Cat Stevens – Cat On The Road To Findout Reviewed: Singer songwriter recounts his many lives

Cat On The Road To Findout

Yusuf/Cat Stevens

★★★★

CONSTABLE

Steven Demetre Georgiou may not have enjoyed nine lives, but he’s certainly had his share. There’s the post-war, ‘street-loose’ West End kid who encounters the pull of God and the tug of guilt at his Catholic primary school; the besuited teenage pop star who tours with Hendrix and The Walker Brothers but is the plaything of the old-school music biz; the acoustic authentic in beard and jeans, a post-Beatles British singer-songwriter to match Carole King or Neil Young; the tyrannical megastar who loses his rag when John and Yoko are excluded from his end-of-tour NYC soirée; the zealous convert who changes his name, marries into a Muslim family and still seems somewhat equivocal about the Rushdie fatwa, albeit while utterly condemning violence; the school chairman and tireless charity worker who is refused entry to Israel and turned away from the US; the peacenik patriarch who returns to music in 2006 and played the Glastonbury Legends slot in 2023.

Inevitably, it’s the early chapters of this chronological saga that grip tightest, as our hero surfs the ’60s in an adjective-heavy prose that tends to the purple. The first Cat is a driven pop star who argues that he should headline over Jimi Hendrix at a fairground in Gothenburg because he’s had more hits and his mother is Swedish. When he’s offered the part of Buttons in a 1967 panto, he realises his career is already over. TB forces him into an extended convalescence in West Sussex where he experiences a transcendental flash of light and returns to the guitar he’d played at Les Cousins’ floor spots mid-decade.

That brief pop ride has made Stevens profoundly wary of this wild world and those “fine-feathered friends” whose friendliness depends on how you do. Alone above his father’s café off Shaftesbury Avenue in a white-carpeted room which shares a toilet with another flat, the tunes pour out. Stevens’ telling blend of vulnerability and intensity and those naive early album covers brilliantly surf post-hippy idealism in a manner only matched by John Lennon’s Imagine.

Now a megastar, Stevens is ambitious and only intermittently self-aware, but he always knows his soul must come first. He’s a seeker from the beginning, a classic ’60s pilgrim who reads Be Here Now and always yearns to find and obey his God. The albums and the tours keep coming but as the ’70s wear on, the songs become more elusive. When Stevens nearly drowns while visiting label boss Jerry Moss in Malibu, the clock is ticking…

As Dylan embraces Christianity, Yusuf finds Allah and turns his back on music. Unfortunately, he’s found his spiritual home on the eve of the Iranian fundamentalist revolution and the emergence of Islamophobia. His commitment to his faith is steadfast, his good works admirable and Western hostility unremitting. It will take Yusuf a mere 28 years to return to music and reclaim his crown, now a smiling if guarded moderate, finally able to enjoy his faith and his gift. Morning has broken.

What We Learned From Cat On The Road To Findout:

Cat On The Road To Findout is out October 2 on Constable.

ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | Waterstones

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