, and the song never gives her a name, a nationality or a motive.
Stewart layers film references over the encounter. There are nods to Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, which he added after watching Casablanca, and the effect is to place the whole thing in a location that exists only in movies. The song is not set anywhere real, which is why it has never dated.
Why does the narrator stay?
Because the bus leaving decides it for him. That is the quiet joke in the song: he does not choose to abandon his life, he simply fails to get back in time, and then finds he is comfortable with the outcome.
It is a fantasy about the removal of responsibility rather than about romance. The woman is the occasion. The missed bus is the subject.
Who wrote the piano part?
Peter Wood, and it got him a co-writing credit. Stewart heard Wood playing a chord progression repeatedly during soundchecks on a 1975 tour and noticed it resembled his old melody. He asked whether he could use it, and then gave Wood half the song rather than a session fee.
The riff is the first thing anybody recognises about the record, so the credit was earned rather than generous.
Why is so much of it instrumental?
Because Alan Parsons produced it. The album version runs six minutes and forty seconds, and over four of those are instrumental, including an extended sequence of solos moving through cello, violin, piano, acoustic guitar, distorted electric guitar, synthesizer and saxophone.
Guitarist Tim Renwick initiated the transition that takes the song from acoustic to electric to saxophone. It was recorded at Abbey Road in January 1976, and it sounds like it: this is a studio record made by people who had time and an orchestra’s worth of options.
A single edit trimmed it to four and a half minutes for radio. The full version is the one people know.
How successful was it?
Released in July 1976 in Britain and October in the United States, it reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1977. The album of the same name made the American top five.
Stewart’s 1978 single “Time Passages” charted marginally higher at number seven, and almost nobody remembers it. This is the record that still gets played, on classic rock and folk stations alike, and it is the one he is introduced by.
Why does it work?
Because it is completely unhurried and knows exactly what it is selling. The arrangement is luxurious, the vocal is conversational rather than dramatic, and the story has no conflict, no antagonist and no consequence.
Very few hit records are this relaxed. The song’s entire proposition is that you might get to stop, somewhere warm, with no obligations, and the four minutes of instrumental music are there to let you sit in that idea rather than to build to anything.
Why it lasted
Because it survived being rewritten twice by a label that did not want it. Underneath a song about a market, a woman and a missed bus is a melody written in 1966 about a comedian who was not really joking, and some of that sadness is still audible under the saxophone.
Seventies album tracks that got played on the radio for decades often reach people with no title attached; when a melody is what you have, our song lyrics search is where to start.