**Not one but two near-death experiences changed the path of Yusuf Islam. Along the way he helped define the era of the singer-songwriter with 1970’s Tea For Tillerman, territory he revisited on 2017’s The Laughing Apple, his first Cat Stevens album since 1978. In six decades of music-making, searching has been the one constant. But why? MOJO’s Tom Doyle went to find out…
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It was February 1968. At only 18 years of age, Cat Stevens was already a fallen pop star. It was only 15 months since his debut UK Top 30 hit, the odd, orchestrated ballad I Love My Dog, which he’d chased with the punchy if equally strange baroque pop of Matthew And Son (Number 2) and, in this age of blooming love and peace, anachronistic thumper I’m Gonna Get Me A Gun(Number 6). However, the chart positions of his subsequent releases traced a sharp downturn.
Exhausted through overwork and overimbibing, Stevens was suffering from a nasty cough – quickly diagnosed as a symptom of tuberculosis. Subsequently sent to the King Edward VII hospital in Midhurst, West Sussex, he was ordered not to work for a year. The doctors told Stevens’s brother that they caught the illness just in time; without treatment it’s unlikely the singer would have lasted the fortnight.
“I was smoking a lot,” he says today. “Dope as well but mostly cigarettes. So then along came this disease and I was stuck with it. It was a kind of godsend in a way for me. That period was my blossoming into who I wanted to be.”
The singer’s partying buddy (and fellow baroque popper) Paul Ryan had given him a book about Buddhism, inspired to buy it by The Beatles’ sojourn in India. During his recuperation, Stevens covered the mirror in his hospital room to block his own reflection and attempt to turn his gaze inward.
“I made that bit up myself,” he laughs. “It was to do with avoiding vanity. The ego is dynamic with its insistence on being recognised. And to subdue that was the job.”
After three months in the hospital, the singer returned home to his room in his parents’ flat above their Shaftesbury Avenue café and for the next nine months dug deeper into esoteric and spiritual texts, studying Tao, Hinduism, Zen, numerology and astrology. Finding himself in an enforced period of stillness following his serious health scare, he was searching for something, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what.
But he knew for certain he hadn’t found it in LSD. Having toured in ’67 as part of a bizarre bill comprising Engelbert Humperdinck, The Walker Brothers and Jimi Hendrix, he’d become friends with the Experience’s Noel Redding and, at the bassist’s flat in Clapham, experienced a nightmarish acid trip. Remembering how calmed he’d felt the next morning by the sight of a blanket of snow outside the window, Stevens wrote a chiming acoustic ballad titled Lilywhite, and songs with a similar feel poured out. “I was trying to run away from the nightmares,” he reflects. “And I suppose that’s what made my songs drive forward so positively into a brighter dawn. That was the beginning of my new era.”
Close to 50 years and a highly significant name change later (after a conversion to Islam in 1977), Yusuf Islam meets MOJO in the lobby of the Marriott hotel in London’s Maida Vale. We’re here to discuss, amongst many other things, his latest album, The Laughing Apple – the first since 1978’s Back To Earth to properly bear his old name on the cover (its 2014 predecessor Tell ’Em I’m Gone, released under the name Yusuf, made do with a ‘Cat Stevens’ sticker). Pointedly, this new record also reunites him with his winning ’70s team of producer/Yardbirds bassist Paul Samwell-Smith and guitarist Alun Davies.
But first today, despite the threat of rain, he wants to venture into Regent’s Park. Out on the pavement, the wiry singer – 10 days shy of his 69th birthday and dressed in an olive-green quilted jacket, brown jeans and cream moccasins – wonders, “Shall we get the bus?” Within two minutes, we’re on the Number 16, trundling south. None of our fellow passengers seem to recognise him.
Hopping off and taking a left down St John’s Wood Road past Lord’s Cricket Ground, he asks if we can begin the interview on foot. Along with the beatific aura of calm you might expect from someone who has devoted more than half his life to religion, there is a perhaps surprisingly geezerish, twinkly-eyed charm about Yusuf/Cat, undimmed by his past decade living in Dubai. There is also a spring in his step that challenges MOJO to keep up with him as we briskly make our way through the streets. At a crossing we look left, right and left again and decide to take our chances with the red man.
“You wouldn’t do this in Dubai,” he advises with a grin. “You’re more careful in Dubai when you see a crossing like that. It’s more like a target.”
The Laughing Apple, with its self-drawn cover illustration and warm, simple acoustic sound, knowingly echoes Cat Stevens’ multi-platinum-selling 1970 behemoth Tea For The Tillerman, while being made up of some new songs, some old songs rediscovered on digitised tapes and simpler reworkings of cuts from his over-orchestrated 1967 flop New Masters [see panel]. It’s as if this latter batch of songs had been recorded in ’71 or ’72, after Stevens’ transformation into a light-seeking, bearded hippy minstrel.
“I’ve kind of given the songs another life,” he reasons as we approach the north-western entrance of Regent’s Park. “They have an innocence about them which I loved. And the melodies of course… it was like I was discovering melodies in every corner.”
There’s a strong sense that after coming out of the 25-year period when he didn’t even pick up a guitar, the singer is finally coming to terms with his past. Born Steven Demetre Georgiou (Greek Cypriot father, Swedish mother), his story is one of a long search for identity: first as the 18-year-old Beatles fan performing under the stage name of Steve Adams, then as Cat and finally Yusuf.
“You’re born, then you’re given your identity,” he muses as we sit outside a glass-walled café built on a mound in the park, before he orders a cup of no-nonsense builder’s strength tea (double-bagged, full fat milk, two sugars). “Your parents tell you who you are and in the end you’re left with your own resources to find out exactly who you want to be. A lot of people don’t really take the time to find out.”
The future producer of Cat Stevens’ classic 1970s albums, Paul Samwell-Smith still clearly remembers the day he climbed the stairs leading to a flat above the Moulin Rouge café in the West End to meet the singer in his bedroom-cum-workroom. “There were tapes all over the place,” he recalls. “He just picked up the guitar and played a few songs and some tapes. I said, ‘Great, let’s just go in the studio and start putting this stuff down.’”
Standouts on the first album Stevens made after his post-tuberculosis period of enlightenment and his signing to Island Records, 1970’s Mona Bone Jakon, included eerie folk ballad and Number 8 hit Lady D’Arbanville (written about his actress girlfriend Patti), along with the tellingly-named piano groover I Think I See The Light (“Giving me a second sight”) and Pop Star, the lyrics of which found him jokingly dismissing his recent past.
“Yeah, and making light of the future too,” he points out. “It was a very accurate prediction of what was gonna happen next. It was gonna be much bigger. I remember [Island Records boss] Chris Blackwell saying, ‘You don’t know how big you’re gonna be.’ I said, ‘What?!’ But I’d been through the mill already once, so I’d learned how to almost tongue-in-cheek go along with the next phase. But with my eyes on something else… which was my journey.”
Stevens’ new sound helped usher in the age of the singer-songwriter. But it was with Tea For The Tillerman, released later in 1970, that Blackwell’s prediction of commercial success would come true. Not that the team who entered Morgan Studios in Willesden, north London to begin recording were quite yet convinced. “We were nervous,” says Samwell-Smith, “and looking to capture some very fragile things.”
“That was the kind of tension,” the singer agrees. “You’d capture something that would be almost unrepeatable. And you’d have to do it right, live, then and there. Morgan was a very good studio, but you had to climb up all these steps from Studio One to the control room to actually listen back. I didn’t want to make that trip too often, so I wanted to get it right, as much as possible, while I was still on the studio floor.”
Still, all involved were aware they were creating something special and recall moments of transcendence. Guitarist Alun Davies says that while recording Wild World – Stevens’ soulful note of caution at the end of his relationship with D’Arbanville – he felt almost outside his own body: “It was just a fantastic thing. ‘Is that me playing through the headphones?’ when you’re actually playing it.”
Elsewhere, nailing a vocal take of the acutely sentimental Father And Son, Stevens heard a voice that was not quite his own. “A very strange feeling,” he recalls. “I heard my father’s voice within my own voice. It was definitely my dad’s voice, and it had such power. Y’know, the son becoming the father or something.”
Shining a light on his spiritual path for all to see, meanwhile, was On The Road To Find Out. “‘You’re locked towards the future’,” he says, quoting the lyric. “That’s pretty frightening. It means you can’t go back. The door is only facing one way and you’re not quite sure where it’s gonna lead.” In the song, Stevens also sang “pick up a good book now”, purposely changing it from “pick up the good book”. “There were obviously Bible bashers around,” he states. “Always, there’s people who will tend to want to own you.”
The secular spirituality that ran through Tea For The Tillerman certainly chimed with a record-buying audience on the lookout for something after the comedown of the ’60s. Particularly in America, where the album entered the Billboard Top 10 for the beginning of a 79-week chart run.
Chris Blackwell was blown away by it. “I’ll never forget hearing it for the first time,” he told this writer in 2009. “They played it to me in the studio, and on the first side, every track was incredible. And then every track on the second side was incredible.”
Tillerman’s enormous success meant more demand and bigger tours, but rather than accepted or vindicated, Stevens instead found himself feeling strangely isolated on-stage. “I’d close my eyes and I’d be somewhere else, almost,” he says. “That was a way I could keep my sanity, I suppose.” He admits he was also uncomfortable with being seen as some kind of spiritual figurehead. “That was a responsibility,” he says. That’s why I couldn’t just take the pop star route all the way to Neverland or wherever. Integrity was always a priority.”
Tea For The Tillerman’s 1971 follow-up Teaser And The Firecat surpassed its predecessor’s sales at the time, and when 1972’s Catch Bull At Four topped the US chart, Stevens felt trapped. “It was getting too big,” he nods. “One of the things about the American success pattern is that you end up getting boxed and stamped and then you’re on a shelf of your own. I think it was the fear of becoming Americanised in some sense. That control thing came back in. I started to say, ‘No, I’m gonna change.’”
In 1973, Stevens moved to Rio de Janeiro, before self-producing the blue-eyed soul of that year’s Foreigner in Jamaica: “I said, ‘Hold on, you may think you know who I am, and I may think I know who I am. But I’m still a foreigner to myself and I’m still on this journey.’”
Two years later, on a trip to Los Angeles to visit his US record company, he had a second near-death experience, swimming off Malibu on a day the sea appeared deceptively calm. “There was a lot of current going on,” he remembers. “You don’t necessarily see it, but it’s all going on underneath. I was maybe even further out than that tree there,” he adds, pointing to a spot in Regent’s Park at least 500 yards away. “If you’re losing your strength, there is no way of getting back. I saw my manager [on the beach], but he looked about as big as that lady in yellow over there. So he’s not gonna hear me, nobody’s gonna know. So the closest one to me was upstairs, y’know (laughs). And that’s who I called upon.”
This is where the story takes on a mystical quality, with Stevens remembering crying to the heavens, “If you save me, I’ll work for you.” Before he knew it, a giant wave had carried him back to the shore.
For his 27th birthday that summer, his brother gave him a copy of the Quran, prompting his “gradual awakening” and decision in 1977 to become a Muslim. “I almost thought I was the only one who was discovering this thing,” he says. “It felt like I was discovering a whole new universe. That’s pretty astounding, y’know… if you’re given a chance to find a new universe. And of course there was no pressure at that time. There was nothing like the Iranian Revolution [of 1979] happening.”
Would that have changed his mind about the Quran?
“That’s a good question. But, y’know, fate has it that that didn’t happen. So I was left in a way to quietly study the real contents of revelation without anybody looking over my shoulder or anybody bothering me. Pretty important.”
Guitarist Alun Davies, for one, admits to being baffled by his friend’s conversion, particularly when during the making of Back To Earth in 1978 Stevens was praying to Mecca five times daily and hinting that he was considering giving up music altogether. “It pains me still, that time,” Davies says. “You were trying to put a good face on it, of no longer understanding what a brother is doing and what path he’s taking.”
“He was intimating all the time that he was going to stop being a pop star,” says Paul Samwell-Smith. “It felt like the end of something.”
Stevens himself was hearing contradictory advice from Muslim scholars and imams: some said it was fine to continue his musical career, others said it presented a serious conflict. “Even though the Quran doesn’t mention music at all,” he stresses, “I was scared of doing anything wrong. So then I just took the cautious path and I suspended my musical activity. I didn’t give it up. I just suspended it.”
“It’s a name, it’s a tag, it’s something that people recognise you as. And I think it’s a pretty good name.”
But swopping pop stardom for religious devotion did not spell an end to problems with celebrity. There was controversy in 1989 when Cat/Yusuf appeared to support Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie, whose book The Satanic Verses led to accusations of blasphemy. Later, Stevens/Islam claimed his citing of blasphemy as a capital offence in the Quran wasn’t meant to be taken “outside due process of law” – though it’s unclear how much solace Rushdie was meant to take from that. In 2004, the ex-singer was refused entry to the United States when his name was found to be on a No Fly list.
He’s now stepped back from his role as a spokesman. “For sure,” he says. “That was much harder than being a rock star. But, y’know, we’ve got to see some daylight out there. We’ve got to keep pumping out humanity and shaking more hands and joining good causes, and I think music helps do that in a wonderful and magical way.”
While as Yusuf Islam he released a series of albums from 1995 onwards, they featured his voice accompanied only by drums. Then in the mid-’00s, after reading that Muslims had likely introduced the guitar, in the form of the oud, to Spain, he began to soften his stance. Around the same time, his son Yoriyos left a guitar lying around the house. “He says it wasn’t a plot,” he stresses. “It was a bit scary and I didn’t know whether I should [pick it up] or not. But then I thought, Let’s just see if I can remember where C is? Can I make F? Then it was like, Woah, it’s all coming back. And I wrote a song almost immediately.”
Trading simply as Yusuf, he released An Other Cup (2006), Roadsinger(2009) and Tell ’Em I’m Gone (2014). Now that The Laughing Apple is to be released as Yusuf/Cat Stevens, does it mean that Yusuf has finally made his peace with Cat?
“Yeah,” he decides after a moment’s thought, draining the last of his builder’s tea. “It’s a name, it’s a tag, it’s something that people recognise you as. And I think it’s a pretty good name.”
Having lived through his procession of identities, what does he imagine the teenage Steven Demetre Georgiou might have thought of the sixtysomething Yusuf?
“I’d have been respectful about his space,” he smiles. “And that’s what it’s all about, being respectful. Allow people to be who they are. And I might learn a few things too if I sat down and talked to him.”
Last year, in a closing of the circle, Yusuf/Cat performed at the Shaftesbury Theatre, across the road from the former location of his family’s café. An emotional moment?
“Emotional?” he wonders aloud. “I mean, it was more honest than it was emotional. I think if I’ve achieved anything or learned anything, it’s the ability to be myself, without embarrassment. I can do that these days. No problem. I can be me.”
This article originally appeared in MOJO 287