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Classc
Rock Magazine
November 2004
Pages 46-51
Feline
Groovy
 Despite
a string of hits including ‘Matthew
and Son’ and ‘Wild World’.
Cat Stevens was always a reluctant star. Then
he gave it up for Islam, having kittens.
Here’s
how Cat Stevens used to get high before a
show: “You need to loosen up before
going on stage. So to have a drink before
hand was very natural. But you can over do
it, and then you can’t sing in tune.
So I found that using a certain amount of
oxygen after a couple of beers or whatever
could put you in just the right spot. But
you’d still be in control. It was just
a strange little recipe I worked out. It was
to get me lucid. So I knew exactly what I
was doing and playing.”
OK, it comes pretty low down in the annals
of rock’n’roll excess, but his
audience could sometimes he forgiven for thinking
that he might have taken something a little
stronger. On the recently released DVD of
his 1976 Majikat tour of North America, he
gets carried away when the lights get turned
on the crowd: ‘You’re s beautiful.
I’m so glad it’s you and not them.
Who ever they are. Who are they, anyway? They
are we, man, they are we. We are me. I am...
Who am I?”
This little monologue comes shortly before
he advises us: “If everybody could love
Alfred Hitchcock the world would be a better
place.”
Maybe the world would be a better place if
we all took a hit of liquid oxygen once in
a while? “That was me trying to connect,
trying to relax between songs,” he says
with a chuckle. “I think I was a comical
fellow in some sense. A lot of people didn’t
a know I had a very funny side to me. I enjoyed
a good laugh. But most of my songs were serious.”
But as for getting out of it before a show,
don’t even think about it. “I
was far too much of a control freak,”
he says. The Majikat Earth tour was about
as big as it got for Cat Stevens. He’d
ridden the crest of the singer-songwriter
wave through the first half of the 70s alongside
the likes of James Taylor and Carole King,
and he was now playing to 15-20,000 people
a night at arenas around America.
He was selling millions of records, too. Hip
cult heroes like Nick Drake, John Martyn and
Richard Thompson (all of whom were signed
to Cat’s record label, Island Records)
may have been the darlings of the rock media
but their total combined sales came nowhere
near one Cat Stevens album.
His appeal was particularly strong among the
hedsit generation. “Particularly the
lone bedsitter who was trying to figure it
all out, the way I was,” he says.
“And the terms of reference had changed
in the seventies. It was a new age and we
were defining that age. And singers and poets
do in some sense speak for the soul of a generation.”
Cat Stevens’s deceptively simple philosophical
vignettes and maddeningly catchy melodies
melodies were as popular with women as they
were with men. Which meant that a Cat Stevens
album was an essential item for any bedsit
boy making his first tentative moves in the
mating game.
Once you’d invited a girl back for coffee
and she was perched nervously on the edge
of the bed while you gathered up the previous
week’s clothes from the only chair in
the room, the sight of a strategically placed
Tea For The fillerman’ cover would reassure
her that you were, indeed, a boy who was in
touch with his feminine side. This was the
signal for you to get in touch with her feminine
side.
And yet the spiritual comfort Cat Stevens
was providing for his audience was doing nothing
for him. “I still had a gigantic hole
to fill in my life,” he says. Within
a year he was hacking away from the music
business. By the end of the 70s he had converted
to Islam —and had changed his name,
to Yusuf Islam.
For many years Yusuf Islam refused to acknowledge
Cat Stevens. But recently they have re-established
a relationship. Yusuf Islam is now happy to
talk about Cat Stevens. He even brought him
out of retirement at the beginning of this
year to perform at Nelson Mandela’s
AIDS benefit concert in South Africa.
Cat Stevens is not his original name. He was
born Steven Georgiou in 1948, the son of a
Greek father and Swedish mother, and grew
up in the Bloomsbury area of London where
the family ran a café. “I went
to school in Drury Lane and part of the fun
was peeking into stage doors and scenery workshops
on the way home,” he remembers. “Covent
Garden, Denmark Street, Soho — those
were my playground haunts.”
The first record to leave its mark on him
was Laurie London’s ‘He’s
Got The Whole World In His Hands’, a
cover of a gospel song by a 13-year old boy
that was a big hit in 1958. “He was
one of the first child stars of the pop era.
My brother turned me onto him. I think they
were at the same school. And my brother popped
this idea into my head ‘You could do
this’ and I remember thinking, yes,
maybe I could.”
By the time Steven Georgiou went to Hammersmith
College to study art in 1965 the British pop
explosion was at full blast. But it was the
London folk scene that initially attracted
him. “I was watching people like Bert
Jansch, John Renbourn, Davey Graham,”
he recalls. “And Paul Simon, who was
there for a while. James Taylor was another
who came out of that scene.”
He played a few folk club dates as Steve Adams,
trying out his own songwriting style. “1
was influenced by musicals. Living in the
heart of theatre land I was just overwhelmed
by the power of musicals. That’s where
a lot of the ideas for my songs come from,
and that’s why some of my lyrics are
slightly left field. They come from an angle
that’s broader, part of a bigger story
line. ‘I Love My Dog’ is a completely
~ new take on a love song.”
That was the song that Steve Adams played
to Mike Hurst, an independent producer who’d
been a member of Irish folksy trio The Springflclds
along with Dusty Springfield.”l went
to his flat in Kensington and there was a
Greek guy there ~ who was actually an American
producer, and he was nurturing Marc Bolan.
And he kept saying: ‘No, no. Marc Bolan
is the thing!’ But l visited Mike again
later and he was going to go to America and
try his fortune there, but he spent one last
burst of energy on a recording session for
Decca doing ‘I Love My Dog’. And
that’s where it all changed.”
That was when Steve Adams changed into Cat
Stevens. And then ‘1 Love My Dog’
nudged its way into the Top 30 in late 1966,
helped largely by airplay from the offshore
pirate radio stations. “They would play
anything and they helped to launch many careers,
mine among them,” he says. “The
BBC would never have gone along with some
of those things. It was still the Light Programme.
There was no Radio One.”
He was whisked straight back into the studio
for the quirky, hook-laden ‘Matthew
& Son’ which was soaked in orchestral
arrangements and shot to No.2 in February
1967, beating off another of his songs, ‘Here
Comes My Baby’, which had been snapped
up by The Tremeloes. Suddenly, Cat Stevens
had developed into a very hot property indeed.
The
Following month he found himself on a 25-date
package tour trekking around the UK in the
company of Englebert Humpcrdinck, The Walker
Brothers and Jimi Hendrix. “At the time
it seemed quite natural to me, although looking
back on it, it was amazing,” he recalls,
“I remember someone shouting: ‘There’s
a fire on stage! Hendrix is burning his guitar!’
And we rushed down to the wings to see what
was going on. We’d never seen anything
like that.”
“But offstage Hendrix was such a nice,
gentle character. We had some he pauses, searching
for the right word some very quiet moments
together on tour. He was very pensive. You’d
see him sitting down in a club sometimes,
just thinking to himself.”
Cat Stevens seldom had that luxury. Togged
up in his dandiest Carnaby Street clobber,
he was dispatched on to the promotional treadmill
for his next hit single, ‘I’m
Gonna Get Me A Gun’, and his equally
successful debut album, ‘Matthew &
Son’, that, unusually for the time,
consisted entirely of his own songs. Meanwhile,
PP Arnold, backed by The Small Faces, was
having a hit with another of his songs, ‘The
First Cut Is The Deepest’.
He was certainly enjoying the trappings of
the pop star lifestyle at that point. But
he was also increasingly aware of how little
control he had over his own career. It wasn’t
just the crass publicity shots for ‘I’m
Gonna Get Me A Gun’ that had him dolled
up in a cowboy hat brandishing a pistol; he
couldn’t even play guitar on his own
records.
“There were a bunch of musicians in
the studio who interpreted your own music
for you. I couldn’t really communicate
with them because I didn’t speak the
language. You had to know how to write dots
and I didn’t know how to write dots.
1 only knew what I wanted it to sound like.
“It seemed to me that I had to get more
control. And that’s what it was all
about my struggle with Mike Hurst, the record
company and my agent was to try and find my
own identity. Because I had music and ideas
which hadn’t been heard yet.”
However, nobody was bothering to listen while
the existing formula was so successful. And
even when the hits started tailing off and
the second album, ‘New Masters’,
failed to chart at the end of 1967, there
was an old-fashioned solution at hand. “My
agent, Harold Davidson, wanted to put you
into pantomime if you weren’t having
hit records any more,” he remembers
with a laugh. “That was the next step
as far as he was concerned — to get
me to play Buttons.”
Stevens was saved from this fate by what he
calls “divine intervention” not
the only time his life would be radically
changed in this way. On this occasion it was
tuberculosis that struck him early in 1968
and took him out of action for nearly two
years.
“Immediately I was extracted from the
whole music scene and given time and space
to reflect, and decide a little bit more about
my future,” he says. “And one
of the goals I set myself was to find out
a bit more about ‘The Truth’.
It was an archetypal spiritual adventure.
And I joined it.”
“My convalescence gave me a chance to
grow and develop, to grow a beard, which I
didn’t have before. And symbolically
that was to change my identity,” he
explains. “When I came back I found
a whole new group of friends who understood
me for being more than just a pop singer.
I was more of a poet--and I had more to say.
One of his new friends was American actress
Patti D’Arbanville who would inspire
two of the songs —‘Lady D’Arhanville’
and ‘Wild World’ — which
would relaunched Cat Stevens’ career.
Other songs came from a project for a musical
that never made it to the stage.
“we came up with an idea about the Russian
revolution, which we called Revolussia. And
we had Nigel Hawthorn as on eof the writers
with us. It was dealing wirh change. But the
strongest concept, for me, was idealism.
What
is the human ideal? And out of that came songs
that were to be the new breed of Cat Stevens
composition. ‘Father and Son’
was one of them. ‘Maybe You’re
Right, Maybe You’re Wrong’ was
another.
He
realized that his songs would stand a better
chance with a new record label. “I went
back to see if I could match my expectations
with Mike Hurst in the studio. We tried, but
it never happened. And that’s when we
tried all these different ways of getting
out of the contract. On one of them was to
come with a 30 piece orchestra concept. And
they let us go willingly.
Ironically
the album he recorded after he’d signed
to island was stripped right back to basics.
“It wasn’t consciously constructed
that way.” He says. “It was just
a natural result of shaving things down to
the bare minimum. The songs had such important
meaning to me that I didn’t want anything
to confuse it, to make it cloudy. So it was
acoustic guitar, drums and bass.”
It also confirmed that Cat Stevens was very
much a solo artist. “I couldn’t
be part of a group’ he says. “I
had tried it early on but it didn’t
work. I realized that I was born to be solo.”
‘Mona Bone Jakon’ didn’t
make the album charts when it came out in
July 1970, even though ‘Lady D’Arhanville’
was a Top 10 hit. But Stevens now had the
creative freedom he’d craved, helped
by producer Paul Samwell-Smith: “Chris
Blackwell, the head of Island Records, was
just so generous to artists, allowing them
all this space to develop. I was even given
the freedom to design my own album sleeves,
which was fantastic.”
Whether such freedom benefited the Mona Bone
Jakon’ album cover with its painting
of a crumpled dustbin with a tear coming out
of the lid is questionable. It might have
made nmre sense if he’d stuck to the
original title — ‘The Dustbin
Cried The Day The Dustman Died — but
then again it made even more sense to change
the original title.
Some bedsit boys believed that the ‘Mona
Bone Jakon’ title was an enigmatic code
for a male erection, a rumour that Stevens
is quick — though not too quick—
to deny. “No, nothing like it. I mean,
all rock songs in some sense have got a sexual
connotation. That’s what rock’n’roll
itself is all about. Ask Muddy VVaters what
he meant by a mojo. What is a mojo? And how
do you get it working? And all the mumbo jumbo
that went with it. It was kind of trendy to
leave yourself unexplained back then. Dylan
has been doing it ever since: ‘What
are songs about? About three minutes.”’
He giggles at the memory.
The somewhat downbeat, hesitant tone of ‘Mona
Bone Jakon’ was remedied just five months
later by the more assured ‘Tea For The
Tillerman’. “Some people over
here weren’t quite sure whether to believe
what had happened when I came hack,”
he says. “To me it was just as natural
as growing the beard. I had simply matured.
Other people were saying: ‘What’s
going on?’ I think that’s the
cynical side of the record business. They
couldn’t quite understand it. But in
America, where they had never really heard
me before, they understood imediately. And
it a happened.”
Once
‘Tea For The Tillerman’ gained
a foothold is the American charts it stayed
there for the next IS months, more than twice
as long as it stayed in the UK charts. Stevens’s
search for a spiritual meaning from a mean
material world articulated the confusion felt
by many people at that time with songs like
‘Father & Son, ‘Where Do The
Children Play’, ‘Hard Headed Woman’
and ‘Wild World’. Cat Stevens
was a pop star again, even bigger than before,
only this time it was on his terms.
Had he realized what a genre-defining album
he was making at the time? “No. I was
just following my heart, and the music was
coming out and was being dressed absolutely
appropriately with the musicians that I had,
and kept very sparse and pure. It was a very
purist period of songwriting and recording.
I had a feeling there was something special
burl didn’t know how people would take
it.”
They took it with great enthusiasm, along
with the follow-up, ‘Teaser & The
Firecat’, which yielded three big international
hits: the rousing ‘Peace Train’,
the sublime ‘Moonshadow’ and ‘Morning
Has Broken’, a Victorian hvmn that was
stripped of its pomposity hut not its dignity,
as well as the beautifully concise opening
track, ‘The Wind’.
Stevens was now able to control his career
from a position of strength. “Tube heard
you have tube a bit powerful,” he says.
“And power brings money and the ability
tube able to do it your way.
After two massive albums in the space of 10
months and a triumphant American tour with
an 11-piece orchestra. Cat Stevens could afford
to ring a few changes for the next album,
‘Catch Bull At Four’, in 1972.
“1 became a little hit harder, a hit
more produced. I wanted to experiment with
sounds. I was into more keyboards and less
guitar. I had to keep generating In)’
own interest. 1 didn’t want to become
a puppet of my own making.”
Success had not made Cat Stevens any more
gregarious, however. “I was still very
much on my own,” he admits. “But
my songwriting thrived on that very introspective
condition. I didn’t feel so alone when
I was writing. I guess I was in some kind
of place where there was an unseen audience.
But they were there... whatever that means,
whateve r
that symbolizes. I remember when I wrote those
words in ‘Sitting’. “Sitting
on my own, not by myself.” That’s
the kind of feeling I had.”
‘Catch Bull At Four’ was the first
Cat Stevens album to top the America chart,
one place higher than it reached in the UK.
“And then I realized it was all going
terribly wrong,” he laughs. “Or
a little bit out of control. So I did another
whole ‘let’s do something different’
thing. And I went to Jamaica and made ‘Foreigner’.”
‘Foreigner’ was certainly different,
and not just because of the location. Stevens
temporarily dispensed with his band and producer,
recruiting local musicians, adding a trio
of backing singers including Patti Astin and
handling the production himself As if that
weren’t enough, the first side of the
album consisted of a 18-minute track, ‘The
Foreigner Suite’. While his lyrical
concerns remained the same. He now had a fear
of being misunderstood that he articulated
in the introduction:
‘There are no words I can use/Because
the meaning still leaves for you to choose/And
I couldn’t stand to let them be abused/By
you, you, you.’
‘Some
people think it’s my best album, which
is strange,” he admits. “But it
just shows you that I had something more in
me. I didn’t want to become a parody
of myself.” it was also clear from some
of the songs on the second side of the album,
notably ‘The Hurt’, that fame
and fortune, even on his own terms, was not
providing the inner happiness he was seeking.
He couldn’t stop pleasing his fans,
though. ‘Foreigner’ got to No.3
in America and Britain. He was now so successful
that he became a tax exile, although the huge
tax bill that he would have paid to the British
Government he sent instead to the UNESCO children’s
fund and other related charities.
His choice of exile was unconventional too.
He headed for the then-unfashionable Brazil
where he fell under the spell of the music.
“I don’t think there’s anything
as detailed, intricate and beautiful as Brazilian
music,” he enthuses. “It’s
just so rich. I couldn’t quite make
that kind of music. What I did was through
my words more than anything else. Plus my
melodies.”
‘Buddha & The Chocolate Box’,
released in 1974, is perhaps the last conventional
Cat Stevens album. “It was to reassure
people that I can do this thing if you want,
but it’s not exactly where my heart
is. Although, many of the songs on that album
were good and meaningful. ‘King Of Trees’
is a lovely song, back to the ‘Where
Do The Children Play’ theme. And the
same with ‘Oh Very Young’.
“But spiritually I was still searching.
I was still casting my net as far as I could
in the realms of inspiration and looking for
answers. I delved into my own Greek ancestry
and the heritage that I had. I looked at Pythagora
and tried to make some sense of the universe
through numbers. And I came up with an album
called ‘Numbers’, which is still
very profound.
“Some people like that album, but it’s
a bit weird, It was also supposed to be a
cartoon at one time that would have preceded
the whole Lord Of The Rings trilogy). I was
very influenced by Lord Of The Rings. Trying
to get to the goal of life was what it was
all about —the rings, solving good over
evil.”
‘Numbers’ was the first Cat Stevens
album not to make the American Top 10 since
‘Mona Bone Jakon’. But the Majikat
tour at that time was the most spectacular
he had yet devised. The brightly lit tent-like
stage set enhanced the music and the support
act of magicians and illusionists heightened
the atmosphere.
“Whatever I wanted to do, I could do
it,” he says I even had a tiger on stage
as my support act when the tour reached Los
Angeles. It was wild, but I could do it. However,
it still wasn’t satisfying me. The contradictions
between Cat Stevens’s spiritual quest
and his pop star career were becoming increasingly
manifest. The driving ambition that had got
him this far was being supplanted by the need
to control everything — right down to
how his lyrics were interpreted.
There’s a moment on the Majikat DVD
when he almost loses it mid-way through the
show after a roadie gaffer tapes his mike
stand—making it impossible to adjust
— when he should have been seeing the
joke. Apparently he had the chance to edit
out the sequence but refused. “Greeks
and ego go well together,” he says with
a rueful smile. “I was becoming domineering.
I wanted things to be like I wanted. And that’s
when the Greek tragedy took over.
He can’t pinpoint the moment exactly,
but it was some time around the Majikat tour
and he was swimming in the sea off Malibu
when he realized that the current was dragging
him out to sea. “All of a sudden I had
no control what so ever. I was about to drown.
I saw my life disappearing in front of me.
“I cried out: ‘God’ I’d
always had, deep down, a faith in the presence
of God, even though I couldn’t understand
how to approach God. And I got an answer.
And the answer was to give me back my life
and then to be prepared to do something a
little bit more real with it.”
It was divine intervention for the second
time, although he didn’t act on it immediately.
In fact his next album, ‘lzitso’,
in the summer of 1977 seemed like a return
to the Cat Stevens of yore, with the bouncy
‘(Remember The Days Of The) Old School
Yard’ — a duet with Elkie Brooks
— giving him another hit single and
another American Top 10 album.
But it was the last hit single he would have,
and Stevens’s true feelings were clearly
spelt out on another album track, ‘(I
Never Wanted) To Be A Pop Star’. ‘lzitso’
was a strange, reflective kind of album.”
he says. “By now 1 was reading the Koran
and I was more concerned with what I was finding
there, It was opening my eyes to so many new
things.”
In
December 1977 Cat Stevens formally embraced
Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam.
There was one more Cat album, ‘Back
To Earth’ in late 1978, which included
the Brazilian-flavoured ‘Nascimento’
from the end of his music adventure, and the
stage-musical-styled ‘New York Time’
from the beginning. He didn’t promote
it but it still got to No.33 in America.
In February 1979 Yusuf announced his retirement
from music to devote himself to Islam. Which
he has done faithfully ever since, becoming
a prominent member of the London Islamic community,
establishing the Islamia School and a hotel
in Kilburn, and becoming president of the
Islamic Association of North London.
But he has also been involved in more controversy
than he ever was as a pop star. There was
his non-appearance at Live Aid in 1985, either
because of a dispute over whether he could
be referred to as Cat Stevens, or because
Elton John over-ran. There was his support
for the fatwa against author Salmon Rushdie
in 1989— although his insistence that
the laws of the country could not be broken
(thus rendering the fatwa largely symbolic)
was seldom reported.
Then there was his expulsion from Israel with
his nine-year-old son as an ‘undesirable’
in 1990—and his visit to Iraq later
that year when he managed to secure the release
of a number of British Muslims being held
hostage during the first Iraq war. And there
were the libellous stories alleging misuse
of charitable funds for which he won substantial
legal damages against Private Eye magazine
in 1993.
In 1993, after 18 years of musical silence,
Yusuf released an album on a label he’d
formed: Mountain Of Light Records. ‘The
Life Of The Last Prophet’ was a spoken-word
story of Muhammad that included one musical
performance by Yusuf. He followed that with
‘Prayers Of The Last Prophet’
and an album of Islamic songs for children,
‘A Is For Allah’, which is used
in English-speaking Islamic schools.
Then there was his benefit album for the Bosnian
Muslim community in 2000 called ‘I Have
No Cannons That Roar’ that featured
two songs written by Yusuf, one of them performed
by him. “I thought that the album needed
to be a celebration of the victory and the
survival of the Bosnian nation. So I came
up with a compilation of Bosnian songs and
I also contributed. That helped me to ease
back and so coming back to the studio was
that much more natural.”
Last year, while producing an album by Zain
Bhikha in South Africa, Yusuf worked on his
first English-language song — a new
version of ‘Peace Train’ —
since 1978. It was included on the War Child
charity album, ‘Hope’, in aid
of the victims of the second Iraq war. Yusuf’s
statement on the album s aid:
‘As a member of humanity and as a Muslim
this is my contribution to the call for a
peaceful Solution to the dangerous path some
world leaders today seem to be taking.’
Yusuf also recorded a couple of new songs
and a reworking of ‘Wild World’
at the same time. ‘I did this new arrangement
after I’d worked out some new things
with the Soweto Choir. They haven’t
been released because I’m still pondering
what to do and how to develop them.
“And that was the basis of what happened
when the Nelson Mandela AIDS concert came
up in South Africa at the beginning of this
year. I said that I had a new version of ‘Wild
World with a Zulu chorus line. And it fitted
quite naturally, “Things happen in their
own time. I don’t like to be rushed,
especially at my age. I certainly don’t
feel the need to rush off and do what other
people think I should be doing. But there
is still harmony left in me which probably
has to come out.”
Yusuf is choosing is words very carefully
here. Music is a controversial topic among
Islamic scholars that provokes heated disagreements.
Even some of Yusuf’s Islamic recordings
have come under fire from militant Muslim
clerics.
Although Yusuf has softened his own stance
on music that he took at the end of the 70s,
he is still sensitive to hardline opinion.
Apparently he does not own or play a guitar.
But as he once memorably sang: ‘Can’t
keep it.”
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