Songfacts®:

• Stewart wrote this about his break up with girlfriend Mandi and his flight to see her. In December 1970 he told Melody Maker that he didn't write a song for a year after she dumped him.
• Al's relationship with Mandi is documented in Neville Judd's authorized biography. They met in early 1967 when he played the Central School of Speech and Drama. On New Year's Day 1968, he moved into a basement flat in Elvaston Place, South West London; for all intents and purposes he and Mandi were living there together, although they had an open relationship, but this wasn't entirely to his satisfaction. On May 4, 1969 there was a party at John Martyn's Putney home - which inspired the song "Night Of The Fourth Of May." Al and Mandi left the party separately, and when they arrived back at Elvaston Place there was a bust up. The next morning, she left for Cambridge and thence to Spain to holiday with her parents, but when they returned she stayed on in Carvajal. By this time Al was frantic, and raiding the money they'd "saved in the biscuit tin," flew out to see her. He proposed to her on the beach but she turned him down, and "the world ended". She returned to London with him via Madrid, but after two weeks she left. This was the first song he produced after their break up, and it took him all of two years before he could bring himself to write it.
• Al met his future wife, Kris, at one of his shows, in Reno, Nevada, when he was forty-two years old. By then he'd had four major relationships, though none of these had lasted quite three years; Mandi had been the dominant force in his love life until then. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 3