Mojo - The Music Magazine

U2 JOINED SENEGALESE superstar Baaba Maal onstage last night to pay tribute to their former label boss, Island Records' Chris Blackwell.

Contributing to London's week-long programme of Island Life gigs, part of the venerable record label's 50th anniversary celebrations, the Dublin quartet were taking a break from rehearsals in Spain for their Blackberry-sponsored 360° Tour.

Maal - sharing the bill with Yusuf "Cat Stevens" Islam at a sold-out Shepherd's Bush Empire - had just concluded a scintillating, rump-shaking set when he returned to the stage with guitarist Barry Reynolds and Yusuf's pianist.

As the unmistakable chords of U2's One rang out, Maal declared, "I have a friend, a brother who really takes care of everything. We share the respect of Nelson Mandela's vision. We need people to understand. We didn't make it yet but we are on the way. As we continue fighting poverty, especially on the continent of Africa."

Then Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen trooped sheepishly onstage to join in on the Achtung Baby anthem - Mullen rather self-consciously behind a set of bongos. Then it was a neat segue into Bob Marley's One Love, which everyone seemed to know rather better. Bono saluted Maal's "nobility" before the latter sauntered off, leaving U2 to essay a semi-acoustic version of their Grammy-winning 2004 single, Vertigo.

Mid-song, Bono launched into a typical lyrical extemporisation, this time declaring: "Chris Blackwell said, 'All of this could be yours!'" indicating the audience and the world in general, before, bizarrely, appearing to snort a large imaginary line of cocaine.

The U2 frontman returned after a lie down, to introduce the night's headliner, Yusuf Islam, dubbing him variously a "poet", a "pilgrim", a "natty dresser", a "family man", and "a 'family of man' man".

Yusuf's own set epitomised the rapprochement he has recently effected with his past, with a crowd-pleasing core of songs - Where Do The Children Play?, Miles From Nowhere, Wild World, Father & Son - drawn from 1970's multi-platinum classic, Tea For The Tillerman, and prime-period sideman, Alun Davies, joined the ranks to pick along with a familiar poignant authority.

There was something pleasingly eccentric about the staging. An Olde Londone streetlamp cast a wan glow, a nod to the title of Yusuf's latest, not-bad-at-all album, Roadsinger. And at one point, the artist formerly known as Steven Demetre Georgiou took the weight off his 60-year-old feet at a perfunctorily mocked-up street café.

It was a reminder that, for all his fretting about the path of righteousness and preoccupation with the Satanic blandishments of the record business (Just Another Night, culled from 1978's Back To Earth remains possibly the best rock-star-in-crisis song there is) Stevens/Islam has always gone his own way.

The voice - not so loud now, but just as uniquely resonant and modulated - and the sparse, gorgeously suggestive musical structures could be the product of no other artist. And if the post-conversion songs sometimes smacked (to the secular fan) of irksome finger-wagging, it's the price you pay for a songwriter who throws his life experience at you with brave - and mostly welcome - abandon. There could hardly be a better example than tonight's Boots And Sand: a beautiful, half-sad/half-wry telling of his deportation from America in 2004.

Aptly, Yusuf closed with Teaser & The Firecat's Peace Train. It had been a night where coming together had been the theme. And we were left with only the faint suspicion that what has been billed a tribute to Island Records could just as easily be dubbed its epitaph. Island today is not the Island of Tea For The Tillerman or even that of Achtung Baby, its identity no more defined than that of the recently disinterred A&M, just another client of the faceless Universal Music Group. U2 aren't even on the label any more.

Beyond question, Chris Blackwell's achievement - building a music-mad label with a truly cosmopolitan cast - is one well worth celebrating; but perhaps it's time that someone did some emulating, too.

Danny Eccleston

Picture by: UrbanImage.tv/Adrian Boot

More pictures, onstage and off, at http://www.urbanimage.tv/island50/cat.php

For more Island on MOJO, go here

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Yusuf Islam setlist

Welcome Home
Lilywhite
Don't Be Shy
Where Do The Children Play?
Thinking 'Bout You
The Rain
Just Another Night
Miles From Nowhere
To Be What You Must
The Wind
Wild World
Boots And Sand
Ruins
Roadsinger
Father And Son
Peace Train