Stealin’ Home has long been a Folkie-Pop favorite of mine, mostly on the strength of the consistently smart songwriting, polished production and audiophile sound quality.
But really, to be truthful, what I found attractive right from the start was Iain Matthews’s especially clear, sweet tenor. That’s the hook that drew me to the album.
Only later would I be pleasantly surprised to find that the recorded sound was wonderful; that the production was equal to the best major label Rock and Pop around (a comparison to The Doobie Brothers would not be a stretch); and, with repeated listening, it was clear that the level of songwriting was high indeed (an a capella rendition of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught, which opens side two, can’t help but raise your averages).
Produced in 1978, the best copies are rich, smooth and sweet in the best tradition of ANALOG recording.
Only a few years later this sound was out of style, replaced by the edgy, hard, digital qualities preferred by synthpop bands like Tears for Fears and Simple Minds.
This would turn out to be a bad time for audiophiles (like me) who liked the pop music of the day but not the pop sound of the day. Heavy-handed processing as well as the overuse of synthesizers and drum effects, with the whole of the production slathered in digital reverb, have resulted in most of the albums from the early- to mid-80s being all but impossible to enjoy on a modern high-end system. Believe me, we’ve tried.
UPDATE 2026
Getting distortion out of the system, electricity, room and all the rest helps make the records from the 80s much more enjoyable. Brothers in Arms comes instantly to mind, but there are scores of others. Obviously some heavily processed recordings are going to sound much better than others, especially if you have the right pressings, but few of them can compete with the better recordings from the 70s.
The albums Squeeze was making in the mid- to late-80s are personal favorites, but the sound is so impenetrable, so overbearing, that nothing can be done with the vinyl. (And customers don’t seem to like their music nearly as much as I do.)
For some reason, the 70s, the decade before, seems to get little respect from audiophiles, when in fact a high percentage of the best recordings we know of were made in that arbitrarily designated ten year period. A rough count leads me to think that more than half of our Top 100 Rock Albums were recorded in the years spanning 1970-79, which is very unlikely to be a statistical accident.
The pool of well-recorded albums was simply wider and deeper. Great sounding records like this one were made by the hundreds, their numbers falling off precipitously in the decades that followed.
Fortunately for us Old School Audiophiles, the analog holdouts, we have easy access to the best of the 70s recordings, still widely available in their original format: the vinyl LP.
More on the subject of the pop and rock recordings of the Seventies here.