One Stage Before - 2001 Remaster

This is another of Stewart's enigmatic songs, this time about reincarnation. One of the standout tracks on his blockbuster Year Of The Cat album, it features a guitar solo by Tim Renwick.

Stewart explained in a promotional interview CD: "Whenever I'm on a stage, I look at the stage, I look at the floor boards underneath me, and I think about all the feet that have been on them before mine. When I was playing at a theater in London I was thinking how Laurence Olivier or Peter Sellers or any of these people would have stood there and declaimed their speeches, and there I am in their place - it's a phenomenal thought. If you take this back a few hundred generations, what about Romans or Greeks standing in the same place, doing the same thing. We all tread these boards, we all travel, we all turn to dust and people replace us. The essence of that is what forms the song."