It is high time the good people

of all faiths worked together

 

As we screech into another new year, I am having to grapple with the fact that many youngsters have never even heard the Beatles song, Yesterday. It’s an ominous sign of age creeping up and reminding you of your own mortality.

 

If that’s the case, how much hope can we bank on to imagine they would know that there once really was a guy called Cat Stevens who dreamt of transporting his generation to a better world with a song called Peace Train? Hearing anything more about this old "Cat" becomes even more remote when you realise that he decided to embrace Islam in 1977, when none of these kids were even born.

 

The next major ponderable impossibility would be for them to have been given enough accurate information about why he decided to jump off the friendly choo-choo and align himself to what is portrayed by some in the West as a religion that is hellbent on their destruction. How can we solve this paradox as we observe the blood-chilling news connected to the name of the faith he adopted as his own – Yusuf Islam?

 

Listening more closely to the "Cat" and his songs of the 1970s might have partially solved the riddle. When he stunned the music world by walking away from fame and money, all you had to do was to listen to Father & Son to hear the last words of the song say, “There’s a way and I know, that I have to go – away ...” But that still doesn’t really explain why.

 

Here comes the explanation: what people don’t know is that the actual station at which the earnest peace-seeking singer alighted, was in fact hundreds of light-years away from the [wild] world that sprouted around him following his entrance to Islam. After having reached the peaceful state of submission to God, emptying his ego and bowing his head, learning to pray and fast, it was only one year after his conversion when the Iranian Revolution suddenly shook the planet. This was followed soon after by the war in Afghanistan, the first Intifada, the Iran-Iraq War, The Satanic Verses publication, the Bosnian Genocide, the list of tragedies rolled on through to the September 11 attacks and up to the crisis we are facing today with the arrival of ISIL.

 

Now for the good news: having just attended the Reviving The Islamic Spirit Convention in Toronto, it was perhaps one of the most exhilarating reminders of the wonderful faith I had embraced before the negative storm of propaganda against Islam began to hail down upon us. Unfortunately, very few people know or have access to the teachings of this faith as so much attention is paid to the more radicalised elements of the Muslim community and receive an unfair percentage of the media’s valuable space.

 

Although Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, sent a video message of support to the event, there was hardly any other blip on the media's radar. Shame. It was truly refreshing listening again to some of the inspiring speeches of the scholars of this religion. But the metaphysical mountain of knowledge and wisdom of the scholars of the human heart are hardly seen or heard.

 

Belief ultimately should lead a person to be the most humane and chartable; the Last Prophet Mohammed said: “He is not a believer who goes to sleep while his belly is full while his neighbour goes hungry.” He also prophesied that there would be extremists of faith whose “words go no further than their throats”. The name given to radicals in Muslim history has always been the same: outsiders (khawarij). The Prophet maintained that the best of affairs lies in the "middlemost" of it, calling for justice, balance and moderation. And this was exactly what the convention was inviting to:the necessity of an “alliance of virtue”.

 

It is high time that the good people of the world, from all faiths and denominations work together to benefit mankind, through knowledge and good actions. The centre is where we can all meet; a place where we can stand high above the chaos caused by religious radicals and soldiers of destruction. One of the memorable sayings of a famous Muslim mystic, Rumi, comes to mind here: “Out beyond the ideas of wrong and right there is a field ... I’ll meet you there.” In that spirit, the words of my old anthem Peace Train also resonate: "Get your bags together / Go bring your good friends too / Cause it’s getting nearer  / It soon will be with you.”

 

Call me Cat or Yusuf, I am an optimist – a believer cannot be anything else. Until that great train arrives, I hope that the new year will truly be one in which we can commit to our common humanity, and practice the heavenly teachings of true teachers and guides, many of whom I was honoured to meet in Toronto. Peace be with you.

 

[thenational.ae, 09. Jan. 2016]

 

 

Yusuf Islam on Cat Steven's 'journey to the peace train'

 

On the concluding day of the World Government Summit (WGS 2016), Yusuf Islam, more commonly known by his previous stage name ‘Cat Stevens’, held a key note speech at the GEMS Education Hall.

 

On the concluding day of the World Government Summit (WGS 2016), Yusuf Islam, more commonly known by his previous stage name ‘Cat Stevens’, held a key note speech at the GEMS Education Hall entitled “Journey to the Peace Train.”

 

During the session, the renowned former singer, songwriter and now turned philanthropist, described his personal journey of finding Islam and how it had a significant and lasting impact on his life and career.

 

Speaking about his heritage – being born in England and raised as a Christian, he reminisced: “What was going on outside the church was much more exciting. This was the big world. The world was geared towards one thing - making it. Making it was the idea of the ‘American Dream’ – the idea to get rich, to be on top, to stay healthy, and maybe even have a beautiful woman later on by your side, if you’re lucky.”

 

He then made the decision to do his best to become successful. Citing ‘the Beatles’ as a great example of successful songwriters ‘making it’ he decided to embark on a similar journey. He developed a great talent for creating catchy songs and achieving big hits.

 

“I then went on the road and that was when the beginning of my career really began,” he explained. “On the road, I often found myself staying up late, partying, smoking cigarettes, consuming alcohol to the point I couldn’t take it anymore. I then contracted tuberculosis. After being admitted to the hospital, I became aware of mortality, and started realizing the certainty of death.”

 

It was from this moment on that Stevens created a new catalogue of songs that reflected his new perspective on what he wanted his music to be about. While performing on the road, he began to look for answers, and read books of different faiths and religions including Buddhism, Hinduism, numerology and much more. He said, “Before death comes, I wanted to know what was going to happen. I needed to know.”

 

He then composed some big hits related to his search and the events that occurred around him, such as ‘Miles from Nowhere’ and ‘Peace Train’. “While on tour, there was the Vietnam war. Then we were suddenly entering the space age and now the moon was the new battlefield.” He explained that while he was making all these records, peace did not come with it, and that he still felt unfulfilled.

 

Then a major turning point occurred in 1975, when Stevens visited his record chief’s house in Malibu. “The water was looking good that day, so I went for a swim. As I went into the waves, I began to get tired and exhausted, and didn’t realize that the current was pulling me out of the land - and not any closer. At that point I thought it could be the end. At that point, I called to God, and said if you save me I’ll work for you. Then the waves pushed me back on land and I was alive. I thought what next? Where do I go?”

 

He then found his answer a little while later, when his brother gifted him the Quran from his travels. Stevens said: “I’m an open minded person. As I read the Quran, one of the biggest things that struck me was the clarity in the first commandment. I thought to myself, so that is what it is and means. Religion wasn’t as alien as I was led to believe. The Quran talked about how humanity is a family, how it was just one race and one family with no distinction. I knew this was a book from God.”

 

Fast-forwarding to today, he explained that after becoming a Muslim, he started realizing the challenges facing Islam around the world and got involved with education and set up Islamic schools.

 

In his concluding remarks, he shared a key message - about the need to share knowledge like the Quran, and how this was an opportunity for all. He stressed: “When humans reach a level of comprehension with each other, there are no battles and no battleground. It is important that we share our learning. And to share this knowledge, let us use the advantages of mediums like technology - while maintaining good character.”

 

The World Government Summit has convened over 3,000 personalities from 125 countries. The summit concludes today (February 10) at the Madinat Jumeirah in Dubai.

 

[emirates247.com, 12. Febr. 2016]

 

 

 

„Die Türkei hat getan,

wozu die Welt nicht in der Lage war.

Sie hat Großzügigkeit bewiesen.“

 

Während der Veranstaltung

Konya: Tourismushauptstadt der islamischen Welt

dankte Yusuf Islam in einer Rede der Türkei

für ihre Haltung gegenüber den Flüchtlingen.

 

Während der Veranstaltung Konya: Tourismushauptstadt der islamischen Welt dankte Yusuf Islam in einer Rede der Türkei für ihre Haltung gegenüber den Flüchtlingen. Islam erklärte:

 

„Die Türkei hat getan, wozu die Welt nicht in der Lage war. Sie hat Großzügigkeit bewiesen.“

 

 Yusuf Islam, der als Cat Stevens Musikgeschichte schrieb und nach seinem Übertritt zum Islam seinen Namen änderte, erklärte, dass beim Thema Syrien die Türkei etwas getan habe, wozu kein anderes Land in der Lage gewesen sei – sie habe mit all ihrer Großzügigkeit den Flüchtlingen ihre Tore geöffnet.

 

Yusuf Islam sagte auf der Präsentationsveranstaltung von Konya: Tourismushauptstadt der islamischen Welt, an der auch der türkische Ministerpräsident Ahmet Davutoglu teilnahm, dass es große Unterschiede zwischen der Türkei zum Zeitpunkt seines Übertritts zum Islam und der heutigen Türkei gebe.

 

Der Künstler betonte, dass die Türkei in ihrem Licht weiterhin erstrahlen werde und fuhr fort:

 

„Die Türkei ist wie ein Blumengarten. Bevor ich mit dem Koran anfing, bekam ich ein Buch mit Gedichten von Maulana Dschalaladdin Rumi geschenkt. Und eben diese Gedichte Rumis stellten meinen ersten Schritt dar. Diese Gedichte öffneten mir das Fenster zu der Schönheit des Islams. Von jenem Zeitpunkt an weitete sich meine enge Welt und ließ mich mit der Wahrheit allein.“

 

Yusuf Islam wies darauf hin, dass die Menschheit von heute den Frieden mehr denn je brauche:

 

„Beim Thema Syrien hat die Türkei getan, wozu kein anderes Land in der Lage war. Sie hat mit all ihrer Großzügigkeit den Syrern ihre Tore geöffnet. Leider reden sie von etwas namens Menschenrechte. Menschenrechte sind so wertlos. Die Menschen, die zurzeit sterben, sind völlig wertlos. Man muss dazu sagen, dass auch Deutschland wie die Türkei die Flüchtlinge aufgenommen hat. Auch ihnen sollten wir unseren Dank aussprechen.“

 

[nachrichtenxpress.com, 23. April 2016]

 

 

 

Cat Stevens interview exclusive

 

If you got the chance to interview Yusuf Islam what would you ask him? Maybe you’d want to know about his life as Cat Stevens, the artist who in the 1970s sold millions of albums and was without doubt one of the biggest artists on the planet? Or maybe you’d question why he turned his back on stardom, converted to Islam, sold all his guitars, and began a completely new life that seemed totally at odds with everything that had gone before?

 

Then again, perhaps you are a Muslim and it’s only Yusuf Islam the charity worker that you have ever known, via his educational spoken-word CDs and his faith schools. You might be more interested in why he is once again touring as Cat Stevens and now seems comfortable with his old life – or should that be his old, old life?

The point being, he has many different personas and people hold strong opinions about them. I’ve had plenty of time to consider all those viewpoints.

 

It’s taken five years to pin Yusuf down to an interview – mainly because he is constantly juggling all these aforementioned commitments. But now, finally, the timing is right. It’s Ramadan and, in the spirit of the Holy Month, he has just released a song “He Was Alone” to highlight the plight of refugees in Europe. It’s a subject he feels passionate about, so he wants to talk.

 

There was a lot to discuss, which we did over two interviews in Dubai, where he has a home. Further insights came from trips to meet his team at their music studios and even from shadowing him for a day of press interviews in London. His book, Why I Still Carry A Guitar (WISCAG) also helped set the record straight.

 

It’s been a lengthy journey, though of course not half as far as the road he’s travelled. So let’s start at the beginning…

 

***

 

Well I hit the rowdy road / And many kinds I met there  – “On The Road To Find out”, Tea For The Tillerman, 1970

 

His name was Steven Demetre Georgiou, son of a Cypriot father and Swedish mother, raised in a flat above the family restaurant in London’s West End district. The year of his birth, 1948, meant his adolescence coincided with the explosion of youth culture in the 1960s. Britain’s capital city was the epicentre for music, theatre, art, fashion, youth, rebellion and profound social change – and all of it was a stone’s throw from his doorstep.

“I’d run from home from school and sneak into these strange warehouses where they’d be building the scenery for shows, and in and out of picture houses and theatres,” he says today, all these years later. “It was so free spirited and open. I didn’t have to choose my identity or be anything. I could be anyone.”

 

He describes the music, and the now legendary bands he saw at the 100 Club near his home as, “a continuous and ecstatic joy ride for those who experienced it. There was constantly some new discovery; it was like we were finding life on Mars. The songs were coming at you, one after the other, everyone of them a masterpiece.”

 

He’s regaling me with these stories over lunch at a low-key Chinese restaurant near his home in Dubai. His son, Yoriyos, who helps run their business and charitable ventures, is sitting with us and they’re both unfailingly polite, both to myself and the staff. No one recognises him, though most people here – the Filipino waiters, Chinese chefs and Arabic diners – would know at least some of his songs, even if they don’t spot the writer in their midst.

 

I’d wondered how happy he’d be talking about his distant past, but he seems to be at a place in life where he’s happy to look back with gratitude at the memories – especially when I ask him if the whole “Swinging Sixties” could really have been that good? “Ah, it was great,” he responds with the laugh of someone who knows what the rest of us missed.

 

Between mouthfuls of food, he talks about how his early attempts to play the guitar and the songs he learned to write with it. In 1966 he changed his name to Cat Stevens, got a record deal and wrote his first hits including “I Love My Dog”, and “Matthew and Son”, the title song from his debut album that went to number two in the UK. Over the next two years he had a run of hits, and played with everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Englebert Humperdinck.

 

 

One thing you couldn’t do, even then, was pin him down to a genre or scene. “There was this record store across the road and they were always ahead of everyone else with their stock,” he remembers. “You’d hear a Scott Joplin song and be like, ‘Wow what’s that?’ Music was everywhere and I was picking up all kinds of tones, tastes and delicacies. Spanish, Russian choral or Armenian or electronic... I listened to everything.”

 

For this reason he felt more comfortable as a solo artist, and his eclectic tastes reflected a restless nature (it’s perhaps no coincidence that he was on the same record label as a young David Bowie). So although he loved what was going on around him, Yusuf also describes himself as more of an outsider, and his lyrics went way beyond the usual boy-meets-girl scenario. “You want to be with the most beautiful girl in the world, who loves you just for who you are,” he says wistfully, “but I didn’t know who I was, so, how could anybody do that?”

 

It was obvious, even in those first songs, that his search was about more than romantic love. He was asking some pretty big questions of himself – and about life in general.

 

I wish I could tell, I wish I could tell / What makes a heaven what makes a hell – “I Wish, I Wish”, Mona Bone Jakon, 1970

 

There would soon be plenty of time to stop and think about the bigger picture. Stevens’ hedonistic “joy-ride” was stopped in its tracks when tuberculosis almost killed him in 1969. He went from being a teenage pop star with the world at his feet, to facing a year-long recuperation from the disease.

 

So while the Sixties roared on, and bands like The Who could blithely proclaim, as only the young can, that they hoped they would die before getting old, Stevens was suddenly confronted with death as a very real possibility. Lying in a hospital bed in the countryside away from London, he thought deeply about his religious background – he’d been to a Catholic school – and also began exploring Buddhism and meditation. “It was a stop sign that made me reassess everything,” he says when I ask how big an impact the illness had on his life. “It also re-emphasised something I’d always had within me, which was the search for peace, where you’ve found a place in this universe which is right for you. And that goes along with finding out more about your own identity.”

 

 

Many people naturally want to understand

how an iconic long-haired hippy pop star that sang

and embodied their dreams ended up a muslim,

prostrating in prayer five times a day

and abandoning drinks, parties, adoration and applause 

Yusuf Islam, WISCAG

 

As well as taking stock of his life over those long months alone, Stevens wrote dozens of new songs. They were simpler guitar-orientated pieces that he describes as being “full of spiritual enquiries, openness and childlike honesty” and they were perfect for the early 1970s market, where singer-songwriters dominated the charts. Backed by the legendary Island Records boss Chris Blackwell, the album Mona Bone Jakon was released in 1970 followed six months later by the record that would make him a worldwide star, Tea For The Tillerman, which included “Father and Son”, “Wild World”, “Where do the Children Play?” and “Hard Headed Woman”. Blackwell described it as “the best album we’ve ever released” which was high praise considering he managed some of the most critically acclaimed artists of the era. Teaser And The Firecat came next, with “Peace Train”, “Morning Has Broken”, and “Moonshadow” all becoming instant classics.

 

But all the resulting wealth and adoration couldn’t quieten the questions that nagged at Stevens. “Looking back into my albums, a person would see quite clearly that within me was a fluttering soul that could not settle down,” he writes in WISCAG. “I was still restless and empty inside.”

 

On this boat called ‘near and far’ / To be what you must, you must give up what you are – “To Be What You Must”, Roadsinger, 2009

 

It took another near-death experience for Stevens to find his true spiritual path. He was in America, swimming one morning in the ocean, off Malibu Beach, and didn’t realise until it was too late that a strong current was carrying him away from land. In WISCAG he describes what happened next: “I realised there was no other way and called out, praying from the depths of my sinking heart, ‘Oh God, if You save me I’ll work for You.’ At that moment a gentle wave pushed me forward and I was able to swim back. That was my moment of truth.”

 

What he didn’t yet know was that Islam would be that path to God. It was his brother, David, who bought him a Qu’ran, knowing that his younger sibling was interested in spiritual books. Stevens read it over the course of a year, but it wasn’t until he got to the story of Joseph (or Yusuf in Arabic), that something resonated like nothing had ever done before. He knew what he needed to do.

 

In 1977 Cat Stevens walked into London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park to declare his belief and enter the Ummah – the nation of faith. He has never knowingly missed a prayer since then. Quickly realising that he couldn’t reconcile his new life with the music business, he put out one last record, Back To Earth, as Cat Stevens, before taking the name Yusuf Islam on July 4, 1978, and starting again.

 

 

I would have been an utter hypocrite if I discovered what I did

and then walked away from it.

That would’ve been a betrayal of everything I’ve ever stood for

 

It cannot be emphasised what a totally new experience this was for Stevens. This was before world events brought Islam into focus, and the religion was still relatively unknown in the West. He’d had never even met a Muslim until the first day he became one. As Yusuf, he would soon marry a Muslim girl, Fauzia Mubarak Ali, start a family (he has five children and seven grandchildren), grow out his beard, adopt a more Islamic style of dressing and donate his guitars to charity. He also decided which of his songs were haram or halal, keeping the royalties only from the latter category, then threw himself into learning Arabic and starting charitable and education ventures. I ask how he coped with such a profound transition and he shrugs his shoulders. “Once you’ve decided to jump in the water, there’s not much else to do apart from learn how to swim,” he replies.

 

Today, in the Chinese restaurant in Dubai, his beard is trim and he’s dressed in the western clothes he re-adopted a long time ago now. His clothes are modest and age-appropriate, though the vintage aviator sunglasses and stylish jacket are subtle hints that the pop star of yesteryear has not completely left the building.

 

Discussing the move away from his old life he says he doesn’t regret any of it, apart from the confusion it caused to his genuine fans. Yet he’s adamant that there was no choice. His music had always been about finding truth and he couldn’t live a lie once he’d found his path. “I’ve never really had a profession other than expressing myself, and I would never want to misspend that responsibility. That’s why I walked away from the music business,” he says, deadly serious for a moment. “What I was looking for wasn’t just a mirage, it was true. I meant it. And I would have been an utter hypocrite if I discovered what I did and then walked away from it. That would’ve been a betrayal of everything I’ve ever stood for.”

 

You know I used to weave my words into confusion / So I hope you’ll understand me when I’m through – “Dying to Live”, Tell ’Em I’m Gone, 2014

 

Yusuf says he loved this period in his life, discovering a new community, starting a family, learning about himself and his religion. But the world was changing. One year after converting, the Iranian Revolution sent shockwaves around the world and Yusuf laments how Muslims in the West felt like they suddenly had to choose sides. Almost overnight, a benign disinterest about Islam turned into something darker and more immediate. “A wall was being built around us;” he writes in WISCAG. “We were thrown into the shadows of a long dark night.”

 

One disaster followed another: the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the abandonment of the Palestinians, famines, floods and earthquakes, the Bosnian war, 9/11... The list of calamities goes on, brutal and dark and it would have profound implications for Muslims in general and Yusuf personally.

 

 

People calling me Cat Stevens? That's OK. It's just a hashtag

Because Westerners didn’t know much about Islam, Yusuf found himself becoming a de-facto spokesperson for a religion he was only just discovering. In the long run this would be a useful platform for sharing knowledge and ideas, but it would cause huge problems in the early years, when he was still finding his way. This came to a head in 1989 when he was asked to explain his position regarding the fatwa by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran on Salman Rushdie after the publication of his inflammatory novel, The Satanic Verses.

 

Yusuf says his responses to the barrage of questions about whether he supported the fatwa were deliberately twisted – especially in one painful encounter with a QC in a live television debate. And when he did release a statement regarding his position, certain lines were taken out of context from the message he was trying to convey. The episode cast a long shadow, though his position has long been clear, as he re-iterates in WISCAG. “The truth of the matter is that I never agreed with the fatwa, in fact, I firmly believe it went against the basic injunction in Islam which forbids the taking of life without just right – lawfully – part of due process in maintaining law and order within society. Never did I say ‘kill Rushdie’ or believe that Muslims were morally or duty bound to take the law into their own hands.”

 

For that reason, it seems pointless today to rake over old ground again. There will always be critics who choose to rely on YouTube snippets, rather than read his considered responses. It seems more appropriate to ask how the position he was in – straddling Islam and the Western world – made him feel in general. “I think I was affected by the people around me,” he says of those years living and working with his Muslim brethren in north London. “A lot of them had left their countries, just trying to save their skins, and weren’t being accepted. And then you can’t help but be affected by the catastrophes happening in the rest of the world; it was all pretty dark. There wasn’t much for many Muslims to smile about and that must have rubbed off on me.”

 

The world is still a difficult, messy place in which to live, but Yusuf’s outward manner is very different today. Although he still wants to talk about the problems of inequality and injustice, in general he just seems a lot looser than perhaps he once would have been. When I ask him what changed his perspective he says what many parents or grandparents would understand: that having children lightened him up again. “You can’t be that serious. Well, maybe at the beginning, but then you’ve got to learn how to be a father and learn to ease off, because freedom, I think, is God given, so you have to respect the fact that everybody has to get through this learning curve on their own, with a bit of help guidance and advice, but in the end everybody’s doing it on their own.”

 

Being a spokesperson for his faith is a burden he also seems more willing or able to shoulder these days. Although he is quick to point out that he doesn’t have the answers – “I am not seeking or asking anyone to follow me, or my various conclusions, but only to look within themselves at the signs of the eternal truth,” – is how he describes it in WISCAG, he’ll happily discuss Islam’s proud history as a culturally progressive force, a fact he thinks has been deliberately downgraded in the West. He’ll quote Rumi’s beautiful mystic poetry and reemphasise time and time again the peaceful, inclusive nature of his religion. Basically, he seems more secure with the path he is on , the wisdom he’s gained over the decades and the opportunities his music and faith have given him to help others.

 

I have dreamt of an open world / Borderless and wide / Where the people move from place to place/ And nobody’s taking sides – “Maybe there’s a World”, An other Cup, 2006

 

To many people, Yusuf will always be remembered for being the pop star who became a Muslim. But what will arguably be a far bigger legacy, albeit one that has often gone under the radar, is what he has done with that platform. A key tenet of Islam is charity – zakat – and he was very active from the beginning in this regard. As well as founding the first British Muslim government-funded schools in London he started his own charity, Small Kindness and the Yusuf Islam Foundation. For many years this, along with education, was his fulltime occupation.

 

 

Yusuf is animated when he talks of how compassion can literally be a game-changer for humanity. “The only way to communicate, share and expand is through human contact with those who don’t have as much as others, which brings you back to the great rules of life,” he says. "There is a saying in Islam, “Love For Your Brother What You Love For Yourself”. Jesus said, “Do to others as you would have them do to you”. And this runs all the way through to the Declaration of Human Rights, which is about good neighbourliness. Well, hey, where did that go?

 

 

Parts of Europe are locking the doors, due to that lethal disease of prejudice, and a lot of it goes back to education. So charity and education are always going to be the main areas of work that I love to be engaged in.”

 

 

For this reason he refuses to bow to cynicism or despair, even having just returned from a refugee camp in Turkey. “There is a lot of injustice in the world,” he says, “but there’s also an optimism that’s like the ocean. It renews itself if you just stop interfering with nature.”

 

 

It’s also the reason he’s doing this interview with Esquire – to raise awareness for his beautiful new song “He Was Alone” aimed at raising awareness of the refugees – particularly the children – desperately trying to survive the journey to Europe.

 

 

In all the emotive discussions about refugees, it’s an overlooked fact that an astonishing 10,000 children have gone missing since the Syrian crisis began, according to the EU’s criminal intelligence agency.

 

 

“One of the biggest crimes today is reductionism,” Yusuf says of his inspiration for the song. “We talk about ‘millions of people’ as if it’s just a figure... we’ve lost the human contact.” The moving video for “He Was Alone” focuses on the story of an actual refugee, a twelve-year-old boy, and his journey from Syria to Turkey. It was due to be played in front of world leaders and other influencers at the end of May at a UN-backed World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul; men and women who have the power to shape policy in Europe.

 

 

This is the power that music has given him – the ability to share, communicate and inspire through music. Which brings us to the $64 million question: why did he come to pick up the guitar again, 25 years after renouncing it as being incompatible with his faith?

 

 

Then a stranger sang / The voice like the wind / Then the hails began to sing / Welcome in – “Welcome Home”, Roadsinger, 2009

 

 

For many years Yusuf erred on the side of caution regarding the role of music in Islam. He did not play or sing, on the advice that it was probably incompatible with his faith. This viewpoint gradually softened over the decades as he learned of the less restrictive view of many other scholars. “Islam does not forbid what is good and meaningful in art and music,” he writes in WISCAG. “It simply does not sanction what is vile, mindless or vain”. To that end, he set up Mountain of Light in 1994, a charitable organisation and studio dedicated to promoting Islam. His spoken word album, released in 1995, The Life of the Last Prophet, was a worldwide hit in many Muslim countries, which showed that he still had an ability to connect to audiences.

 

 

“The Little Ones” was his response to the war in Bosnia, and it led to an album I Have No Cannons That Roar in 1998, though he wasn’t actually playing on any of these compositions. A is for Allah followed in 2000, which led to more educational CDs. In 2001 he opened an office and then a studio in Dubai to produce more children’s songs.

 

 

In 2002 Yusuf finally picked up the guitar again, after Yoriyos brought one to their house in Dubai. This would once have been a cause for consternation, but instead of scolding his son he did something else. One morning, when everyone else was sleeping, he picked up the guitar and placed his fingers on the fretboard. He quickly found a C and D chord, thought for a while and then remembered the correct voicing for F. And there he sat, playing as a beginner, the guitar full of possibilities. From this moment the music began to flow again and has yet to stop, which he thinks is because “it was like going back to having nothing to lose... It’s back to when you were a kid.”

 

 

Another series of marker points led him back to writing and performing on a permanent basis. He wrote “Indian Ocean” for victims of the 2004 tsunami and went to Indonesia to distribute aid. And, in what was perhaps the perfect example of his more humorous side reasserting itself, he turned the very troubling experience of being refused entry to the US in 2004, thanks to the FBI mistakenly placing him on a no-fly list, into a song that poked fun at the ordeal. “Boots & Sand” was catchy, subversive and funny, with Dolly Parton and Paul McCartney, who are both fans, proving backing vocals, and Bob Dylan’s son, Jesse, directing the video.

 

 

He released his first full album in almost 30 years, An Other Cup in 2006, followed by Roadsinger (2009) and Tell ’Em I’m Gone (2014), and also wrote a musical, Moonshadow. He’s also just finished another album, this time with his old producer Paul Samwell-Smith and guitarist Alun Davies who worked on his most famous early material. This one revisits some early material, including “Mighty Peace” and “Northern Wind (The Death of Billy the Kid)”, of which he is especially proud, as well as some standards and new compositions. He’s clearly delighted to be back with his old comrades, rediscovering the unique magic and longevity of those songs.

 

 

This brings us to a big question I’d asked myself about Yusuf Islam: How do you explain the enduring power of his music? (I should confess to a longstanding interest in this regard. I’m speaking now as a journalist who has had a sideline playing music in bars for the past 20 years, and I can report that the likes of “Wild World”, “Father and Son” and “First Cut is the Deepest” have always been among the most requested songs – and not from any one demographic either. This has often led me to wonder why some songs just never lose their hold on people.)

 

 

In an anonymous-looking Turkish restaurant near Satwa,the setting for our second interview, the man who wrote these classics humbly sips his tea and thinks about the question. “It’s got to be a reflection of people’s own experiences or their emotions,” he eventually says. “A song can feel like it was written for you, and it’s wonderful to be able to reflect things that they perhaps couldn’t explain in any other way.” Ask how he managed to capture those emotions, he puts down his cup and pauses again. “When you ask me today who wrote those songs then I have to really ponder, because I don’t know.”

 

 

Like many other artists, he says that most of his best-known work almost seemed to write itself. “In the early days you’re not really thinking about it, you’re in the middle of everything. But on reflection it must be a bit like when a scientist unravels some mystery, DNA or whatever, and he’s discovered what was already there and he’s, like, ‘Wow, I’m the first to see it!’. And when you write music you’re the first one to hear it. So you’re very lucky... But it doesn’t mean you wrote it.”

 

 

I tell him about a phrase I’d heard a couple of days before, “music is the sound of feelings” and how I immediately associated it with his songs. “Well, music is the straightest way to get to the heart, and the heart is where our conscience lives,” he agrees. “And it can be manipulated sometimes or used for titillation, like a lot of music today, or it can strike another chord that makes you stop and think.”

 

 

He jokes that, back in the day, he regretted the fact that other people’s music made an audience dance, whereas his songs made them sit down and ponder, but now he realises that is a good thing. And to return to the purpose behind his new release “He Was Alone”, that is a powerful tool. “It’s an example of how music has enabled me to get back to social commentary, you know, back to protest,” he says.

 

And here’s where we get to the most fascinating part of the story: the idea that Yusuf’s whole journey has been moving and changing so that he can get back to where he started.

 

 

Life is like a maze of doors and they all open from the side you’re on / Just keep on pushing as hard as you can / And you’re going to wind up where you started from – “Sitting”, Catch A Bull At Four, 1972

 

 

The more I looked at the journey of Yusuf Islam in the months, years, leading up to our meetings, the more it became clear that the question most people ask of him, or rather Cat Stevens – namely, why did he change? – is the wrong way of looking at his story. Study anything he has ever written and you realise that the journey has been about staying true to an ideal he formed at a very young age, rather than breaking away from it.

 

 

There are countless clues or markers that point to the direction he was travelling in, even if we could not know it at the time. Yusuf has been thinking about this a lot lately, as he’s working on an autobiography, and says the process of rediscovering his origins has taught him a lot about where he is today. For instance, the region his father’s family hailed from, Cyprus, was once part of the Golden Crescent of the Muslim world.

 

 

“...And so you think, Oh, maybe I am from the Middle East after all,” he says with a laugh. “It’s great to make these discoveries. You re-establish this context and life becomes this clear road again. It’s a really interesting process. I recommend it to anyone, no matter what kind of life you’ve had.”

 

 

He also discovered that the small town in Sweden, near Gävle, where his mother came from, was also the birthplace of Joe Hill, who went on to become a labour activist and songwriter in America at the start of the 20th Century. He’d later be sung about by many of the folk singers of the early 1960s who inspired a young Cat Stevens.

 

 

Yusuf’s book will also include wonderful vignettes such as Jimi Hendrix squirting a water pistol at him from behind the curtains while he was singing “I’m Gonna Get Me A Gun”. The two were on tour together when Hendrix first burst on to the scene and he laughs again at the memories. “I should have done the same to him when he lit his guitar on fire,” he laughs.

 

 

One of the most revealing clues to his future journey, as revealed in the book, is that the first proper song he ever wrote was called “Mighty Peace”, which basically delineated his path from the very beginning. He’s re-recorded it for the next album, in recognition of the place he was at both then and now.

 

I ask if he agrees with this assessment of his career going full circle to answer the questions he’d posed in his songs at the beginning. “I’ve always carried the feeling that somehow there is a plan for me,” he affirms. “Discovering Islam was one of the big discoveries of that plan, because I had written so many songs that almost described where I was going, but in more generic terms. And then when I dropped the guitar that also felt right at the time.”

 

Recently he got a kick out of discovering Ziryab, an 8th Century Muslim poet and musician who introduced the oud to Spain (which later led to the invention of the guitar) and also brought the influences of North African music with him to Europe. The knowledge that this must have been part of the musical journey that led to the blues and rock and roll is not lost on Yusuf.

 

Everything in the journey, it would seem, turns out to have happened for a reason.
 

 

So on, and on I go / The seconds tick the time out / So much left to know, and I’m on the road to find out – “On the Road To Find Out”, Tea For The Tillerman, 1970

 

Today when he releases new music, Yusuf Islam tends to just use the moniker “Yusuf” on the promotional material. It’s shorter, snappier and has fewer connotations for the more wary among his western audience about where he is coming from. But he also doesn’t mind putting Cat Stevens somewhere on an album cover or tour poster if it helps identify him to his audience.

 

Some people still struggle with this not very complicated dualism. I sat in the BBC studios in London a couple of years ago while the Radio 2 DJ, Simon Mayo, spent the first few minutes of the interview trying to establish Yusuf’s proper title. The conversation went something like this:

 

What should I call you?
Well, my name’s Yusuf Islam
But some people still call you Cat Stevens...
That’s fine too
Which do you prefer?
Well, my name’s Yusuf
So either?
Whatever you’re comfortable with...

And so it went. But this was a revealing, if a little torturous, conversation. People want to know what box Steven Demetre Georgiou / Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam fits into. But in truth, how many of us do fit into one mould? “Well, some of us are dads; we’re brothers, sisters, friends; we have names and nicknames,” he says when I remind him of the encounter in London.

 

“Cat was a very appropriate name at the time; it was part of my independent personality, but then Yusuf was the key to me because I loved the name Joseph.” His last record says “Yusuf” on the cover, and in smaller letters on a sticker, “Cat Stevens”. “That’s okay,” he shrugs. “It’s just a hashtag.”

 

He’s telling me this over a very late lunch, shortly before leaving for dinner with one of his daughters. He’s patiently endured a photoshoot on a hot May afternoon in Satwa, and now we’re cooling off indoors along with Yoriyos. It’s our last interview before Yusuf goes back to Europe to launch “He Was Alone”, so it seems appropriate to finish by asking about his legacy. He thinks first, choosing his words carefully, perhaps mindful, as always, of the need for humility in his answer.

Or maybe he’s just too busy to have thought about it yet.

 

“I hope the messages of my songs will continue to be relevant, which they seem to be today, so that’s important,” he replies. Then we talk about the faith schools he helped established in London, of which he’s clearly proud. “We’ve had a breakthrough where Muslims get equal treatment in the UK, at least in education.” He also discusses the unity of thought and belief that he found in Islam and hopes this will be more widely publicised in future. Amid the gloom of recent times there are reasons to be optimistic. London just elected a Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, who has promised to work for everyone. “We need more of it,” Yusuf says.

 

Finally, he wants his audience to understand why he left the guitar and why he eventually picked it up again – because he had to stay true to the ideals he’d always sung about. “It’s about commitment. I never sold out to anything other than God. The only one worthy of true commitment.”

 

But right now he has more immediate concerns other than thinking about legacies. His daughter phones to remind him that they have a dinner date, and from the sound of their conversation she wants to know why he is already in a restaurant. He assures her that, no, he hasn’t spoiled his appetite, tells her he’ll be there shortly and then apologises to me that he has to leave.

 

As we wait for the bill, watching the waiters prepare for the evening crowd, I ask what he learned from helping out at his father’s restaurant all those years ago back in London. “That you should always tip the hard-working staff,” he laughs.

 

So we leave some change and make our way outside into the rush hour. Yusuf offers me a ride home as he’s going in my direction, and he wants me to hear a freshly done mix of “Northern Wind” that he seems thrilled with.

 

I’m happy to report that it feels like a quantum leap for his sound. It’s like everything you’d hope for from a latter-day Cat Stevens song, thanks to its poignant story and a beautiful, rich production. But best of all there is the voice. Thanks to suffering from a cold in the studio, Yusuf dropped the melody by an octave and his vocals seem to have acquired a new gravitas that helps convey his message. As we drive I hear the wisdom of a 50-year search for meaning; the sound of an artist deep into his journey. It is, in my opinion, one of the best things he has ever recorded and an emphatic case for everything he has ever done or said.

 

For our sakes, thank goodness he went away to find himself and his faith – and then came back to share the fruits of those labours. Although for him, of course, he never really went away. He just got closer to where he was always heading.

 

[esquireme.com, 22. Juni 2016]

 

 

 

Cat Stevens' Peace Train pulls into

New Zealand for just the second time

 

There might never have been a Cat Stevens if it weren't for Jane Fonda.

 

The Beatles, the Yardbirds and even the Monkees also had a hand in his creation - though not necessarily in the way you might think.

 

Now called Yusuf Islam - a name he adopted a year after he became a Muslim in 1977 - Cat Stevens was born Steven Demetre Georgiou in 1948, to a Greek Cypriot father and a Swedish mother living above their family restaurant in London's West End.

 

In recent years he has undergone another (minor) name change, dropping the surname Islam from his stage persona to become simply 'Yusuf' - a decision made mostly due to the journalistic habit of referring to people by their last names.

 

"Reading things like, 'Islam says…' worried me," he says on his website.

 

"It was not appropriate for pop-journalists to write things like, 'Islam's new album'."

 

As for Cat, that was only supposed to be a temporary thing - a stage name to counter the fact that he couldn't imagine anyone asking for an album by Steven Demetre Georgiou.

 

"Well, there were the Monkees, there were the Yardbirds, there were the Beatles - and I figured that animals were like, in, you know?" he laughs. "Also, there happened to be films around at the same time like Cat Ballou, What's New Pussycat? - cats were flying at me all over the place. So I just said, this is it.

 

It was only temporary until I thought of something better, but it ended up on the record label and it's been stuck there ever since."

 

It's a strange thing to be interviewing Cat Stevens - hereafter referred to as Yusuf - not least because I'm at first unsure of just what are appropriate subjects to talk to him about.

 

While he hasn't exactly shied away from interviews since his return to the world of 'secular' music in the mid-2000s, it's hard to shake the sense that Yusuf's Cat Stevens days are somehow off-limits - despite the fact he's been playing old hits like Peace Train and Moonshadow again for years, as he did on his last (and first) visit to New Zealand in 2010.

 

Maybe it's the way the internationally renowned singer-songwriter - at what could be called the height of his fame - so abruptly quit the music business altogether, converting to Islam, changing his name and releasing one final album as Cat Stevens before auctioning all his guitars for charity and devoting his life to philanthropic causes around the world.

 

Any concerns I might have had are almost immediately dispelled when I get him on the phone however - Yusuf seems perfectly happy to talk about everything from the weather and Facebook to the inspiration behind Matthew And Son and the reasoning behind his return to music.

 

In Sydney promoting his upcoming Australian tour - he'll be there from November to December before coming here for three dates in Auckland, New Plymouth and Christchurch - Yusuf comes on the line after a vaguely confusing exchange between myself and his son Yoriyos, who I at first mistook for the man himself (all the while marvelling in my head at his miraculously youthful-sounding voice).

 

Like his father, the son is a singer-songwriter - Yoriyos is actually another stage name; he was born Muhammad Islam - and is also the person responsible for bringing Yusuf back to the guitar after a quarter-century absence.

 

It was 2002 when the then-teenage Yoriyos brought a guitar home to their house in Dubai - and late that night when his family was sleeping, Yusuf picked it up and tried out a few chords.

 

"I didn't have a guitar for many years, because I'd just got ridden of them all," says Yusuf, still sporting a surprisingly distinct London accent. "And then when I got the guitar back I started to play, and at that point, immediately I started to write.

 

"The first song that I wrote actually hasn't been released yet, but one day it'll come out. It's a very moving song - very moving - and it was kind of like the inspiration came back to me."

 

Yusuf not only has a knack for moving people with his music - the lyrics to Father And Son rarely fail to bring a tear to my eye - but for me there's always been something about his songs that also seems to make a deeper connection with the listener.

 

The summer I left school my friends and I absolutely thrashed the 1990 release of The Very Best Of Cat Stevens, listening to it alongside albums by more (at the time) contemporary bands like Sublime and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I wanted to know if Yusuf had any idea why his songs continue to endure 30, 40 and now even 50 years after they were written?

 

"I think the spirit of the counter-culture sort of movement that I belonged to, and I contributed to, still stands relevant today to many kids," he reflects.

 

"Growing up in the world today, it's becoming harder and harder to find your identity I think - because everything is corporate stamps. You've got your Facebook, but even on that you become a trademark yourself - of your own image.

 

And people change, so I think I represent someone who went through those changes - it's that I think that resonates maybe."

 

The changes have continued for Yusuf over the years - these days he even admits that his sudden departure from music might have been a somewhat "radical and over-zealous reaction" to his newfound faith.

 

And while he acknowledges that there are those in Islam who may disagree with his decision to return to the music that made him famous, his own standpoint seems to have mellowed considerably.

 

"I think what I'm doing by singing again is kind of bringing people back to the basic human heart of it all - because that's what it's all about," he says. "Unfortunately politics really does a nasty business in separating people. Especially these days, we can see politicians make a whole career out of it - you know, out of making divisions and building walls and all sorts of things.

 

So it's great to be able to, in a way, represent a bridge between the cultures that I represent. By the way, recently I wrote a book - a short book - called Why I Still Carry A Guitar, so I'm also trying to explain to the Muslim community, 'Hey, that's why I'm up on stage' - because I think it's a great way to communicate, a great way to unite."

 

[stuff.co.nz, 02. April 2017]

 

 

 

Yusuf Cat Stevens talks on

sharing melodies with Coldplay and borrowing them from Beethoven

 

We are partnering with some animators here in Australia for a children’s series based on my songs.

 

Is the series a reimagining of the Moonshadow musical you staged in Melbourne in 2012?

 

The Moonshadow experience was very, very enlightening for me because I had to get it out of my system, I wanted to see this thing on stage.

 

I realised then perhaps people need to get to know the fable, the story, the myth before they understand what this is.

 

At the time some people were confused as to whether it was a tribute or a musical or some cartoony thing. Yet the story is very much a child-centred concept set in a world of darkness ... very much like today where people are oppressed.

 

In the story somewhere is out there with the little hero looking for daylight, the sunshine. It’s a great little story, so I am working on that. The animation project, yes it’s the same people behind the (Beatles inspired) Beat Bugs project.

 

You have talked about feeling a simpatico with John Lennon.

 

I love them, I was such a fan of the Beatles.

 

I felt particularly aligned philosophically strongly with Lennon. We even wrote a similar line by chance; I wrote a song in ‘68 which I never released and later heard in his iconic song Imagine in the context of “dream of the world as one.” And “I’m not the only one”.

 

There was a kind of synchronicity.

 

There are other songs you have mentioned may have too much synchronicity with your music.

 

Don’t forget Coldplay.

 

That song Viva La Vida ... it was said the similarity was with Joe Satriani (2004’s If I Could Fly. The plagiarism case brought by the guitarist was dismissed in 2009).

 

If you go back even further, you will come to Foreigner Suite in 1973.

On An Other Cup album (2006), you will hear the development of that same melody, which I stole from myself, and turned into a song called Heaven/Where True Love Grows. And that is much closer I think to what ended up on the Coldplay album.

 

And hey, I love it.

 

Come on, on my next album again I have borrowed from myself. And also a melody of Beethoven and turned it into a song.

 

 

Songwriters are always casting forward and the tour you will be doing here in November is very much about looking back.

 

I have great fondness for those songs.

And I bring out hidden gems some people may have missed. There’s a thread, a continuity through them to now.

 

But the continuity was broken when you quit music in 1979 and didn’t return officially until 2005.

 

I was just getting down to living the songs, that’s all. Walking the talk, they say.

Coming back to writing again was only when I had something to say.

What had become a bit tedious to me in the end was always this insistence on another album, that cycle.

 

How thankful are you that your children left a guitar hanging around during a family holiday in Dubai? Is it true that was part of the catalyst for you picking up your music career again?

 

It was a very strategic move on the part of my son Yoriyos to leave the guitar hanging around and now he’s my manager.

 

He’s a smart lad and he keeps surprising me, his perception of the world is sharp.

 

The children love my music. My grandkids, come on. My eldest grandson loves I’ve Got a Thing About Seeing My Grandson Grow Old, he thinks it’s about him. It is; I just didn’t know when I wrote it.

 

Looking at how it all started for you, growing up in Soho in London with the famed 100 Club down the road and everywhere, do you think you were destined to be a singer and songwriter?

 

The role I was given early on was a bit of a peacemaker because my mum and dad spilt very early and I was there always trying to hold them all together, it was a big job.

 

That’s always been my thing, to want to bring sides together.

 

 

During your US tour, you let the songs do the talking rather than speak directly about politics or religion from the stage.

 

No, no, no, that’s not what people come to see me for, they come to hear me for the music.

 

It was home for me because I brought my attic with me and put it on the walls and the shoes and the trunks that came with me.

 

Music quite frankly can, does, bring people together, it’s as simple as that. Concerts bring people together, football matches divide them in half and politics just fractures whatever remains.

Forget the rest, go to a gig.

 

Peace Train still brings audiences to their feet, united in song, more than four decades after it first hit the charts.

 

The message is still absolutely perfect, the symbol of the movement of humanity, you want everyone to get on that train to get to where happiness resides, for all of us.

 

It still resounds and it is a great message for what I hope to represent throughout my life.

 

 

Are there songs which, since your conversion to Islam, you may feel qualms about singing?

 

The Boy With the Moon and Stars On His Head is a paradoxical song.

 

For a start, I’m that kid!

 

But at the same time it talks about a flirtation before marriage and that’s not really on for a Muslim, is it?

 

I don’t have so much of a problem (singing) it now because it’s symbolism and the symbolism of that song is nothing other than love.

 

And love can overcome anything, everything in fact, if it’s pure or not lustful or anything like that. The last words of that song “I’ll tell you everything I’ve learned and love is all ... he said.”

 

[adelaidenow.com.au, 12. April 2017]

 

 

 

Yusuf / Cat Stevens Announces New Album: The Laughing Apple

 

The Laughing Apple follows the common ‘60s template of combining newly-written songs with a number of covers – except that all the covers are from Yusuf’s 1967 catalogue. The Laughing Apple celebrates some of his earliest material, presenting the songs as he has always wished they had been recorded.

 

“There are some I always wanted to hear differently,” he explains. “Many of my earlier recordings were overcooked with big band arrangements. They crowded the song out a lot of times.”

 

Yusuf produced The Laughing Apple with Paul Samwell-Smith, the original producer behind Yusuf’s landmark recordings, including 1970’s Tea for the Tillerman, which contained the classics ‘Wild World’ and ‘Father and Son’. That multi-platinum album became a benchmark of the singer-songwriter movement, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has named it one of the definitive albums of all time.

 

The Laughing Apple takes listeners to that little garden where the Tillerman sat under the tree, with a charming new illustration by Yusuf. That picture harks back to Tillerman’s younger days when he worked as an apple-picker. Yusuf also has illustrated each of the 11 songs on The Laughing Apple in his naive style, resembling a storybook — for those whose hearts have never really grown old.

 

When all things were tall,

And our friends were small,

And the world was new.

 

Those words of Cat Stevens’ Silent Sunlight now seem to reflect most accurately the sentiments of The Laughing Apple. “As you grow older, the sweetness of youth, as Wordsworth expressed in his poem ‘Splendour in the Grass’, get stronger,” says Yusuf. “Looking back and emotionally drawing on the themes of childhood possibilities and disappointments is what exemplifies this album, for me.”

 

The new album also marks the return of Yusuf’s longtime musical foil, Alun Davies. Davies, whose graceful acoustic guitar is an essential component of Yusuf’s classic sound, first appeared on 1970’s Mona Bone Jakon and recorded and performed with Yusuf throughout the ‘70s. The Laughing Apple‘s newest songs — ‘See What Love Did to Me’, ‘Olive Hill’ and ‘Don’t Blame Them’ — possess the reflective insight of a spiritual seeker and the melodic charm that made Yusuf beloved by millions during the ‘60s and ‘70s and still speak to a younger, wide-eyed generation.

 

‘Mighty Peace’ is the first inspired song Yusuf wrote while still beating the folk-club path in London during the early ‘60s. The song laid fallow for more than 50 years, and, with a newly added verse, finally has made it onto an album. ‘Mary and the Little Lamb’ reflects a similar story: it is an unreleased song that existed only on an old demo, and it also has a new verse. ‘Grandsons’ updates ‘I’ve Got a Thing About Seeing My Grandson Grow Old’, which now has hung around long enough to fulfill its biographical destiny. (Yusuf is the beloved grandfather of eight little grandkids.) The original version appeared for the first time on the 2000 edition of The Very Best of Cat Stevens.

 

Other highlights of The Laughing Apple include new versions of ‘Blackness of the Night’, ‘Northern Wind (Death of Billy the Kid)’, ‘I’m So Sleepy’ and the title track, four songs that appeared in their original incarnations on New Masters, a 1967 album largely unknown in the US.

 

The album also contains ‘You Can Do (Whatever)’, a song originally intended for the film ‘Harold and Maude’ that remained unfinished until now.

 

2017 is a milestone marking 50 years of Yusuf / Cat Stevens’ amazing musical history. In 1967, Decca released his debut album, Matthew and Son, on its Deram Records subsidiary.

 

Yusuf returned to the stage at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre, right across from his father’s cafe, on November 20, 2016, with a reflective and deeply emotional delving into his ‘Attic’ of songs, anecdotes and memories. The unforgettable ‘A Cat’s Attic’ show and subsequent tour included his musical classics and global hits like ‘Wild World’, ‘Moonshadow’, ‘Peace Train’, ‘Morning Has Broken’ and ‘Oh Very Young’, which made him a radio staple during the ‘70s. The music of Yusuf / Cat Stevens will be the subject of a PBS Soundstage special in September.

 

Yusuf’s music has established him as a timeless voice for all generations. His songs are used regularly in films and television shows, with “’Father and Son’ playing during a crucial scene in the blockbuster movie Guardians of the Galaxy 2.

 

A recipient of The World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates’ Man of Peace award and the World Social Award, Yusuf continues to support charities such as UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Tree Aid through The Yusuf Islam Foundation in the UK.

 

Full tracklisting of The Laughing Apple below:

Blackness of the Night

See What Love Did to Me

The Laughing Apple

Olive Hill

Grandsons

Mighty Peace

Mary and the Little Lamb

You Can Do (Whatever)

Northern Wind (Death of Billy the Kid)

Don’t Blame Them

I’m So Sleepy

 

[folkradio.co.uk, 21. Juli 2017]

 

 

Hear Yusuf / Cat Stevens' Joyous New Song 'See What Love Did to Me'

 

Track will appear on 'The Laughing Apple,' veteran songwriter's upcoming LP of new and reworked songs

 

Yusuf / Cat Stevens will release a new album in the fall, his fourth since returning to the folk-pop style of his classic Sixties and Seventies work. The Laughing Apple bridges the artist's present and past, combining newly written songs with covers of tracks from his early repertoire. [...]

 

The song offers a charming update on the breezy, singalong-friendly sound that Yusuf / Cat Stevens helped to pioneer on classic albums such as Tea for the Tillerman. Over a simple acoustic-guitar-driven arrangement, he praises love's transformative powers, comparing it to forces of nature. "Just like the wind, my heart's rushing fast/A piece of dust too high to catch," he sings. The song's lyric video features animations of Yusuf / Cat Stevens' own drawings, made especially for the album. The artist himself turns up for a cameo near the end of the clip, as the song takes a religious turn: "And now I see what God did for me."

 

"'See What Love Did to Me' is a a song which extolls the virtue of Love and its destructive properties," Yusuf / Cat Stevens tells Rolling Stone in a statement. "Based on a poem written by Yunus Emre, a Thirteenth Century Turkish poet. I fell upon the guitar riff back in 2006, while recording An Other Cup. It took eight years to find the right words and sentiments to marry with the joyous tune. It has musical ripples of Africa as well as India flowing through."

 

"Like a blindfolded bee, guided only by his heart to the bosom of the flower, Love is the greatest Divine instinct that gives us wings to fly to the supreme heights of our humanity," he explains, alluding to the song's repeated line "Like a blindfolded bumblebee." "It takes us to a garden where our minds can surrender reason in exchange for the nectar of Love. Worship is in essence a state total devotion to whoever we adore the most and expressing our yearning for closeness and proximity to our Beloved and where we forever want to be."

 

The Laughing Apple celebrates the 50th anniversary of the artist's 1967 debut, Matthew and Son, and will come out on Yusuf / Cat Stevens' Cat-O-Log Records imprint, via Decca, the label he worked with back then. It also reunites him with producer Paul Samwell-Smith, who helmed Tea for the Tillerman, Teaser and the Firecat and other releases from his early-Seventies heyday.

 

Among the old songs that Yusuf / Cat Stevens revived and revamped for The Laughing Apple are "Mighty Peace" and "Mary and the Little Lamb," neither of which ever made it onto an album. Four other songs, including the title track, appeared in their original forms on his 1967 LP New Masters. And "You Can Do (Whatever)" was originally intended for the Harold and Maude soundtrack but was left unfinished at the time. "Many of my earlier recordings were overcooked with big band arrangements," he explains in a press release of his decision to revisit this material. "They crowded the song out a lot of times."

 

The Laughing Apple will be released on September 15th. Last year, Yusuf / Cat Stevens celebrated the 50th anniversary of his first hit single "I Love My Dog" on the retrospective tour A Cat's Attic. [...]

 

[rollingstone.com, 20. Juli 2017]

 

 

Morning has broken (again) as Cat Stevens returns to the charts after a decade of self reconciliation with an album of gentle lullabies and quiet joy

 

It has taken a decade for Cat Stevens to fully reconcile himself to being Cat Stevens. When he returned to music in 2006, having abandoned his career after converting to Islam in 1977, he traded as Yusuf. The Cat was firmly back in the bag.

 

Since then he’s paddled around in the rockpools of his discarded creative identity, but The Laughing Apple signals a full immersion. Reuniting with producer Paul Samwell-Smith and guitarist Alun Davies, both veterans of Stevens’s early Seventies classics, Tea For The Tillerman and Teaser And The Firecat, it’s the first release since Back To Earth in 1978 to be billed as Cat Stevens. 

 

Sound commercial logic? Certainly. But the sense of reclamation extends into the heart of the album, which revisits several of Stevens’s earliest compositions. Four tracks (Blackness Of The Night, The Laughing Apple, Northern Wind, I’m So Sleepy) are reinterpretations of songs from his 1967 album New Masters. Stripped of the over-elaborate production of the originals, they’re presented here in the kind of earthy yet elegant acoustic setting that can’t help but recall Stevens in his prime.

 

The same mood is evident on Mary And The Little Lamb and You Can Do (Whatever), which date from the same era but were never fully realised, and three new songs. See What Love Did To Me has the direct and devotional beauty of Stevens’s best work, topped off with swooping Arabesque strings. The outstanding Don’t Blame Them finds him once again directing traffic on the bridge across the generational divide, much as he did almost 50 years ago on Father And Son. 

 

Aged 69, his voice still has a guileless quality, a gift for innocence that only occasionally curdles into tweeness. With its gentle lullabies, skipping parables, stern warnings and quiet joy, The Laughing Apple feels like the real deal. A short, sweet return for the most effectual top Cat.

 

[dailymail.co.uk, 09. Sept. 2017]

 

 

 

Yusuf klingt wieder wie Cat Stevens

 

Vom gefeierten Popstar zum zurückgezogenen Muslim -

und retour?

Erst jetzt, 50 Jahre nach dem Debüt,

scheint Cat Stevens alias Yusuf

seine zwei Welten endgültig zu vereinen.

 

Er ist eine der enigmatischsten Persönlichkeiten des Musikgeschäfts - und mittlerweile 50 Jahre dabei: Als Cat Stevens eroberte er von 1967 an mit Hits wie "Father and Son" die Herzen von Millionen Fans, bis er nur ein Jahrzehnt später einen Koran bekam, sich Yusuf Islam nannte und dem westlichen Leben komplett entsagte.

 

Zur Gitarre ist der in Dubai lebende Engländer seither längst zurückgekehrt, zunächst mit rein religiösen Inhalten, 2006 dann auch wieder mit Popsongs. Erst das Album "The Laughing Apple" aber, das am Freitag erscheint, scheint ihn vollends mit seiner Vita zu versöhnen.

 

Für das Album hat Yusuf - neben einigen neuen Songs - mehrere alte aus seiner Anfangszeit neu interpretiert. 50 Jahre nach dem Durchbruch mit "Matthew & Son" steht auch sein früherer Künstlername wieder auf der Platte. Sein Comebackalbum 2006 als Yusuf nannte er noch "An Other Cup", mit Betonung auf dem Wort "anders".

 

"Mir ging es nicht darum, diese alten Lieder einfach zu verändern, sondern ich habe sie wiederentdeckt", erzählt der Sänger im Interview in Berlin. "Dann interpretiert man sie natürlich so, wie man heute ist." In "Grandsons" heißt es jetzt etwa statt "I'm hoping to stay" (Ich hoffe, ich werde bleiben) "I'm going to pray" (Ich werde beten).

 

Auch der Opener "Blackness of the Night" und das namengebende "The Laughing Apple" sind Cat-Stevens-Covers, erstmals erschienen 1967. Damals war er ein 19-jähriger Anfänger. Heute, zahlreiche Wendungen später, singt ein grauhaariger 69-Jähriger die gleichen Lieder - so, wie er sie sich musikalisch von Anfang an vorgestellt habe, sagt er.

 

Wie klingt dieser neue, alte Cat Stevens? Etwas langsamer, definitiv auch ausgeruhter, die Instrumentierung ist reduzierter, weniger Blech. Yusufs Stimme ist gealtert, tiefer - aber sie behält ihren unverwechselbaren Klang. Seine besten Lieder singt Yusuf nicht, er fühlt sie so intensiv, dass andere sie hören können. Er ist, in seinen eigenen Worten, ein "Liebhaber von Melodien".

 

So deutlich wie nie knüpft Yusuf damit an seine Jahre als Singer-Songwriter an: Die Single "See what love did to me" etwa ist eine beschwingte Folkpop-Nummer im Stil der frühen 1970er - anders als noch die Blues-Songs des Vorgängeralbums "Tell 'Em I'm Gone". Sogar das Titelbild von "Laughing Apple", das Yusuf mit einem "kindischen, naiven Ansatz" selbst gestaltet hat, ist visuell eine Hommage an "Tea for the Tillerman", das der "Rolling Stone" einst als eines der besten Alben der Geschichte kürte. Jedem Song auf "The Laughing Apple" hat der Sänger eine eigene Illustration verpasst.

 

Die Wandlung von Cat Stevens zu Yusuf Islam 1977 überraschte - und verstieß - viele. Dabei war er immer schon ein spirituell Suchender: Er sagte sich los von der katholischen Kirche, näherte sich unter anderem dem Buddhismus. Als Sohn eines griechischen Zyprioten und einer Schwedin "bin ich schon mit einer verlorenen Identität groß geworden", erzählt er. Und das auch noch im multikulturellen London: "Das hat die Fragen nur noch größer gemacht."

 

Gleichzeitig sei die Suche nach neuen Möglichkeiten aber auch der Zeitgeist gewesen, während heute alles viel kleinteiliger sei. "Man muss sich schnell einer Gruppe anschließen. Wohingegen man damals seine eigene Gruppe erfinden konnte."

Beendet ist diese Suche ist für Yusuf übrigens auch nicht mit dem Islam, der ohnehin weniger engstirnig sei als der Katholizismus. "Die Suche nach Wissen ist endlos", sagt er. "Denn es gibt immer einen über dir, der mehr weiß." Friedvoller aber als der Sänger, der sich einst rastlos nach Antworten sehnte - ja, das sei er heute schon.

 

Auf die Frage, ob er denn - ähnlich wie bei seinen alten Songs - auch in seinem Leben als Popstar im Nachhinein etwas ändern würde, überlegt der 69-Jährige nur kurz. "Nicht wirklich", sagt er dann. "Denn es hat Spaß gemacht."

 

Schon lange vor dem von US-Präsident Donald Trump geplanten Einreiseverbot für Muslime hatte Islam wegen seines Namens Probleme in den USA - 2004 wurde ihm die Einreise verweigert. Seither war der Popsänger, mehrfach wieder in den USA, allerdings noch nicht, seit Trump regiert, wie er sagte. Das werde sich bald ändern, fügte er lachend an: "Auf geht's, wir sind bald auf dem Weg nach New York."

 

Die Kandidatur Trumps habe er anfangs nicht ernst genommen. "Ich dachte, das ist sowas wie ein Streich ... Aber er hat gewonnen ... Das hatte ich nicht erwartet. Ich glaube, er auch nicht", sagte Islam. "Das zeigt wirklich die Mängel der Demokratie, nicht? Wie die Dinge schiefgehen können, wenn die gewaltige Aufmerksamkeitsmaschinerie im Wahlkampf die Wahrnehmung täuschen kann."

 

[kleinezeitung.at, 14. Sept. 2017]

 

"Ich liebe die Beatles. Sorry!"

 

Der Mann hat extreme Wandlungen durchgemacht:

Vom Weltstar Cat Stevens wurde er 1977 zu Yusuf Islam.

Jetzt bringt der 69-Jährige ein neues Album auf den Markt, das sehr sanft daherkommt. Das habe vielleicht auch mit seinen Enkeln zu tun,

vermutet der Brite.

 

Ihr neues Album klingt sanft, ruhig, friedvoll, fast schon naiv. Wie empfinden Sie selbst die Atmosphäre, die die Songs kreieren?

 

Es ist kindlich, es ist sehr ursprünglich. So, wie es ist, wenn man das erste Mal im Leben Farben sieht, das erste Mal neues Essen probiert. Es ist als wäre man wieder ein Kind, also als würde man dem ersten Abschnitt seines Lebens noch mal einen Besuch abstatten. So ist das bei den Songs, und auch bei meiner Kunst, meinen Zeichnungen. Die sind auch im Album, für jeden Song gibt es eine Illustration. Und das Cover ist der "Lachende Apfel".

 

Also ist das Album so etwas wie die kindliche Seite in Ihnen?

 

Ja, das kommt wahrscheinlich daher, dass ich jetzt acht Enkelkinder habe, und ich komme natürlich gar nicht drum herum, mit denen zu spielen (lacht). Der Älteste ist zwölf, mein jüngster Enkel ist ein gutes Jahr alt. Und das bringt die kindliche Seite wieder zum Vorschein. Und auch, dass ich mit Paul Samwell-Smith, der mein Produzent bei "Tea for the Tillerman“ (viertes Album vom Cat Stevens, erschienen 1970) war, wieder ins Studio gegangen bin, und auch mit Alun Davies, der damals mein Gitarrist war. Dieses Team ist auf dem Album wiedervereint, und dadurch ist es sehr gemütlich, sehr leicht, sehr entspannt geworden, quasi mühelos. Wie eine Brise, als wir es aufgenommen haben.

 

 

Warum haben Sie eigentlich alte Songs und neue Songs auf dem Album gemischt?

 

(lacht) Es nicht so, dass ich keine neuen Songs habe. Ich habe eine Menge neuer Songs. Es war diese Umgebung, wieder mit Paul und Alan zusammen zu sein. Ich habe ein paar von diesen Songs gespielt, ich habe sie geprobt und dabei gemerkt, dass diese neue Art, sie zu spielen, viel persönlicher ist, viel organischer. Nicht so, wie sie 1967 aufgenommen wurden, damals waren sie sehr orchestral. Also es war eine Rückkehr zu der Reinheit, die die Songs ursprünglich hatten. „Mighty peace“ zum Beispiel ist mein allererster Song als Songwriter. Bis jetzt hat der Song nie das Tageslicht gesehen. Ich hatte sogar den Text vergessen, aber ein alter Freund hat mich daran erinnert, er kannte den Text noch. Ich habe noch eine Strophe dazu getextet, und den Song mit ins Album genommen. Ich finde, er ist sehr wichtig, weil er den Anfang von allem zeigt.

 

 

Also ist das Album so etwas wie ein Zusammenfügen von Vergangenheit und Gegenwart?

 

Ja, aber nicht bewusst, nicht mit Absicht. Sondern dadurch, wie es sich angefühlt hat. Wenn man älter wird, beginnt man zurückzuschauen. Und einige dieser Bilder, dieser Andenken, dieser Erinnerungen, werden plötzlich lebendiger (zeigt auf das rote rbb-Mikophon, lacht und sagt: Übrigens, das sieht aus wie ein roter Apfel – ein lachender roter Apfel!).

 

 

Warum haben Sie das Album eigentlich "The Laughing Apple" genannt?

 

Das ist einfach die beste Zeichnung, deshalb hab ich sie auf das Cover genommen (lacht wieder)! Und außerdem ähnelt es natürlich dem Garten auf dem Cover von "Tea for the Tillerman" - also jetzt, das ist der "Tillerman", als er ein kleiner Junge war. Das war sein erster Job – Äpfel pflücken.

 

 

Wären Sie eigentlich gerne noch mal jung?

 

Das Problem am Jungsein ist, Sie haben die ganze Erfahrung nicht, um zu erkennen, dass vieles an diesem "brillanten Ding, das sich Jugend nennt" (lacht), einfach Zeitverschwendung sein könnte. Man verschwendet einfach viel, sogar seine eigene Gesundheit. Ich meine, ich war ganz sicher nicht besonders nett zu meinem eigenen Körper als ich jung war. Man macht lächerliche Dinge, ob es nun Drogen sind oder irgendetwas anderes. Also: Wenn ich noch mal jung wäre… – Nein, es gibt kein "wenn". Ein Sprichwort sagt: "Es gibt kein "wenn", es gibt nur "was war", "was ist" und "was wird sein"..

 

 

Mit welchem Blick schauen Sie zurück in Ihre Vergangenheit? Mit dem Album "The Laughing Apple" feiern Sie den 50. Geburtstag Ihres ersten Albums. Das neue Album klingt besonnen, heiter, kein bisschen bitter.

 

Wenn Sie ein Album zusammenfügen, wissen Sie manchmal nicht unbedingt, was nachher herauskommt. Man hat eine Menge Songs, und plötzlich fangen die Dinge an, sich zu entwickeln. Eine Art Genre taucht plötzlich auf, wie aus dem Nichts, und bestimmt, was für ein Album das wird. Und so hat es auch dieses Mal funktioniert. Es ist ein optimistisches Album, aber es gibt auch einen Song, "Don’t blame them", der richtet sich gegen Vorurteile. Das ist kein schroffer, harter Song, er zielt nicht auf Konfrontation ab - ich will damit sagen, dass wir ein bisschen tiefer als nur bis auf die Oberfläche gucken sollten. Wir sollten hinter das schauen, was die Überschriften uns manchmal sagen. Jeder hat eine eigene Beziehung mit irgendjemandem, und so sollten wir auch Menschen beurteilen: Mehr nach dem, was wir wissen, und nicht nach dem, was wir hören oder was andere Leute uns sagen, wie wir etwas wahrnehmen sollen.

 

 

Geht es in dem Song "Don’t blame them" auch darum, Verantwortung für sich selbst zu übernehmen?

 

Ja, absolut. Das ist genau der Punkt. Die Menschen geben der Welt die Schuld, der Zeit, dem Wetter. Immer, wenn wir nach einem Schuldigen suchen, sollten wir erstmal bei uns selbst schauen, denn am Ende sind es wir selbst, die über unsere Wahrnehmung bestimmen. Und damit bestimmen wir auch darüber, ob etwas im Dunkeln glüht – oder ob es dunkel wird.

 

 

Damit hat der Song eine klare Botschaft…

 

Ja, das stimmt. Und auch der erste Song, "Blackness in the Night", hat eine Botschaft. Das war mein erster "Protest-Song" über die Welt, wenn man so will. Er handelt vom Krieg, von Waisenkindern, und der Song ist leider auch heute sehr aktuell und relevant.

 

 

Gerade haben sich die Terroranschläge vom 11. September zum 16. Mal gejährt. Was meinen Sie – ist die Welt seitdem besser oder schlechter geworden?

 

Sie ist aggressiver geworden. Viele Dinge sind seitdem stigmatisiert worden. Die muslimische Gemeinschaft ist ganz sicher stigmatisiert worden – Millionen Menschen hatten nichts mit den Anschlägen zu tun. Aber das ist vielen nicht bewusst. Um ehrlich zu sein, die Mehrheit der Menschen, die heute in Kriegen umkommen, sind Moslems. Da gibt es ein Problem, das verstanden werden muss. Viele Jahre – vielleicht Jahre der Ungerechtigkeit – haben eine Explosion der Aggressionen hervorgerufen, die leider Teil unseres Lebens geworden sind. Aber ein ausgewogenes Verhältnis muss erst noch gefunden werden. Die Stimme, auch die der Presse, muss den vielen Menschen in der Mitte gegeben werden. Denen, die sicher keine Extremisten sind und die Frieden wollen.

 

 

Kann man eigentlich sagen, Sie persönlich haben Ihre "Mitte" gefunden?! Sie haben sich entschieden, neben "Yusuf" erstmals wieder den Namen "Cat Stevens" mit auf ein Album-Cover zu schreiben..

 

Ich habe meinen Frieden mit der Plattengesellschaft gefunden. Sie haben gesagt: Warum können wir nicht Ihren Namen "Cat Stevens" draufschreiben. Also hab ich gesagt: Okay, let’s do it! (lacht) Nein, ernsthaft: Es hilft den Menschen zu wissen, wer dieses Album gemacht hat. Was mich betrifft, das ist ein und derselbe Geist, und der bin ich. Cat Stevens war immer mein Name, ich habe ihn selbst ausgesucht. Jetzt haben wir beide Namen zusammengeführt, und für viele Menschen wird es ein Cat Stevens-Album sein.

 

 

Was würden Sie der heutigen Jugend gerne mit auf den Weg geben?

 

Ich denke, die Jugend sollte wieder etwas vom "Geist der Dinge", von ihrem Sinn, lernen. In früheren Zeiten war der "Spirit" natürlicher Teil des Glaubens, mit dem man aufgewachsen ist. Die wundersamen und magischen Geschichten, die wir jetzt als Animationen oder Videospiele sehen, die wurden erzählt. Sie wurden durch Geschichten von Glauben, Zuversicht und Unbekanntem weitergegeben. Heute ist das alles sehr weit weg und wird durchs I-Pad vermittelt. Heute schauen die Jugendlichen auf die materielle Welt, sie erkennen nicht wirklich, was darin und dahinter ist, dabei ist das eine absolut faszinierende Welt voller Wunder. Das ist das, was fehlt. Das lässt die Bildung aus, weil sie denkt, es passt nicht zur modernen Zeit. Es ist existentiell, aber die moderne Zeit sagt nichts zu diesem "Geist" oder "Sinn".

 

 

Ist Ihr neues Album auch eine Art Kontrapunkt zur heutigen schnelllebigen Zeit?

 

Ja, für viele Leute ist es sicher so etwas wie eine Auszeit von diesem digitalen, pumpenden Hiphop-Ding, das heute vieles andere erstickt. Deshalb glaube ich, das Album ist eine Art Ruhepause, und die Leute werden es aus dem Grund mögen.

 

 

Welche Musik hören Sie denn gerne, wenn Sie zuhause sind?

 

Mein Sohn bringt mir bei, was in der Musikwelt los ist (lacht). Aber er ist auch ein "Retro-Liebhaber". Er spielt mir Ali Farka Touré (Musiker aus Mali, Westafrika) vor, fantastisches Zeug, wunderschön, authentische Musik, ohne diesen ganzen digitalen Schnickschnack. Ich liebe das. Und ich liebe Klassik. Und: Ich liebe die Beatles. Sorry! (lacht)

 

[rbb24.de, 14. Sept. 2017]

 

 

The Unlikely Return of Cat Stevens

(by Howard Fishman, writer, performer, and composer based in Brooklyn)

 

Early in a Cat Stevens, a.k.a. Yusuf Islam, a.k.a. Yusuf/Cat Stevens, concert in Boston a couple of years ago, there was a hushed pause in the room as the then sixty-six-year-old performer waited for a stagehand to bring him a guitar in between songs. “I’m really happy to be here!” the singer suddenly exclaimed. It did not sound like ersatz show-biz banter; it sounded humble, childlike even, as if he himself were surprised by the emotion. It sounded like capitulation. The crowd, in response, rose to its feet en masse, producing a sound that was more than just a cheer. It was an embrace. It was an acknowledgment by artist and audience alike: Cat Stevens, a figure who, for all intents and purposes, had ceased to exist more than three decades ago, had come back.

 

For a long time, it has been hard to love the man once known (and now known again) as Cat Stevens. In the years since he formally retired from the popular music world, in 1978, his name has popped up in the media from time to time. He would be quoted, or seen in a video-clip interview, and it was difficult to accept the visage of the person whom he now presented himself as—to reconcile this cold, humorless, unhappy, and severe-looking man with the joyful, understanding, goofy, wise songwriter whose music we’d known and loved. For a long time, the man who’d changed his name to Yusuf Islam had completely disowned his artistic output as Cat Stevens—a confusing, dispiriting slap in the face to those it once meant a great deal to.

 

The man who was Cat Stevens ran Islamic schools for children, spreading the word of Allah, and acted as a spokesperson for Islam. After a while, he began making some children’s albums, but he wasn’t playing the guitar, and the music was not for his traditional fan base. In interviews, he sounded defensive and removed. Some remarks attributed to him seemed to be in line with some of the more distasteful prejudices of orthodox Islam.

 

Then, in 2006, came “An Other Cup,” his first album of commercial music in twenty-eight years. He’d dropped his adopted last name of Islam, and was now calling himself, simply, Yusuf. Something had shifted, certainly. How welcome it was to hear that voice with that guitar again, after all these years. Still, the album’s opening track, “Midday (Avoid City After Dark),” set a tone of unease, paranoia, and judgment that never really lifted. Elsewhere on the recording, there was a revisit to a much earlier composition (“I Think I See the Light”) and an interesting (if forced-sounding) reworking of a section of his “Foreigner Suite” (“Heaven/Where True Love Goes”), but the bulk of the album felt earthbound. Nowhere was there the joie de vivre that inhabited his best work. The follow-up, “Roadsinger,” in 2009, sounded fresher, but still unconvincing. Which was it—was he wary of us, or we of him? There seemed to be skepticism and distrust on both sides.

 

Some live performances began to appear here and there online. Yusuf was steadfast about not playing any old Cat Stevens material, save for a select few songs that he could justify in the context of his religious path, such as “The Wind” and “Peace Train.” He had collaborated on a musical called “Moonshadow” that featured actors singing some of his old songs and was having a run in Australia. It proved a critical and financial flop.

I paid attention to all of this because, unhip as this may be to admit, the music of Cat Stevens once meant a great deal to me. I did not grow up listening to it, per se (I was too young), but his music became the soundtrack to my adolescence when I watched “Harold and Maude” for the first time, and my world changed. I went out and got a guitar. I listened to Cat Stevens obsessively, played and sang his songs with friends, hunted down all of his albums. While it was clear that he’d lost his way artistically on later albums like “Numbers” and “Izitso,” the earlier, classic albums that he’s still known for (“Mona Bone Jakon” through “Foreigner”) were full of treasures that could be mined again and again. Indelible melodies, beautiful production, emotionally committed performances, and, most of all, a gentle wisdom, a repudiation of the status quo, a sense that we were not alone. Here was someone who was trying to make sense of life, too; he may not have had the answers, but he was looking for them, and we were encouraged to join him. Here was a friend.

 

Of course, I quickly learned that Cat Stevens had already ceased to be. My adolescent soul despaired, knowing that there would be no more Cat Stevens albums, no more Cat Stevens concerts. The man who had become a hero to me had long since retired from the music world.

 

In time, his music, too, would fade from my consciousness. As I grew and matured, so did my musical tastes and sensibilities. I might reach for a Cat Stevens album on rare occasions, to remind myself of something that I’d once treasured, sometimes surprised that a song or album held up as strongly as it did, but his music was no longer a living thing for me. I paid attention when he came out of retirement with the two Yusuf albums, and listened to each of them a handful of times with attendant hopes and (it seemed) inevitable disappointment. It was hard to get excited about his music now. The voice was the same, but the spirit was changed, different, unwelcoming.

 

Nevertheless, when it was announced, in late 2014, that he was going to perform in America for the first time in thirty-eight years, I put my misgivings aside and became a teen-ager again, queueing up for tickets on the phone the morning they went on sale. I did not listen to his latest album, “Tell ‘Em I’m Gone,” nor did I look for any news about the kinds of shows that he’d been playing of late. I simply drove up to Boston to see my old hero, expectations dimmed to almost nothing. I imagined that there I would see Yusuf Islam, delivering a respectful program of his latter-day music, with perhaps one or two old favorites thrown in as crowd appeasement. I wasn’t going for Yusuf Islam. I was going to pay homage to the singer who had once meant so much to me, for the chance to simply be in the same room with him for the first (and what I assumed would be the last) time.

 

It has taken some time for me to think clearly about what it was like to be at that show. What happened there was more than just a good concert given by a group of well-rehearsed, talented musicians, backing a pop icon on a comeback tour, though it was partly that. It was more than just a nostalgic trip down memory lane, as a sold-out crowd sang along to songs that many (including myself) never expected to hear played live again, though it was partly that, too. Without resorting to hyperbole, being there, for me, was an unexpected catharsis, something like seeing a ghost.

 

I didn’t know, until I got there, that the singer was now billing himself with the ungainly but revealing name of Yusuf/Cat Stevens. Was he now acknowledging his former self? This was a surprise, the first of many that the evening would hold.

 

The once and future Cat Stevens walked onstage to a tremendous ovation (no surprise there) and launched into a solo performance of “The Wind.” O.K., in some way, this was what we’d all come for, and here he’d already given it to us. All the latter-day Yusuf stuff would follow, we’d give him some hearty applause at the encore, and that would be that—or so I thought. What was this, though? He was wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket—not the austere, devotional garb he’d worn in the (admittedly not so recent) appearances that I’d seen him do online. And the stage set—it was elaborate, whimsical, evocative of the old Cat, whose tastes sometimes crossed the line into outright silliness. Most significantly, though, he himself seemed engaged, connected, and—hardest to believe—lighthearted.

 

“Here Comes My Baby” and “The First Cut Is the Deepest” followed, two pop hits from the infancy of his career, both secular love songs, both jarring surprises. “Thinking ‘Bout You” followed, a more recent song of love and devotion, but it was buoyed by an energy and commitment that sustained the freshness of what had come before, and served as a bridge to the first real shock of the night, as the singer made his way to a piano at the side of the stage and, unaccompanied, launched into the opening strains of “Sitting,” and the crowd seemed to collectively gasp before erupting into joyous, grateful cheers. Here he was again. Cat Stevens. Questioning, seeking, proudly admitting that he did not have the answers, but that he was on his way to find them. Our companion, our friend, had returned.

 

It was the first of what would be many goosebump-inducing moments in the generous, two-part concert. He followed it with “Last Love Song,” from 1978’s obscure (and mostly uninspired-sounding) “Back to Earth,” the mere fact that he was exploring and reclaiming obscurities from his back catalogue speaking volumes. By the time he reached the end of the first set, closing it with “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out,” the message was clear—something had happened. He was giving us back the songs he’d taken away so many years ago. He was, after all this time, validating their worth again, and with it, our love for them. After insisting for so many years, as Yusuf Islam, that there was only one way, only one truth, one law, one path, he’d relented. He was giving us permission, again, to do and think and live how we wanted. And he seemed genuinely happy saying and singing it.

 

The second set held even more surprises, as song after song from the old œuvre was brought back to life. “Oh Very Young,” “Sad Lisa,” “Miles from Nowhere” (I have my freedom / I can make my own rules / Oh yeah, the ones that I choose). They were presented, for the most part, as set pieces, with hardly any improvisation at all, but that didn’t matter. The faithful Alun Davies was there on lead acoustic guitar, as he has been since 1970. Matt Sweeney was a welcome addition on electric guitar, adding a pinch of verve and danger to the mix, but if old concert footage is any indication, Cat Stevens was never one for taking too many risks onstage musically, choosing instead to eschew spontaneity in deference to the arrangements on his studio recordings.

 

It was touching to hear the singer-songwriter still tinkering with that beautiful failure “Foreigner Suite,” still trying to get it right. Classics such as “Where Do the Children Play?” and “Trouble” brought with them a great sadness; confronted with the simplicity, the naïveté even, of the sentiments in these gentle lyrics, it was impossible not to think of how the world has changed and darkened since these songs were written and last performed. Even “Moonshadow,” that lullaby of Buddhist acceptance, carried with it the sting of longing for less dire times.

 

Being at that concert, hearing those songs again, sung with conviction by that man, was like being allowed to spend a night in one’s childhood home, with everything back the way that it was from some preëxistential, innocent moment—with even one’s family members frozen in time the way that they were decades ago. For me, it was eerie, spooky, unsettling, like Emily’s return from the dead in “Our Town.”

 

At the end of each of these old songs, there was that same sustained applause that followed his aside, early in the show, about how happy he was to be there. It’s a sound I keep coming back to in my mind when I think about the experience of being at that concert, a sound distinct from any that I think I have ever heard. It was an entity, a palpable force, as though the emotion behind every voice and every pair of hands could be heard. There was a sort of desperate celebration to it. It was the sound of reconciliation, of gratitude, of forgiveness.

 

Yusuf/Cat Stevens has a new album coming out this week, called “A Laughing Apple,” and more tour dates have been announced. I have not heard the new recording yet, but news of its release has led me to reflect on that night, when it felt as though this shape-shifting performer had brought someone we once loved back from the dead, a phantom from another time, and with that act offered tacit acknowledgment that we’re so much better together than we are apart. It’s a notion as naïvely idealistic as any he ever gave us; an echo from the past, finding its way to us past a wall that is, miraculously, no longer there.

 

[newyorker.com, 15. Sept. 2017]

 

 

Yusuf/Cat Stevens taps classic sound in new 'The Laughing Apple' album

 

An inescapable sense of foreboding runs through “Blackness of the Night,” the opening track from “The Laughing Apple,” the new album by Yusuf, aka Cat Stevens.

 

“In the blackness of the night I seem to wander endlessly, with a hope burning out deep inside,” Yusuf sings in the same soft, gravelly baritone that helped make him one of pop music’s biggest stars of the 1970s. “I’m a fugitive; community has driven me out/ For this bad, bad world, I’m beginning to doubt.”

 

That’s a far cry from such buoyant and exquisitely uplifting pop hits of yore as “Morning Has Broken,” “Moonshadow” and “Oh Very Young” that he charted more than four decades ago, before bowing out of “the star-making machinery” at the end of the ’70s and devoting himself to his newfound faith, Islam.

 

So it’s difficult to listen and not wonder whether the onetime voice of indefatigable optimism — a man who sang “Peace Train,” and who lovingly warned against giving in to humanity’s penchant for evil in “Wild World” — hasn’t himself, at age 69, finally succumbed to that darkness.

 

Precisely the opposite. “Blackness of the Night” is a prime example of the disillusionment of youth.

 

“I wrote it in a way, in anger against the world, about what I thought were the injustices that were going on,” the veteran singer and songwriter said by phone from England, having just returned from a round of media interviews in Germany for the new album, released today, Sept. 15.

 

“I suppose that was my first attempt at a protest song, and today it still resonates extremely strongly with me.”

The song actually dates to the late ’60s.

 

It’s one of several that Yusuf wrote when he was just starting his career as Cat Stevens, and has revisited or recorded, for the first time, on “The Laughing Apple.” It’s something of a temporal hybrid album that combines new versions of some of his earliest songs with recordings of a few of his most recent.

 

The idea is that bringing the two together is a way to celebrate what is the 50th anniversary of a career that was launched at the tail end of 1966 with his first pop hit, “I Love My Dog.”

 

“I’m quite proud of the album,” he said with the East End London accent that’s softened only a bit over the years. “It was not premeditated; it happened kind of naturally, quite organically with the new team of me and Paul and Alun back in the studio again, because we had that kind of magic between us.”

 

He’s referring to producer Paul Samwell-Smith, who oversaw production of the watershed albums from his creative heyday: “Mona Bone Jakon,” “Tea for the Tillerman,” “Teaser and the Firecat” and “Catch Bull at Four” in the early ’70s.

 

The other name he dropped is that of guitarist Alun Davies, who was his instrumental foil on those albums.

 

His reunion with his former collaborators manifests in a musical and sonic kinship with those classic-period recordings, making it perhaps the most quintessentially sounding “Cat Stevens” record since he returned to writing and recording in the early 2000s, after more than two decades away from music.

 

“I had a whole bag of songs I came in with, some old ones and new songs as well,” he said. “But I started digging into my previous cache of songs, and when I started playing them again recently I fell in love with them. There are some very poignant songs, rich in meaning and with an exuberance that made me want to do them again.”

 

Among the vintage songs are the title track, “You Can Do (Whatever),” “Mary and the Little Lamb,” “Northern Wind (The Death of Billy the Kid),” “Mighty Peace” and, ironically for the man who has several children and grandchildren, a song he wrote in his youth titled “Grandsons.”

 

Did he envision that he might still be writing and recording music into his ’70s? After all, he emerged from the same generation of young British rockers that includes Pete Townshend, who famously wrote “Hope I die before I get old” in the Who’s “My Generation.”

 

“At that age, you don’t envision what’s beyond the there and then,” Yusuf said. “I wouldn’t have been engaged in anything other than now. However, saying that, I think I also did at some point have a view of myself as an old man with a gray beard, with children surrounding him, telling them stories.”

 

Indeed, his close-cropped hair is more salt than pepper these days, as is his mustache and the beard that extends a few inches below his chin. His voice carries a certain gravitas that’s in keeping with decades of concentrated spiritual studies, but his tone is still leavened periodically by a light remark or quick quip.

 

Slightly paraphrasing the lyric from his poignant 1971 song “Father and Son,” he added, “I’m older and I’m happy.”

 

Happy, yes, but not without a discerning eye and honed artistic viewpoint.

Among the newer songs included on “The Laughing Apple” is “Don’t Blame Them,” a firmly worded but gently rendered heed against the search for scapegoats.

 

“Don’t blame the girl/She won’t do you wrong/The veil she wears/On her long dark hair/Mary would have done,” he sings.

 

“We usually try to find something to blame our problems on,” he said, “and the solution is in the mirror — that’s where all our problems really began. This song does have a massive message. When we blame, we tend to project the balance in our own favor.

 

“I think the best kind of people are those who can stand in the middle and watch what’s going on around them,” he said, “and then evaluate, and decide what to do.”

 

The song itself urges listeners to “Understand the one you hate/Anger will abate/Love will moderate.”

 

As a convert to Islam, Yusuf has been on the receiving end of anti-Muslim rhetoric and policy.

 

In 2004, he was denied entry into the U.S. — where he had toured arenas and played to tens of thousands of fans three decades earlier — en route to a planned recording session in Nashville because the name he took after converting, Yusuf Islam, was similar to one on a federal Do Not Fly list assembled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

 

He was accused of supporting terrorism in 2004 by the British publications the Sun and the Sunday Times, and in 2008 of refusing to speak to unveiled women. He challenged both accusations in court and received formal apologies from the news organizations and substantial financial settlements, which he donated to charity.

 

More recently, the Trump administration’s attempts to restrict travel to the U.S. by people from numerous Muslim-majority countries have complicated his ability to continue to perform and work here.

 

While in Australia on tour in March, he told the U.K.’s Daily Independent newspaper, “I would definitely like Mr. Trump to use his influence, whatever is left of it, to rush my visa forward because I’ve already missed the Grammys and I might even give him a free ticket to one of my concerts.”

 

He stopped short of suggesting he is being individually persecuted by the policy put forth by Trump.

 

“He’s not exactly keeping me out, but it’s become a drawn-out process,” he told the Daily Independent. “Those orders, it’s such a horrible paintbrush he’s using.”

 

Yusuf said he’s planning to travel to New York shortly “to sort all that out.”

 

Last year he traveled in the U.S. on a 50th-anniversary tour that played the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles. Performance highlights from that tour will be featured in a future PBS television special.

 

Unlike most of his ’60s and ’70s peers who were writing love songs or social and political protest music, Cat Stevens was probing deeply spiritual matters.

 

“After I contracted tuberculosis [at 21], everything I did was because of the fear of death and the beyond,” he said. “I wanted desperately to know whether life goes on, whether everything comes to an absolute stop or if there’s a better place to go. That’s where spiritual investigation becomes necessary — at least, where it became necessary for me.”

 

Songs he wrote after that near-death experience expressed that deep yearning, such as “On the Road to Find Out,” “I Wish I Knew,” “Miles From Nowhere,” “Time,” “But I Might Die Tonight” and “I Think I See the Light.”

 

“It’s the whole story of my life and my music,” he said, “and if you ask me now, I believe I’ve found some answers which absolutely hold up.”

 

[latimes.com, 15. Sept. 2017]

 

 

"Meine Lieder sind optimistisch"

 

Cat Stevens konvertierte mit 30 Jahren zum Islam, verabschiedete sich aus dem Musikgeschäft und benannte sich um in Yusuf Islam. 2006 dann seine Rückkehr in die Popwelt. Heute erscheint sein Album "The Laughing Apple" - mit neuen und alten Liedern.

 

"This is like Star Wars. You find out what Darth Vader used to be."

 

Star Wars ist wohl so ziemlich das Letzte, woran man bei Yusuf Islam denkt. Mit einem perfekt getrimmten, grauen Vollbart, getönter Brille und einen gewinnenden Lächeln sitzt Yusuf in einem Berliner Hotelzimmer. Und dann erzählt er mit einem Lächeln, dass sein neues Album so ähnlich sei, wie Star Wars, wo es bei Episode 1 darum geht, die Vorgeschichte von Darth Vader zu erzählen. Sein Album "The Laughing Apple" erzählt die Vorgeschichte des Tillermans, der Figur seines erfolgreichsten Albums "Tea for the Tillerman". Und dieser Tillerman hat als Jugendlicher als Apfelpflücker gearbeitet.

"Den Tillerman haben einige Menschen falsch verstanden. Sie dachten dabei an einen Steuermann, der mit einer Stange ein Boot lenkt. Für mich war der Tillerman aber jemand, der die Welt steuert. Ganz am Anfang der Menschheit gab es zwei Berufszweige. Die Einen haben sich mit Landwirtschaft beschäftigt, die anderen waren Schafhirten. Der Tillerman ist für mich jemand, der die Erde bewirtschaftet, jemand den wir alle brauchen. Eine sehr wichtige Figur."

 

Dieser Tillerman ist jetzt derjenige, der eine Brücke baut zwischen dem Anfang 20-jährigen Cat Stevens und dem jetzt 69-Jährigen, der sich mittlerweile Yusuf / Cat Stevens nennt. Noch bevor man eine einzige Note gehört hat, bleibt man beim Albumcover hängen. Vor einem großen Apfelbaum steht ein Junge mit einem Korb.

 

Am Baum hängen viele Äpfel mit einem traurigen Gesicht, nur ein leuchtend roter Apfel lacht. Yusuf selbst hat dieses Bild gemalt. Anders als die grauen, traurigen Äpfel, macht sich der lachende keine Sorgen. Er ist mutig, verbirgt seine Meinung nicht und genießt sein Leben, erzählt Yusuf.

 

"Ich bin heute dieser lachende Apfel"

 

"Ich glaube, ich bin heute dieser lachende Apfel. Ich kann mittlerweile frei meine Meinung sagen und dabei lächeln. Das ist in der heutigen Zeit manchmal eine ganz schöne Herausforderung. Aber ich sehe das Positive. Deshalb sind meine Lieder auch optimistisch."

 

Unterlegt ist das Lied mit Streichern, die eine eingängige Melodie spielen. Dazu hört man Einflüsse aus der arabischen Musik. Yusuf Islam erzählt auf diesem Album zwei Kapitel seiner Lebensgeschichte. Den Anfang seiner Musikkarriere und die vergangenen Jahre, seit er sich 2006 wieder der Popmusik zugewandt hat. Von den Jahren dazwischen, seinem Wechsel zum Islam, den Vorwürfen, er hätte den Mordaufruf gegen Salman Rushdie unterstützt – davon möchte er nicht reden. Nicht auf dem Album und nicht im Interview.

 

Drei neue Lieder hat Yusuf für dieses Album komponiert, die anderen acht sind neue Versionen von Songs, die er zu Beginn seiner Karriere in den 1960ern geschrieben hat. Meistens unbekannte, die teilweise noch nie auf einem Album veröffentlicht wurden. Er singt über seine Enkelkinder, von seiner Liebe zu Gott, von Mut und Frieden.

 

Fans werden Spaß haben

 

Sollte es jemanden geben, der noch nie von Cat Stevens gehört hat, dann wird ihn dieses Album wahrscheinlich nicht überzeugen. Dafür fehlen musikalische Höhepunkte oder wenigstens Überraschungen. Fans werden trotzdem Spaß haben, denn tatsächlich erinnern viele der Lieder an den früheren Folk-Sound Cat Stevens mit der akustischen Gitarre als zentralem Instrument.

Seine Stimme allerdings ist hörbar gealtert. Die Leidenschaft und Leichtigkeit des jungen Stevens sind weg. Stattdessen klingt er eher wie der Großvater, den man sich immer gewünscht hat, der einem Geschichten aus seinem Leben erzählt und dessen Stimme eben manchmal brüchig ist.

 

"Wir alle müssen uns auf den Tod vorbereiten"

 

Ohne Frage hat Cat Stevens genauso wie Yusuf viel zu erzählen. Und gerade deshalb macht es traurig, wenn er im letzten Lied des Albums "I´m so Sleepy" singt: Bald werde ich davon gleiten.

 

"Das ist jetzt wohl der Punkt im Leben, wo man realisiert, dass es nicht endlos weitergeht. Schlaf ist die Schwester des Todes. Wir alle müssen uns auf den Tod vorbereiten. Ich rede gerade schon mit meinen Anwälten, um meinen Nachlass zu klären, sodass ich dann friedlich scheiden kann."

 

[deutschlandfunkkultur.de, 15. Sept. 2017]

 

 

"Nach außen wirkt das sehr warm"

Yusuf / Cat Stevens schließt den Kreis

 

 

Er ist eine britische Singer-Songwriter-Legende: Yusuf / Cat Stevens. Jetzt veröffentlicht er sein neues Album "The Laughing Apple" - am selben Tag, an dem auch 50 Jahre zuvor sein Debütalbum "Matthew And Son" erschien. Mit "See What Love Did To Me" präsentierte der Brite eine erste Hörprobe aus dem neuen Werk. In diesem Song steckt der Klang der 1960er und 1970er Jahre: Eine Akustik-Gitarre, auf der die Worte des 69-Jährigen beinahe zu schweben scheinen. Der Folk-Pop-Song basiert auf einem Gedicht des türkischen Poeten Yunus Emre und handelt von der "Tugend der Liebe und ihrer Kraft, die Dinge zu verändern". Mit "The Laughing Apple" baut Yusuf / Cat Stevens nun eine Brücke zwischen der Vergangenheit und der Gegenwart: Das Album enthält sowohl neue Songs, als auch neu überarbeitete Klassiker seiner ersten Alben. Zuerst aber zeigt Yusuf mir die Bilder, die er zum Album gemalt hat.

 

Oh wie schön! Zu jedem Song ein Bild.

 

Ja. Das da bin ich ...

 

 

... und das sind drei der acht Enkelkinder?

 

Ja (lacht). Alle habe ich dann nicht geschafft, zu zeichnen.

 

 

Das Album heißt "The Laughing Apple". Kicherndes Obst?

 

Ja, ja, der Apfel ist eine optimistische Frucht, finde ich. Er wirkt unängstlich, hat viele Talente (lacht).

 

 

"One apple a day keeps the doctor away" ...

 

Ja, genau, auch das. Nein, es hat eher was mit dem Album "Tea For The Tillerman" zu tun. Ich habe mir aus irgendeinem Grund vorgestellt, dass dieser Steuermann früher mal Äpfel geerntet hat.

 

 

Seit wann malen Sie denn?

 

Oh, das war eigentlich mein erster Berufswunsch. Ich liebte diese Disney-Zeichnungen und Cartoons - vor allem politische, deswegen war das mein größter Wunsch. Aber da wäre ich verhungert (lacht). Und so fing ich mit der Musik an. Es war diese Zeit in den Sechzigern, wo man sich eine Gitarre kaufte und Geschichten erzählte, und ich fand, das kann ich doch besser als zeichnen.

 

 

Was haben sie als Junge gemalt?

 

Ich war fasziniert von Gesichtern. Immer nur Gesichter.

 

 

Wir gucken auf eine 50 Jahre andauernde Karriere zurück, mit vielen Höhen und Tiefen. Fühlt sich das nicht an wie mehrere Leben?

 

Ja, stimmt eigentlich, als hätte ich mehrere Generationen erlebt. Jetzt im Alter habe ich mehr Wissen und vielleicht sogar ein bisschen Weisheit. Und man kann nicht mehr die Dinge tun, die man früher getan hat. Aber ich habe doch das Gefühl, dass ich immer mein Bestes gegeben habe. Und wenn ich zurückblicke, dann sehe ich das Album meines Lebens, das ich mit vielen anderen Menschen teile. Und vielleicht gibt es auch bald das Buch meines Lebens ...

 

 

Sie schreiben eine Autobiographie?

 

Ja, und ich hoffe, dass ich endlich mal damit fertig werde (lacht). Nächstes Frühjahr.

 

 

Sind Sie jemand, der auch mal bedauernd zurückblickt, oder leben Sie immer in der Gegenwart?

 

Das einzige, was ich wirklich bedauere, ist meine Unterstützung für Arsenal London, weil die sich so schlecht anstellen in letzter Zeit (lacht). Nein, ganz ehrlich: Ich bedauere nicht einmal die Fehler, die ich gemacht habe, denn die haben mich zu dem gemacht, der ich jetzt bin. Sie gehören zu mir. Das gehört zu meiner Lernkurve. Und was ich vor allem gelernt habe, ist, dass man keine Vorurteile haben sollte. Damit kommt man viel leichter, viel freier durchs Leben. Das ist mir das Wichtigste.

 

 

Sie reisen viel - wie sehen Sie Deutschland von außen?

 

Oh, Deutschland steht wirklich gut da: stabil, sauber, organisiert. Ich mag das Deutsche, ich habe eine schwedische Mutter, und da ist sich vieles ähnlich. Wobei Deutschland vielfältiger ist, kulturell gesehen. Liberaler. Und wärmer und heller (lacht). Mir ist völlig klar, dass ihr viele Probleme mit eurer Flüchtlingspolitik bekommen habt, aber nach außen wirkte das alles sehr warm, sehr "welcoming", und auch stabil trotz allem. Man traut Deutschland einfach eine Menge zu.

 

 

Wir lieben diese Musik der Singer und Songwriter - wir assozieren damit die Sechziger Jahre, die Freiheit, die Liebe, Drogen, Peace und so weiter. Wir wissen genau, wie die Sechziger klingen. Aber wie klingt 2017?

 

Der Sound von heute ist High-Sonic. Sehr professionell. Es gibt unglaubliche Sounds, keine Ahnung, wie die hergestellt werden. Wir haben eine große Sehnsucht nach Leuten, die echt wirken, so wie Adele. Sie schafft es, realistisch zu klingen, wiedererkennbar. Und so authentisch, dass man sie nicht abkupfern kann. Talent wird sich immer durchsetzen. Aber es wird schwerer, lange erfolgreich zu sein.

 

 

Was empfehlen Sie dann jungen Musikern für eine lange, erfolgreiche Karriere?

 

Mach' das als Hobby! Ehrlich! Wenn man sich zu sehr bemüht, dann klappt das meist nicht. Wenn man unbedingt populär sein will, macht man sich eher unbeliebt. Verkauf' dich nicht, deine Seele schon gar nicht.

 

 

In einem Ihrer Songs, in "Mighty Peace", singen Sie, Sie wären gern wieder ein Kind.

 

Den Song habe ich geschrieben, als ich 15 war. Das war der erste Song, bei dem ich ein gutes Gefühl hatte. Dennoch habe ich ihn erst jetzt veröffentlicht. Weil ich erst jetzt bereit dazu war. Und außerdem habe ich dieses innere Kind noch immer in mir. Auf der anderen Seite habe ich Enkel, und ich kann jetzt loslassen. 

 

 

Können Sie Kritik gut wegstecken?

 

Nein, nicht besonders gut. Aber ich mach' einfach weiter. Zu meinen Lieblingssongs gehört "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" von einer meiner Lieblingssängerinnen, Nina Simone. Dieser Song ist meine Hymne. Über manche Dinge habe ich keine Kontrolle. Dann versuche ich erst recht, dass es an mir abperlt.

 

 

Wann gehen Sie auf Tour?

 

Oh, erstmal in Afrika, glaube ich. Ich bin aber immer wieder erstaunt, wie weit die Leute in die Zukunft planen.

 

 

Klingt weise.

 

Ich versuche ab und an, so zu klingen (lacht).

 

[n-tv.de, 16. Sept. 2017]

 

 

 

 

Album der Woche | Yusuf/Cat Stevens:

"The laughing apple"

Folk-Finesse mit überwältigendem Sound

 

Nach einem kometenhaften Aufstieg zum Pop-Superstar Anfang der 70er konvertierte Cat Stevens 1978 zum Islam. Er nannte sich daraufhin Yusuf Islam und kehrte der Musik jahrzehntelang den Rücken. Nun hat er wieder Gefallen an seinem alten Job gefunden. Für sein neues Album "The laughing apple" nennt er sich Yusuf/Cat Stevens – um deutlich zu machen, dass er sich mit seiner Vergangenheit versöhnt hat. Und auch die Songs auf dieser Platte sind ein versöhnlicher Rückgriff. Ein paar neue Stücke, aber vor allem seine frühen Songs und unbekannte Demos, die er wieder aufpoliert hat.

 

 

Geklaut von Beethoven

"Mighty peace" ist einer der ersten Songs, die Cat Stevens überhaupt geschrieben hat. Schon damals ging es ihm um Frieden und Liebe. An dieser Botschaft hat sich bis heute nichts geändert. Die Songs auf "The laughing apple" zeigen einen 69-jährigen altersmilden Mann, der mit sich im Reinen ist. Lebensfragen werden hier nicht mehr gewälzt. Wenn man sich selbst gefunden hat – dann ist das Leben eben auch mal schön.

Apropos schön: Was Cat Stevens immer noch richtig gut kann, ist das Songschreiben. Die Lieder auf "The laughing apple" strahlen pastoral und melodieverliebt. Fein arrangiert und intim aufgenommen. Ein reines Funkeln. In dem kinderliedhaften "Don't blame them" blättert Stevens das Handwerk von 50 Jahren Songschreiben auf, zitiert sogar aus Beethovens Klaviersonate "Pathetique".

 

Überwältigender Sound

 

 

[mdr.de, 18. Sept. 2017]

 

 

The Nine Lives of Cat Stevens:

Yusuf Islam Embraces His Musical Past on The Laughing Apple

 

 

It’s not quite fair to call The Laughing Apple a comeback album. Since 2006, the artist who beguiled listeners in the ’70s as the spiritually curious Cat Stevens has released three discs under the mononym Yusuf—short for Yusuf Islam, his chosen moniker after adopting the Islamic faith in 1977. These works were his first foray into Western music after shunning the industry in the wake of his religious conversion, during which time he sold his guitars and focused instead on charity work and theological study. Fans were grateful for any new output following the decades of silence, but Yusuf’s initial trio of albums were a cautious, occasionally frosty reconciliation with the superstar he never truly wanted to be. On The Laughing Apple, he fully embraces his musical legacy at last. For any who’ve longed for the preternaturally wise acoustic troubadour of yore, the music envelopes like a hug from a long-lost friend—one who’s been away for quite a long time and has a lot to share.

 

Tellingly, the album is credited to “Yusuf/Cat Stevens,” marking the first time his famous alter ego has appeared on a new release since 1978’s Back to Earth. Much like the hybrid billing, The Laughing Apple builds a bridge between the old and new. The majority of its 11 tracks are rerecorded songs from his initial musical incarnation as a teenage pop star in the mid-’60s, including four titles taken from his 1967 sophomore album, New Masters. While these early offerings suffered from overwrought orchestration, the new versions feature stripped down arrangements reminiscent of his best-known material. That’s no accident; The Laughing Apple reunites Yusuf with producer Paul Samwell-Smith and guitar foil Alun Davies, both of whom were regular collaborators during his ’70s heyday.

 

In a fitting nod to the 50th anniversary of his recording debut, he includes “Mighty Peace,” the first song he ever wrote. Few artists would dare put their very earliest compositions alongside their most recent, for fear of underscoring their crude creative beginnings. But Yusuf’s musical sophistication, to say nothing of his lyrical depth, has been present from the start. The song holds its own among contemporary tracks like “See What Love Did to Me,” and “Don’t Blame Them”—the latter of which urges listeners to exchange bigotry for empathy. It’s a potent message in a time of travel bans and increasingly violent protests.

 

Yusuf’s spiritual journey has made him a target of such blame. He converted to Islam on the eve of 1979’s Iranian Revolution, an event which transformed a matter of personal faith into an apparent political issue. Vaulted into the limelight as one of the most famous Muslims in the Western world, the singer/songwriter suddenly found himself as the unofficial spokesperson of a religion that most in his homeland knew nothing about. The role occasionally brought controversy, but over time Yusuf has evolved into one of the foremost ambassadors of peace on the planet. In addition to his philanthropy—including the founding of several dozen Muslim schools in the U.K.—the 69-year-old has returned to music to help spread his message.

 

Yusuf spoke with PEOPLE about his new album, peace efforts, how far he’s come and how far he has to go.

 

What was behind your decision to revisit some of your earlier songs?

 

I’ve got a bag full of songs I’ve been writing over the years—probably about 20 or 30—but when I started playing some of the early songs again with my guitar, I realized how badly they were recorded in the beginning. I thought I could right this wrong by going back in and recording them the way I feel it today. That, of course, brings a whole new life to the song. There were some gems in there, in my sixties albums, which I really had fun rerecording.

 

 

Has the meaning changed for you on any of these songs?

 

They’re still very relevant, like “Blackness of the Night.” You could have written that today about the refugee problem and about orphans left on the shores of a foreign country. They don’t quite know where they fit in and they’ve lost their homes and their families. That kind of song is still relevant. And then you’ve got “Northern Wind (Death of Billy the Kid),” which I think is very, very appropriate thinking about today. Even though it seems to be talking about the story of the gunslinger, it’s actually an anti-gun song. It’s the story of the sidekick who traveled with Billy the Kid and wanted to hang up his holster and go back home and live an ordinary life again without a threat of guns crowding his life. It’s quite an important song, I’d say.

 

 

When you first began writing songs, did you have a specific message you wanted to get across, or a goal in mind?

 

This [new] album gives very good insight into my original goal because it actually contains the first song I ever wrote, called “Mighty Peace.” The seeds of my dreams began with the dream of peace. In this environment, everything is clashing. You have to survive and drown out the noise. So I think that song lays out my path very clearly. But also, because I grew up in the middle of the West End, which is Theater Land here in London, I was influenced by narratives and musicals. I used to go an awful lot. Hair was playing up the road from us and I saw it so many times. Then around the corner there was Drury Lane with My Fair Lady. West Side Story was perhaps one of the most powerful for me. So I pitched narratives into my songs. They have a kind of beginning, middle and end—it’s a three-act thing.

 

 

As far as your writing process, do you hear the song completed in your head in one piece, or do you workshop it through? 

 

I don’t plan what the song is going to be, but I like it to somehow surprise me. If I’m surprised and excited, then I’ve got a feeling whoever hears the song will be excited like I am. I trick myself as I start writing by haphazardly trying something different along the way. It might be a rhythm, it might be a chord, it might be a word. When that happens I know I’ve hit it and I’ve got something special. A lot of what we’re hearing today is quite repetitious. [laughs] Not all of it! Some of it is very original, and I’ve always looked out for the original.

 

 

On The Laughing Apple you began working with producer Paul Samwell-Smith for the first time in nearly 40 years. What was it like making music with him again?

 

It was great. He’s an artist in his own right. Obviously he’s got a great history with the beginning of British rock as the bassplayer in the Yardbirds. He’s got a great history himself, but as a producer he’s brilliant at understatement. The first time I understood that was when he played for me Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Joni Mitchell. That set the tone for what we wanted our records to sound like.

 

 

There was such a huge shift between your ’60s pop work like Matthew and Son and the sparse acoustic work to come in the early ’70s. Can you talk about that transition? 

 

Initially, I was an artist who relied on other musicians to play my music because my producer set it up that way. That’s how it began and that’s how it continued for a long time until I finally got frustrated because I didn’t feel as though people were getting the songs as they should be getting them. And then came the opportunity when I got very sick. I was taken away and removed from the pop world and thrown in hospital. At that point, I had all the time in the world to gather my thoughts and find out what I was doing wrong. The main goal I set for myself was to take control of my own art and not to give it over to someone else to interpret. And that meant playing my own music—playing guitar, and learning to play almost every instrument that I wanted in order to capture the song that I heard in my head.

 

 

You mentioned “Mighty Peace,” one of your first songs, which is remarkable when you think how sophisticated the lyrics are. So many themes you’d touch on in your later work were already present this early. Who inspired you as a lyricist when you first started writing? 

 

[Bob] Dylan obviously had a big effect, but if you look at the blues—the blues are all rooted in real life stories. When you listen to the catalog from Lead Belly, it’s a whole genre and a narrative of what people were going through on the ground in the most terrible situations. So there’s a realism which I started to try to capture in my lyrics, which weren’t to do with completing a lyric for the sake of the song. The lyric had to make sense and the story had to be told.

Looking at this album [The Laughing Apple], another song I really like is “Don’t Blame Them.” I borrowed the melody from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata. The theme of that song is extremely important because it deals with one of the great ailments, unfortunately, which has reared its head again: prejudice. It’s all to do with allowing others to think for you and not find the truth out for yourself.

 

 

You’re one of the foremost peace advocates in the world, but not everyone has the same audience and platform that you do. What do you believe to be the most important thing an individual can do to promote peace in this world in times like these?

 

I’ve thought about this, and you can consider the Peace Train as the symbol. We’d love to see a physical Peace Train arriving on our street and carrying us away into the land of happiness and peace and harmony, but that may not happen. One of the last tours I did was called Peace Train: Late Again. What I realized was that the Peace Train is a metaphor for one’s own life. We begin the journey with our parents and as we go along other people get on the train. We don’t quite know where we’re going to get off, but while we’re in this world, it’s our job to make our tracks as straight and as true as possible. I think even though the truth is hard sometimes, it’s a thing which will save you in the end.

 

[people.com, 21. Sept. 2017]

 

 

 

Yusuf/Cat Stevens Talks Revisiting

1960s Catalog for New Album

'The Laughing Apple' features stripped-down versions of songs

singer-songwriter wrote as struggling teenage musician

 

Success came quickly for 18-year-old British singer-songwriter Steven Demetre Georgiou when he began releasing singles under the name Cat Stevens in 1966. His debut single "I Love My Dog" rose to Number 28 on the UK singles chart and follow-up single "Matthew and Son" hit Number Two. But it would be a long three years before Cat Stevens became a household name all over the world, a difficult period marked by overcooked recordings that didn't live up to the music in his mind. "It was all new to me and I had to leave the process of recording to the professionals," he tells Rolling Stone. "I wrote on acoustic guitar and they didn't sound like me. There were layers given to it that weren't mine. I felt alienated from my own music."

 

By the time that "Father and Son," "Wild World," "Moonshadow" and "Peace Train" hit radio in the early 1970s, this period of Stevens (who now uses the name Yusuf) became a distant memory. But a couple of years ago, Yusuf began going through his 1960s catalog and reflecting on what could have been. "I felt as if some of these songs deserve to be personalized, again, by me," he says. "I wanted to take ownership of them."

 

He decided to re-record 11 of them for his new album The Laughing Apple, which came out earlier this month. He recorded it in Brussels, Belgium with Paul Samwell-Smith, a founding member of the Yardbirds that also produced his classic 1970 LP Tea For The Tillerman. They reconnected in 2014 when he remixed Yusuf's LP Tell 'Em I'm Gone.

"I wanted to work with someone I can trust," says Yusuf. "He captured the spirit of the songs at the very early stages of recording. We had whole museum's worth of analog instruments and could just pop down and choose whatever ones we wanted."

 

The songs were cut with minimal instrumentation, allowing them to breathe in ways they couldn't back in the 1960s. Guitarist Alun Davies, who recorded with Yusuf on many of his classic 1970s records and had been in his road band since 2006, also plays on the album. "Like Paul, it just seemed natural that Alun should be included," says Yusuf. "I thank God that he was since his natural personality and aura in the studio contributed so much. He didn't even have to play." For Yusuf, the entire process was a fascinating trip back to his earliest days. "It was like going into a trunk of your old toys," he says. "You pull them out and see whether or not these choo-choo trains still goes on the tracks."

 

Yusuf - who began playing his old music in 2006 after decades out of the pop music world - will promote The Laughing Apple with a long series of dates in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand in November and December. He hopes to book more shows next year. "I was talking today about Asia," he says. "I haven't played Indonesia, China. I want to play places I've never played before." He toured America last year and hopes to return at some point. "I want to come back," he says. "I had such a great reception last time."

 

He's also already thinking about his next album. "I've got so many tracks in the can," he says. "I just haven't developed them enough. I'm waiting to find the right approach, but Paul and I just spent week at a studio in Stockholm, Sweden. We narrowed down quite a few tracks there. It just depends on what context I want to give to my next album."

 

[rollingstone.com, 28. Sept. 2017]

 

 

Yusuf / Cat Stevens breathes new life into his early music for latest album

It's been just over five decades since a young British singer-songwriter took the name Cat Stevens and soon found himself atop the world's music charts. Songs like "Peace Train," "Wild World" and "Oh Very Young" were simple tunes that became smash hits and helped lead to his 2014 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

 

Now known as Yusuf, following his conversion to the Muslim faith, his latest album, "The Laughing Apple," recalls his earliest days and even features the first song the 69-year-old ever wrote, reports "CBS This Morning: Saturday" co-host Anthony Mason. 
 
"It's been 50 years, you know. So like, some of those songs, I just, it's like I went to the little toy cupboard and took out these songs and then put a new battery in and went, 'Wow,'" Yusuf said. "You know I just picked up these songs again and they came to life."

 

Seven out of the 11 songs on the album come from his early catalog. "Blackness of the Night" originally appeared on his 1967 album "New Masters."

 

"It was me growing up in London and looking up at the sky, and looking up at the stars, wondering what's written for me, you know, what this world's gonna do to me. So that's one of the illustrations that you'll see in the album, is this little boy walking, you know, in the streets of London, with a fez on completely out of place," Yusuf said of the song. 

 

The young Cat Stevens first aspired to be a cartoonist and drew many of the covers for his hit albums in the 70s, but Yusuf gave up art, music and his old name when he converted to Islam. This is the first cover he's made in a long time. 

 

"I get to explain the vision of my song much, much clearer through my art," Yusuf said. 

 

Just as he's started to draw again, he has returned to touring and made peace with the Cat he once was -- putting the name on marquees and albums again. 

 

"I think that's the whole purpose of coming back. I went through quite a, you know, a kind of distancing from everything that I did before and all that, but that was natural because I was zealous and really enjoying the new thing I had found. But coming back to music has brought so many things together for me and it's a wonderful way to spread unity and peace," Yusuf said.

[cbsnews.com, 30. Sept. 2017]

 

 

 

Yusuf/Cat Stevens Shares the Stories Behind His Beloved Classics

 

With an evocative acoustic sound and lyrics that simultaneously soothed and begged introspection, 2019 Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Yusuf/Cat Stevens soared into the hearts of the masses in the early ‘70s with a succession of enduring hits including “Wild World,” “Father and Son,” “Moonshadow,” “Morning Has Broken” and “Peace Train.”

 

As his musical star was rising, so too was his desire to connect more deeply with his spirituality -- a path that led him to Islam. His 1978 album Back to Earth would be his last commercial music release for decades. He changed his name to Yusuf Islam and disappeared from public life for more than a decade.

 

In a wide-ranging conversation, the artist shares with Billboard his musical roots, the reason he retreated from the public and the reason he returned, and the musical direction of his new album, due in 2020.

 

When I think about how young you were when you wrote some of your biggest songs, you seem to have possessed a wisdom beyond your years. Where did that come from?

 

I think we should mention that there was a previous career before the “Moon Shadow,” “Wild World,” “Father and Son” era. There was another era where I was trying to enter into songwriting and making hit records. I was a pop star, but that wasn’t my first intention. I was brought up in London in the middle of the West End, which is very comparable to Broadway. So if you’ve got someone living on Broadway, you know what that means. It means you’re surrounded by incredible music but not necessarily pop music. But the storytelling, and the great composers like Gershwin and Bernstein. And so my first inspiration really came from musicals, and if you look at my early career, my first songs were kind of jerky, cameo life experiences I would just imagine and then write a song about. There are certainly songs I’ve written that I never fully understood myself how I got there. I have this ability to write about things which I imagine.

 

Did you have a favorite musical?

 

West Side Story was absolutely it for me, and if you listen to my early songs, you’ll hear that kind of jagged staccato. I already had a Greek cultural upbringing from my father’s side so there was all that going on, too. But Bernstein was definitely my model. And, of course, I was also listening to my sister’s record collection, which included Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Bach, so I had a pretty classical musical background and upbringing.

 

What precipitated the segue to your second musical act?

 

Well, that really is connected to what happened next. After my first little zoom into the heavens as a pop star, I came crashing back down to earth very soon with a disease called tuberculosis. That was really life-changing for me, having gone through that incredible adoration and being in the spotlight, and then suddenly I was thrust into a hospital bed and isolated, alone, and I had a lot of thinking to do. My spiritual quest began at that time in earnest. I was about 19 at the time, I had my first hit record at age 18 and by 19 I’d had it. It was over. At that point, I thought I was dying, and I thought the doctors were not telling me. So I had to quickly read up on as many spiritual books as I could. I had one very important book, it’s a Buddhist book called The Secret Path, and that opened me up to the great questions about existence and that’s where my wisdom, probably, where my thoughts began to take shape and my questions became defined.

 

And then, miraculously, you recovered…

 

When I came home, I never stopped. I continued on my quest searching spiritually for my home, you may say, and while that was happening, I began writing again and this time I was determined not to let the business, and the sounds that were prevalent at the time, affect me. I wanted to sound like me, like my demos and the original ideas in my head, and that’s how I began to develop my sound, which was mainly acoustic and very, very personal.

 

Let’s talk about some of your signature songs. Shall we start with “Wild World”?

 

“Wild World” was really my parting song with my girlfriend Patti D'Arbanville. We’d had some great times together, but I started recording and she was doing her modeling and it just became like two different worlds. And because I’d had such an experience of almost falling off the planet, I knew there were a lot of dangers out there so it was kind of me talking to myself about the second career I was about to embark on and also talking to her about her career. We’d basically split at that point, and that was the ode to our parting.

 

That song still continues to pop up in so many movies and television shows. I loved its use in the U.K. series Skins, and of course it’s meaningful to so many on a personal level.

 

It’s a mother’s song too, I would think, it’s very appropriate for a mother, also. Watching kids walk out the door is not an easy thing.

 

“Morning Has Broken” was originally a hymn, but you really made it your own.

 

I picked it up from the hymnbook one time when I was searching for ideas. It was quite a traditional song sung in the church, and I just did my own arrangement. I fell in love with the melody and the words, and people think it’s mine.

 

Can you share with us the story behind “First Cut Is The Deepest”?

 

That was one which, again, it was partly telling the story of a breakup between me and one of my first loves, really, and that was a very strong sentiment. What I wanted to do there was… I loved R&B. As well as listening to musicals I was also going down to clubs and listening to the latest R&B records coming over from across the Atlantic. I loved Otis Redding and I tried to write a song for Otis Redding and that is how “First Cut Is the Deepest” came about. It’s very much a soulful tune. My guitar playing wasn’t that clever in those days, so you hear those three little notes, which is pretty basic, but it begins the whole song and it’s a signature tune.

 

And of course there’s “Peace Train,” an anthem for a generation.

 

“Peace Train” came out of the Vietnam era and the affect that had on our generation, as well as the Cold War, which was looming above us. We realized, “Hey, we all want to live; we don’t want to be blown into smithereens. We want this planet to go on." So peace became a rallying call for many of us in the ‘60s. One time I had started touring and I was on a train going up north in the U.K. and it suddenly struck me I had this rhythm going from the sound of the wheels and I came up with this idea of “Peace Train.” I was playing around with the chords, which are very Greek in basic nature. I used these two notes, first and third, and the melody came out from there. It’s very simple, again, but one of my most profound songs and one that still breezes through the hearts of many people and the hopes we have today.

 

Your music has always had the ability to unite people. Were you aware of that as you were creating it, and how have you come to think about your role as a songwriter in uniting people as you’ve gotten older?

 

I left music for a while because I wanted to get on with living. I’d been consumed by the music business from a very young age. From the moment I heard the Beatles I was in it, I wanted to be there and wanted to be part of it. And then finally when I found what I was looking for, that spiritual home if you like, I decided to get on with life. Get married, have kids, and I got involved with so many things. Charities, education, etc. And there were some doubts in my mind as to whether there was real validity to this supposition that music can fix our problems. But in the end, what I realized was the human being has incredible potential and our aspirations go beyond the material. You can’t define happiness. You know when it hits you what it is. And music somehow has the ability to make you happy, it has the ability to makes you sad, too, but even in that moment there’s a connection with others you get through music. We empathize and that’s a very human characteristic. If we don’t have empathy, we’re not really human. There’s so much music can do in terms of linking up emotions and aspirations together into a unity which we wouldn’t otherwise have. We’re sitting on the Tube, nobody’s talking, we’re all separate. But somehow when you’re listening to music, you’re united in that moment, in another place, which is not necessarily in this world.

 

You stepped away for a long time and there were a lot of stories circulating about your whereabouts. Were you aware of them? If you don’t mind sharing, I’d love to hear about your decision and if/how you were able to disassociate yourself from your life as a pop star.

 

I was slightly oblivious because I was so happy about what I’d found. And I thought I’d left enough clues about where I was that if people wanted to find me, or to reach me or reach the place I’d reached. I thought, if someone was really serious, they would listen to my music and realize, this is the trail he took. And then make your own trail and follow it to a point, and you may want to go further—up to you. But there’s nothing like being in front of your audience. The connection you get there is unlike any other. It’s a real harmony of souls, and what I realized is that I’ve got another job to do, to come back. Because everything’s looking so bad and so negative, and I realized I needed to reconfirm to people the principles of life I’ve always believed in and my songs have always seemed to reflect.

 

It sounds like a combination of you wanting to reconnect with fans, and the sense that your fans maybe needed some more Cat Stevens?

 

Yeah. There are two kinds of stories in this world. Those about leaving home, and those about coming back. That’s what it’s all about. And coming back is very important. Especially when you think about, you’ve made a home in so many people’s hearts, and you definitely don’t want to leave them without your presence, without at least keeping the fireplace going and keeping everybody content with whatever you were giving them. I was giving something, I stopped giving it, and I realized I had to continue. To make sure people got healed, and I got healed.

 

What was it like returning to the public eye and ear? It had been such a long time, did the connectivity come back immediately?

 

Absolutely. It instinctively was as natural as once you learn how to swim, you know how to swim, so there wasn’t any difficulty there. And things were made much easier because now we were living in the digital age, so there were much less technical problems, so that was a bit of a joy. I missed the ‘80s—which, actually, I don’t think I missed too much—but I felt that we had such a great time, when I bowed out in the ‘80s it was the optimum time for me to do so. But coming back, I was so ready. It was a piece of cake.

 

Did you already have a lot of new material in your head?

 

It was a flood of creativity. The great thing is when you do give yourself space to live and experience life and taste things again and get hurt, maybe, and feel the joy, you’ve also got a lot more time and experience in your life to write about. So I found it was very easy and I had a lot more to say. I mean, yeah, I was a hungry artist, and so I’m not so hungry anymore, but I have some wisdom and philosophies I’ve picked up along the way which I think are more important than the just doing this as a career without any real thought. I think there’s a real purpose to what I’ve tried to do. I hope so anyway.

 

Your songs have been covered by so many artists. Do you have a favorite?

 

I like Rod Stewart’s “First Cut Is the Deepest” very much. I think he did the best job there, and he made it his own as well. Jimmy Cliff did “Wild World,” which I produced, by the way, and I really do like that version.

 

Your most recent album The Laughing Apple came out in 2017. Are you working on any new projects?

 

We have the prospect of my memoir being finalized and published, I think it will be next year, and we’re also working on another album, which has been more or less recorded and we’re in the mixing stage. I’m really fond of this album. Laughing Apple is a very acoustic album and this is quite a classic album. It’s even got a section of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake because his music inspired me, and that particular movement inspired me and I wrote a song based on it and I thought, “Why not pay tribute to the one who inspired me?” It will be out for sure next year, and we might release a couple of songs before the end of this year.

 

[billboard.com, Juni 2019]

 

 

Klassiker in neuem Klang – Neuausgabe von Cat Stevens’ „Back to Earth“

 

 

Das Album „Back to Earth“ war Ende 1978 das vorläufig letzte des Hitsongwriters Cat Stevens. Danach wandte sich der zum Islam konvertierte Musiker der Religion zu und irritierte durch fragwürdige Kommentare – etwa zur gegen Salman Rushdie verhängten Fatwa. Bald erscheint das Popmeisterwerk in einer musikhistorischen De-luxe-Edition.

 

Es war ein überraschendes Ende (am Ende allerdings nur vorläufig). Im Jahr 1978 entschied sich Cat Stevens, einer der größten internationalen Künstler der 1970er-Jahre, sich aus dem Musikgeschäft zurückzuziehen. Es war das Jahr, in dem er – kurz vor Weihnachten – das letzte Album unter dem Namen Cat Stevens veröffentlichte. „Back to Earth“ war das Album, mit dem sich der in London geborene Sänger vorläufig von seinen Fans verabschiedete – und seine Entscheidung aufzuhören in Songs wie „Last Love Song“ oder „Just Another Night“ indirekt erklärte.

 

Zuvor hatte seine Musik die Welt erobert – Songs wie „Lady D’Arbanville“, „Morning Has Broken“ und „Father & Son“ und Alben wie „Tea for The Tillerman“ (1970) oder „Teaser and The Firecat“ (1971). „Back to Earth“ war tatsächlich eine bemerkenswerte Rückkehr zu alter Form – zum einen in der Zusammenarbeit von Cat Stevens mit Paul Samwell-Smith, dem Produzenten jener Albumklassiker, zum anderen in der Fortsetzung der kreativen Partnerschaft mit dem langjährigen Gitarristen Alun Davies.

 

Das zentrale Thema des Albums „Back to Earth“ waren der Übergang und die Veränderungen im Leben des Künstlers, die nicht nur die Aufgabe des Ruhmes symbolisieren, sondern auch einen Wendepunkt hin zu humanitären und ökologischen Anliegen darstellen. In „New York Times“ (einem Lied, das Cat Stevens auf der Grundlage von Geschichten schrieb, die er in der „New York Times“ gelesen hatte) wird der Sänger bereits deutlich, wenn er über eines der aktuellen Themen unserer modernen Zeit – die Luftverschmutzung – klagt: „Autos, die dein Kind zu Tode würgen, aber du willst es nicht sehen.“

 

Bis 2017 veröffentlichte er kein Album mehr als Cat Stevens

 

Schon im Dezember 1977, also lange vor der Veröffentlichung von „Back to Earth“, hatte sich Stevens dem Islam zugewandt. Obwohl das Album noch unter seinem Künstlernamen erschien, nannte er sich nach erfolgter Konversion Yusuf Islam. Bis 2017 erschien keine Platte mehr als Cat Stevens. 1979 versteigerte er all seine Gitarren für gute Zwecke. Mit fragwürdigen Kommentaren zu der vom iranischen Revolutionsführer Ayatollah Chomeini verhängten Fatwa über den Schriftsteller Salman Rushdie („Die Satanischen Verse“) brachte Stevens 1989 viele Menschen, auch viele Fans, gegen sich auf.

 

Das Album „Back to Earth“ ist in einer remasterten CD- und LP-Version am 25. Oktober erschienen. Jetzt wurde bekannt, dass es am 28. Februar 2020 als Super-de-luxe-Boxset auf Cat-O-Log Records/BMG neu aufgelegt wird. Die musikhistorische Edition enthält das in den Abbey Road Studios neu remasterte Originalalbum, dazu kommen Demos, Outtakes und Material aus dem Unicef-„Year of The Child“-Konzert von 1979, der damals historischen letzten Liveperformance des Sängers als Cat Stevens.

 

Dazu gibt es obendrein – sozusagen als Schmankerl für die Die-Hard-Fans des Songwriters – die unveröffentlichten Titel „Butterfly“ und „Toy Heart“ (mit Grammy-Gewinner Eric Johnson), die von Cat Stevens damals als zu „poppig“ angesehen wurden.

 

[landeszeitung.de, 3. November 2019]