Yusuf / Cat Stevens: „The Laughing Apple“

„Meine Lieder sind optimistisch“

 

„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 die 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. September 2017]

 

 

Yusuf/Cat Stevens On Reinventing

'Tea For The Tillerman,' 50 Years Later:

'I Wanted to Take the Halo Off'

The legendary singer-songwriter talks about

reimagining his 1970 album and

how he's been unlocking creativity during the pandemic.

 

In 1970, Yusuf—then still known as Cat Stevens— released Tea for the Tillerman, a gorgeously melodic collection of songs that looked at the world through a prism of wisdom and spirituality that belied the British artist’s youth.

 

The multi-platinum album, which included the classic “Wild World,” as well as “Where Do the Children Play” and “Father and Son,” catapulted the 22-year old musician to global stardom and helped define the singer/songwriter era.

 

On Sept. 18, UMe will release Tea for the Tillerman 2, Yusuf/Cat Stevens' reimagining of the 11 songs filtered through 50 years of life experiences. Recorded in the south of France last summer with the original album’s producer, Paul Samwell-Smith, the reinvention upends many of the familiar arrangements, while staying blessedly true to the mission of the album—to explore life and oneself fearlessly.

 

Today (May 28), UMe released first single, “Where Do the Children Play,” the album’s opening track. With the world in turmoil, the song has lost none of its poignancy—and, in fact seems more relevant than ever— as it questions how we protect children in the face of rampant urban sprawl, poverty, pollution and climate change. A stop-motion video, directed by Chris Hopewell (Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch), comes out next week.

Yusuf/Cat Stevens talked to Billboard from his home in Dubai, where he has been sheltering in place during the pandemic about recording the original album and revisiting a work loved by millions. The initial plan included playing the album from start to finish on tour, but that is on hold until it is safe to play live in front of an audience again. “Let's hope that we can continue with that next year,” he says.

 

How did you come up with the idea to revisit the album for its 50th anniversary?

 

It's a lot to do with my son. He inspires me in many ways to do things and to get out there. This challenge was one I couldn’t refuse because it’s my record, but not only that, it set such a standard for so many people as far as my music is concerned, I thought, “C’mon.” Not that I’m going to try to beat it or compete with it, but at least make it relevant to me today so the people can hear me singing it all over, but with some very interesting and new novel arrangements on some of the songs at least. …If you do a masterpiece, people always want to see you do it again. That's another reason why I’m doing it because I'm satisfying that part of the curiosity of people to see how would I approach it today.

 

Tea for the Tillerman was your fourth album. You’d broken somewhat in the U.K. but not in the States. What were your expectations for it?

 

The expectations were almost prophesied by Chris Blackwell. We were standing [in] the Island Records office in London, near Portobello Road. And he turned to me after hearing it—he almost couldn’t recover after he heard this for the first time—and he said to me these immortal words: “You don't know how big you're going to be.” I was a little bit shocked, but he obviously knew something I didn't. So my expectations were, “Oh, you know, I'm progressing.” I've gotten to the point where I was able to do what I wanted to do and so I was extremely happy to just to be there doing that. I had total freedom. My expectations were certainly not more than to have a successful record, but it went much bigger than that.

 

There’s so much wisdom on the album for someone so young but by then, you’d already had some disenchantment with your career and, more significantly, nearly died from tuberculosis. At 71, do you look back at your 22-year old self and think, “I was an old soul already?”

 

Everybody carries a DNA destiny. Not just DNA, it's much more than that. It's our spirit. It's not just a physical thing, it’s something that we carry with us. Who was guiding me, it was unseen, but I always felt there was a presence in my life. That I wasn't the only one making things happen. There was something else going on. We're all kind of made for our purpose and our destiny in this world and I just felt that when I started looking up at the sky from very early on, one of my biggest questions was where does the sky end? It was a metaphysical question I had from a young age. And that’s been my task and my mission: to go explore the universe to find out where it's leading to.

 

When you decided to go back into this body of work, did you discover anything about some of the songs that you didn't realize the first time?

 

I found my “Hard Headed Woman” and that was a pretty great discovery. I could actually write about her and sing directly to her. That’s my wife. So there you go. It’s thrown a completely new light on the song and I changed the lyrics to make sure it does, that people understand.

 

The most radical arrangement is on “Wild World,” which you reinvented to sound like something Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill would have done. It almost takes you to a cabaret in Berlin. How did that interpretation come about?

 

How that happened was kind of a trick. What happens is you can get in front of the Yamaha Clavinova and there are all these buttons and you can go anywhere. You can go to hip hop, rock, ‘60s, classic, world and I just hit ragtime. There was a chord sequence and I started singing “Wild World” to it. It started happening all at once and I thought, ‘This is great!’ I enjoyed reinventing the song, as you said, with that Berlin-esque sound. I also grew up in the time when I was still hearing some of the strains of that music coming out the radio.

You could take an approach to that song, “It’s so pristine and you've got to be so reverent to it.” No, let's do something else. Let’s just have fun and do something new. I wanted to take the halo off.

 

 

You turned “On The Road To Find Out” into a bluesy stomp. It’s a little bit tougher than the original.

 

Yeah. I needed to get inspired. I don't want to just repeat. We wanted to do things differently. I've been listening to Muddy Waters and if you take a song like “Catfish Blues,” his guitar sound on that is just out of this world. So gritty. I wanted something like that. I’ve been working in the studio with Tinariwen. I love the desert blues. I just went back to the roots. That’s where the blues came from. They came from Africa. It was great to be able to reinvent the song and I could sing it in a new dimension with my experience and maturity today.

 

The obvious one to ask about is “Father and Son.” Fifty years down the road, you’re now the father as opposed to the son who has to go away. What was your approach on that one?

 

That one kind of created itself. I’m obviously the father. It’s much easier for me to sing in that tone and that scale. I think it was, again, my son's idea, to why not use your original voice from 1970. We dug around and found this incredible recording from the Troubadour in 1970. We isolated the voice and that’s what we used for the son’s part. That’s the making of “Father and Son 2020.”

 

What was it like reuniting with the album’s original producer Paul Samwell-Smith and guitarist Alun Davis to create the new version?

 

It was great. Paul has got into the mode now where he knows he can criticize me, but he has be very careful about how he does it. (laughs). I've trained Paul a little bit and he trained me because I know the kind of thing he likes so I won’t waste my time there, I'll get straight onto it. We get on so well together. Hand in glove. It’s a perfect relationship and I love the man.

 

You also updated the cover art you painted for the original. The Tillerman is now in a space suit and one of the children is holding a smart phone. Is that the world now?

 

Yeah. It’s much darker. Who knows? In the future with all this pollution, we may need to walk around in space suits. It's like one one of those Sci-fi possibilities. No, Tillerman represents also a constant. There’s that little spot for humanity to exist, to sit down, have a cup of tea and forget about everything else.

 

When Tea for the Tillerman first came out, the U.S. was greatly divided by the Vietnam War. Now we're even more divided in the U.S. and in much of the world. How do you feel this music can bring us together?

 

When some people have lost the spiritual link to their lives, music can play an important part. So from that point of view, I think that the sentiments from the album are incredibly important to us today. It shows that there are human beings still around. That's important.

 

Especially in the middle of a pandemic. Has this time unlocked any creativity in you?

 

I have been very busy with writing. I'm finalizing my autobiography. I’m trying to fill in the gap for so many people who almost have a mythological view of me so I'm trying to clarify who I am and how it happened. I’ve been illustrating [the book] as well. It’s probably going to be out the end of next year.

 

This album could introduce you to a new generation of fans. What do you want them to get out of it?

 

I think like what I got out of the album: It was something which propelled me in my journey, in my life. Once you define what the road is — and the road is to find out—in other words, explore life. That's the whole meaning of the album: Explore yourself and explore life and realizing, you know what, it is a wild world. We have to live in it, but try to find that place of peace within it that you can make your home.

 

[billboard.com, 28. Mai 2020]

 

 

Yusuf/Cat Stevens Re-Records

‘Tea for the Tillerman’ for 50th Anniversary

“We knew we were coming up to the 50th birthday of the friendly face, Tillerman,” says Yusuf, “and we wanted to do something special for him”

 

This November will mark the 50th anniversary of Cat Stevens’ landmark album Tea for the Tillerman, which features “Wild World,” “Father and Son,” “Where Do the Children Play?” and other classics. To celebrate, the songwriter (who now records under the name Yusuf) has re-recorded the entire album with original producer Paul Samwell-Smith and original guitarist Alun Davies. He’s called it Tea for the Tillerman² and it comes out on September 18th, but you can hear the new version of “Where Do the Children Play?” right here.

The new renditions of the 11 Tea for the Tillerman tracks are not note-for-note recreations. In many cases, they are lusher than the sparse originals and some take surprising left turns, like a funkafied “Longer Boats” featuring guest vocals from rapper Brother Ali. “Wild World,” meanwhile, now sounds almost like a waltz. That said, Yusuf worked hard to maintain the same spirit of the originals.

 

 

“This album is very important because it’s celebrating so many people,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It’s their soundtrack and people’s memories are so intertwined with the notes of this album and the music of this album. I hope a lot of people will love to grow this new album.”

Yusuf called Rolling Stone from his home in Dubai to discuss the new album, his life during quarantine, his touring plans and the usage of his music in the films Rushmore and Harold and Maude.

 

How is your quarantine going?

It’s actually not too bad here. We’re obviously kind of locked down and can’t go very far. You need to wear masks and have gloves, but they’ve just eased things up a little bit and some shops are open. It’s quite well organized in the shops. I haven’t gone in myself, but they apparently monitor you and measure your temperature. It’s quite well controlled. Everything here is not too bad, to be honest. We haven’t been affected so far.

 

I know Ramadan just wrapped up. How was it different than usual for you?

We couldn’t go to the mosque. Normally in Ramadan, you like to go to the mosque for the last prayer of the day. That wasn’t possible since all the mosques are shut. We had to do everything at home, but that was good for me because it made it more intense and more concentrated. It’s a spiritual month and you don’t have to be going out and gallivanting everywhere. It kind of suited the month. I became more reflective. I read more during this Ramadan than I have during previous ones.

 

I’ve really been enjoying the new version of Tea for the Tillerman. Why did you decide to re-record it?

It’s a collection of reasons, really. One of them was that we knew we were coming up to the 50th birthday of the friendly face, Tillerman, and we wanted to do something special for him. And we thought about it and my son Yoriyos came up with the idea of, “Why don’t we record it again?” I suddenly thought, “Hang on. We could. There’s nothing to stop us.” That was the first ignition of the idea.

Another reason was I wanted to do more up-to-date versions of how I do it onstage and how I’d like to do it onstage so I could update my catalog a little bit and show how I sound today. I also wanted to take some expeditions and adventures with the songs, which I certainly have done with some of them. I have taken them to a slightly different sphere of sonicality. That was another reason.

And I got to sing a duet with myself after 50 years, which is incredible. In “Father and Son,” the voice of the son was taken from a recording of me in 1970 at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. And now here’s me at 70 singing with myself when I was about 22. It’s amazing. It’s virtual reality for you.

 

When many older artists re-record their classic albums, they tend to stick to the exact same arrangements and it’s usually just an attempt to license them out when they don’t own the publishing of the originals. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.

There was also this idea of re-recording so you could circulate your own versions, but I don’t think that was necessary. The original version is great. People are fond of that. But I wanted to do something original. We certainly did do that. If you listen to “Longer Boats,” nobody would have expected James Brown to jump in the middle of it and start funking around, but that’s exactly how we did it.

If you listen to “On the Road to Find Out,” that to me is a beautiful departure from the original since it’s gone into an area that I love, a sort of desert blues. We had a very, very good time making this record. It’s something new.

 

“Wild World” has an almost waltz-vibe to it. It’s a very different arrangement.

Yeah. It could be sort of Argentinian, sort of tango-type, waltzy back in 1940 or something like that. That was a simple jump for me to make. What happened is I was playing around with my Yamaha Clavinova, which is one of those machines where you can press any button, like “pop,” “R&B,” “world music” or whatever. I ended up with this button called “Ragtime” and I started playing these chords and singing “Wild World” to it. It sounded so great and I felt it was great fun, so I recorded it on my mobile. That became the basis for the arrangement.

It’s all possible. I do think that song obviously has its own iconic arrangement, which is not going to change. I just wanted to do something different. I had great fun doing it. And that particular track was recorded in Stockholm at Benny Andersson’s studio, which overlooks the archipelago. We got this great alto sax player, a jazz-oriented player, to come in and fill in little parts. It was kind of ambient.

 

Who is the rapper on “Longer Boats?”

That’s Brother Ali. He came and did his speech in the middle of it. We sent him the track and it just came back like that. We loved it. It fits perfectly.

 

What was it like working with Paul Samwell-Smith and Alun Davies again?

We’ve been working together on the recent albums and we got so used to each other. And I didn’t want to leave them out of this one because this is Paul’s baby as well. I wanted him to connect with it. He also lives in the South of France, which is where we recorded most of the album apart from “Wild World.” It was great to have him along.

We also had Alun there. He’s a vibe and he’s always been a great vibe for me, from the moment we met in Olympic Studios. He originally didn’t know quite what to expect from me in those days, but ever since then we hit it off and started playing together. It was great to have him.

We got some other great musicians to play with us. Peter Vettese plays the keyboards. He’s been with Jethro Tull and is a spectacular musician. Another real great multi-instrumentalist is Kwame [Yeboah] from Ghana. My God, he does anything you can imagine. The guitarist as well, Eric Appapoulay. Jim Cregan too. He was with Rod Stewart once.

 

Do the words of “Father and Son” mean something different to you now than the time when you first wrote them?

Well, the story behind the writing of that one is that it was intended for a musical. I had already cast myself in two roles, playing the two characters in this musical I was writing, which was based on the Russian Revolution. It originally had to do with the young son living with his father on the farm and he wanted to join the march, join the revolution, and his father wanted him to stay home. “It’s better not to change things. Let’s keep things as they are.”

That was basically the story against another story that was going on at the same time, which was Nicholas and Alexandra, the czar of Russia. That’s a whole other story. Anyway, that was where the song came from. But it has a massive meaning for so many people. As far as I was concerned, yes, my father had a life. He also had an immense jump from where he came from the little island of Cypress. He made quite a few jumps, actually. I think it wasn’t necessarily about dad, but then again, it was because I never followed his path. I didn’t take over the restaurant. I went and did something completely different.

 

How did it feel emotionally to revisit these songs after 50 years and get back in the headspace of your younger self?

Well, I’ve been singing them live anyway, so they aren’t too far from where I am today, or the meanings of the song. “Where Do the Children Play?” has a contemporary theme as well now. Everybody is beginning to get that one and understand how vital the message of that song is. Therefore the songs and their meanings haven’t changed much, like “Wild World” or ” Where Do the Children Play?”

“Miles From Nowhere” is a great spiritual song. It’s such a metaphor for life. There’s always a mountain to climb. That satisfies that. And “Into White” is just a pretty song. You just can’t help but fall in love when you sing it. It’s great. Bringing these songs to life again was just a joy.

 

Prior to the pandemic, were you planning a special show where you’d play the album straight through? Might that still happen at some point?

Yeah. That was the intention. We were really getting ready for that. Rehearsals were all lined up and everything. The busses were booked and everything. But it came in the way. Suddenly you’re looking at an ocean and you can’t cross it anymore. That changes that.

Destiny has a way of affecting you. You suddenly say, “OK. This is it. Get used to it.” Let’s hope we can get moving again. But now we’ve learned how much we can do while we’re at home. It might change things a little bit in the future.

You’re hoping next year to possibly do those shows?

Yeah. I’d love to do that. I’m also writing a lot of music. I can’t say I’m writing right now, but I’ve written a lot of songs and we’ve also recorded, more or less, an album, which is ready to go. But because Tillerman is the 50th anniversary, we decided to do that first. But we have more music to come. There’s a lot of very interesting songs.

 

Your voice is in remarkable shape for your age. You basically sound the exact same. Do you think not singing for all those years helped preserve it?

Yeah. I was basically in a non-musical pod somewhere in the atmosphere, floating around. I was doing lots of other things. I had a life, to be sure, and I didn’t really have time to do anything else. But when you look at what it did for me, obviously, I don’t drink. I certainly don’t take drugs. All of that and the effect it had on my life and my physical state and my being, obviously, was positive. And my voice was preserved. Thank God.

 

This is getting off-topic, but I feel like the movie Rushmore introduced your music to many people that weren’t around when it originally came out. Have you seen that movie? What do you think of it?

I love it. I met Wes Anderson a long time ago and we talked about possibly doing a musical together. He loved my music and it was great to hear. His choice of songs, like “Here Comes My Baby,” was terrific. I loved hearing that again in the film.

 

I can’t hear “The Wind” and not think of that movie.

It’s a beautiful film. It’s about this young dude trying to figure it out. He doesn’t quite fit in. That has always been the theme for many of my ventures and involvement in film, Harold and Maude being the best example, a guy that just wants to shock his mother into reality.

 

To wrap here, I’m curious to know if you’re feeling optimistic about the state of the world considering how bleak everything feels right now.

Well, I am. I’m always an optimist. I do think there’s work that has to be done. You can’t just sit back and expect it to happen. There are lots of things that need to be done. For instance, right now there’s a general attitude that we are progressing, but I’d definitely question that. I’d say that we aren’t becoming better human beings just because we have so much more technology to help us communicate and we can get food from any part of the world. There are so many luxuries and comforts that people have taken for granted today.

But it hasn’t made us better human beings. That’s the question we have to think about. This thing that has happened is a disaster. At the same time, as the Chinese say, a crisis is also an opportunity. I think this is an opportunity for us to reboot our humanity a little bit. We’ve got close to our families.

I’ve got a project that is important. “Peace Train” was always a song, a theme, an anthem which was very, very important for the time. And it’s still important. But today we’re using it as a name for a charity project that is sending food to townships and refugee camps, providing food to families. It’s about making sure people have bread and butter on the table. You can’t achieve peace without that. You can’t have starving people and try to sing about peace. It’s impossible. You’ve got to look at what’s going on with humanity and take some steps to address that. That’s what I’m trying to do.

 

That’s great. And I’m really hoping you tour next year. Seeing live music again will seem especially joyous once it’s possible again.

It will be exciting. I don’t know how it’s going to work. I can’t visualize it anymore. It’s just so foreign to us. We’re used to this distancing thing. I can’t imagine being crammed together again at a show.

 

I don’t want to be singing “Peace Train” at one of your shows while wearing a mask. It’ll seem crazy.

You’ve seen how Tillerman looks today on the new cover. We might all be walking around in spacesuits just to make it safer for us all.

 

[rollingstone.com, 28. Mai 2020]

 

 

Where Do The Children Play?:

Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ Timeless Message

Eternally relevant, Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ ‘Where Do The Children Play?’ remains a classic song looking for ‘the balance of nature’.

 

The classic Yusuf/Cat Stevens song ‘Where Do the Children Play?’ was the opening track on his 1970 album Tea For The Tillerman. The singer-songwriter said that song’s message had such lasting “value” that he was still performing it at shows more than half a century later.

 

‘Where Do The Children Play?’, which featured on his fourth album, was recorded for Island Records on a summer day at Morgan Sound Studios on London’s Willesden High Road, a suitably urbanised setting to cut a song that castigated the pollution and the concrete jungle that a new generation of youngsters had to grow up in. It was produced by his long-term collaborator Paul Samwell-Smith, a bass player who had been a founding member of The Yardbirds. Stevens and Alun Davies played acoustic guitar on the track, with John Ryan on double bass and Harvey Burns on percussion.

 

Cat Stevens (who also goes by the name Yusuf) was born Steven Georgiou in central London on 21 July 1948 and grew up in Holborn, attending a school in the theatre district of Drury Lane. “It was all entertainment, everywhere; I mean, I thought this was natural,” he later told NPR. “But then I realised that there weren’t so many parks around there. And that’s where, when you come to my music, a song like ‘Where Do the Children Play?’, there’s a kind of harking to that issue.”

 

Stevens is a master of writing melancholic songs – alongside ‘Where Do the Children Play?’ are other classics like ‘Moonshadow’ and ‘Peace Train’ – and his lasting contribution to popular music was recognised with an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 2014. Five years later, he also made it into The Songwriters Hall Of Fame.

 

In an interview with Songwriter Universe, Stevens went into more detail about the inspiration for ‘Where Do The Children Play?’. “At the time I was growing up in London, there were bomb ruins, because the war had just ended. There were still signs of destruction all around. And there weren’t many gardens… you had Hyde Park… you had to travel quite a long way to get there. So there was a yearning for the countryside and space for kids. At my school, we had a basement. It was like a lower ground floor. That’s where the boys played, confined to that small basement. That was the reality of growing up in the city, so that’s where ‘Where Do The Children Play?’ comes from.”

 

The song appeared on the soundtrack of the cult 1971 movie Harold And Maude, adding greatly to the poignancy of a scene in which the protagonist, Harold, is driving past a military graveyard full of tiny white graves.

 

Many of the lines by Stevens – such as “You roll on roads over fresh green grass/For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas” – remain sadly pertinent in the 21st Century. Stevens said that because his “iconic song” was “talking about ecology”, it remained relevant in an era struggling to find “the balance of nature to allow our children to play, to enjoy life”.

 

In the past decade, the singer has helped run Islamic schools for children, funding pleasant places for younger generations to develop in inner-city New York. “I started a school with a big, big playground, so there you go. It’s kind of like walking the talk. That’s what I tried to do,” he told CNN.

 

Among the musicians who have covered the wonderful ‘Where Do The Children Play?’ are UK band The Christians, American rock band Garbage – who recorded a version for a United Nations charity album in 2017 – and country legend Dolly Parton.

 

Yusuf/Cat Stevens has made an entirely new recording of Tea For The Tillerman. Tea For The Tillerman 2 will be released on 18 September, and can be pre-ordered here.

 

[fr.cameroonmagazine.com, 29. Mai 2020]