1st Half

THE WIND
MIDDAY
DON’T BE SHY
THINKIN’ ABOUT YOU
THE BELOVED
WHERE DO THE CHILDREN PLAY
I LOVE MY DOG / HERE COMES MY BABY/ FIRST CUT
MOONSHADOW
GOD IS THE LIGHT
TUESDAY’S DEAD

 

 

2nd Half

 
ROADSINGER
DOORS
OH VERY YOUNG
MILES FROM NOWHERE
ALL KINDS ROSES
WILD WORLD
MY PEOPLE
MORNING HAS BROKEN
FATHER AND SON

 

 

Encores

 
RUINS
CHANGES
PEACE TRAIN

 

 

 

 

“Now I’m gonna take a little break,” Yusuf Islam announces to his Saturday evening audience. He’s already seated and, as he speaks, a white tablecloth-draped table is whisked on stage before him.

 

“Well it did take you a long time to arrive,” he jokes to the audience, groups of whom were still filing into BIEL an hour after the show’s start time. “Now I’m gonna get you back!”

After ruminating over the coffee pot before him, stories about leaving and coming home, he confesses he’s been writing a musical, one that takes its name, “Moon Shadow,” from one of the many songs he composed when people knew him by the name “Cat Stevens.”

 

Islam’s show is divided between those Stevens tunes familiar to mostly everyone in this capacity audience – whether actively listening to his records or absorbing them passively in the decades after Stevens embraced Islam and abandoned music.

 

The day of the show, Islam told The Daily Star about his gradual reconciliation of his music with his faith.

 

“Music is an issue which is still under debate,” he said, “because there is no clear indication in sacred text, either in Quran or authentic and unambiguous hadith. It is something that is subject to discussion and research.

“In the beginning, ... when I heard some of the hadith or some of the reported hadith, I was a little bit careful and thought, OK I’m gonna withdraw until I know more, until God makes it more clear to me.

“I left. I got busy with work and education and charity and raising a family.

“But music does have a very special place. If you look at prophetic tradition you’ll see that the Prophet (praise be upon him) acknowledged that. In fact there are stronger hadith to show that, when there was a time when there was music or singing in the Prophet’s house and one of the companions came in to object, he told him to stop and for [the musicians] to carry on.

“Yes, there is this hadith about the Prophet (PBUH), when he heard the flute, putting his fingers in his ears.

“But, if you analyze it from another point of view, that’s because he is the Prophet and he is of such a status that – ” he recites from the hadith in question – “music is not suitable for the Prophet. That doesn’t mean it isn’t suitable for others. When he didn’t restrict or prohibit then it leaves the allowance to people of lesser status.”

Looking back to the start of his career as a performer, Islam says music was part of his experimentation with artistic expression.

 

“Song-writing took over from painting,” he said, “because it was somehow more instantaneous. When you make a painting you have to wait ’til it dries ... and you can’t get 5,000 people looking at one painting at the same time and having the same buzz. It’s to do with instantaneous connection with the artist and the viewer or the participant or the spectator.

“Music in itself is fantastic because it’s a science and it’s an art form that relates to the spheres and the heavens which God has created, beautiful. But when words come and coincide with beautiful music, it can be so powerful.”

Islam’s show is a compromise between his own needs and those of his audience. Evidently he’s aware that most people want to hear Cat Stevens tunes and he devotes about half the show to them. If Stevens ever regarded his pop songs to be elastic things to be improvised with in concert, Islam prefers to deliver these tunes exactly as people recall them from the recordings.

 

Some might find this a bit boring but it is no mean feat that, as he approaches 65, Islam’s voice sounds indistinguishable from the one on Cat Stevens’ recordings. In this he’s greatly aided by his superb backing quintet.

 

And occasionally Islam is willing to depart from the musical archive if it suits his ecumenical concerns. When the program arrives at the much-loved Stevens’ tune “Wild Word,” he sings a bar or two in Zulu, but carefully returns to the start of the song that everyone in the audience recognizes.

 

The show does reference religion (praising God, if not Islam per se), but the performer is as preoccupied with worldly injustice as were many 20th-century performers. He gives a shout-out to the popular uprisings that have broken out over the last year or so. “The people are rising,” he says, “and when that happens, you pray for their safety.”

To the demonstrators he dedicates the new song “My People,” which appears to have been released in 2011 online but not on CD. It is the one new tune in Saturday’s show that approaches the quality of a Cat Stevens tune, echoing some of the sentiments and stylistic elements of “Peace Train.”

 

Conversation with Yusuf Islam is striking for his apparent modesty. Asked how he was able to cope with bizarre objectification of celebrity, he shrugs, saying he’s learned to “look objectively at it ... I’ve been given something and because of that I feel grateful ... But it’s been given. It’s not as though I’m creating it truly, with my own power. I don’t have that.”

He attributes Cat Stevens’ rise to fame to the circumstances in which he happens to have emerged as a performer. “Singer-songwriters were suddenly being noticed,” he said. “I think the path had been made clear or at least defined by Dylan, by folk music and before that there were the blues players struggling to be heard, in chains. That’s rock’n’roll and the music business came from that surge to be emancipated, freed, to express, to live to be honored, to be respected.

Islam depicts his present relationship with music to be more balanced than it once was. “Now music is a part of my life, part of what I do and how I communicate. At one time it was my religion. But I’ve got my religion now,” he laughs, “and within that I had to find a place for music. I didn’t have to but I found it and everything is much more balanced.

“As I make money, I can give to charity, as well as that look after my family. It’s growing. I now have grandchildren. There’s my son-in-law,” he gestures to the young man who’s been quietly photographing the interview, “responsible for my three grandchildren.”

Two tunes into his band’s encore set, Yusuf Islam leans into the microphone. “We’re gonna give you one more,” he says. “Otherwise you’ll have to pay a little extra.”

Then he and his expert ensemble lean into a picture-perfect rendition of “Peace Train.”

 

[The Daily Star/ Lebanon News, 20. Febr. 2012]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A crowd of hundreds of Lebanese people cheered for Yusuf Islam, the musician formerly known as Cat Stevens, as he performed at a concert in Beirut last Saturday. Evidently aware that the majority of his fans wanted to listen to Cat Steven’s pop songs, the show was a compromise between his own needs and the needs of the audience: half devoted to Steven’s well-known songs and half to the melodies composed in the decades after he embraced Islam.

The Arab Spring took on a different form in Islam’s concert as he sang about love, reconciliation and freedom of nations. On the day of the show, Islam explained to Al Arabiya that the uprising of the Arabs reminded him of the sixties when people all around the world were marching for peace. To embrace this new movement, Islam wrote “My People”, a song which tackles the issue of people’s right to freedom and the need to take decisions without hurting the others. He added that this song is dedicated to all the nations who are seeking freedom and liberty peacefully.

The musician’s fans rallied overnight to be able to listen to his music that Islam says can help bridge cultural gaps. Islam commented in his interview with Al Arabiya that music is a powerful art that plays the role of connecting people as it is not restricted by boundaries, color or nationality. He stated that music is a part of human civilization that we can use to help people to come together, explaining that when words coincide with beautiful music it can be a very powerful tool to unite people under same topic: love. He added “when the audience comes to the show, you see Muslim and non-Muslim, old and young gathered to listen to a universal art.”

 

The singer, who left his career at the peak of his stardom in the seventies to devote himself to humanitarian causes, has gradually made a return to music. Islam revealed to Al Arabiya that the incident of 9/11 acted as the trigger behind his come back to music. Seeing escalating tension between people across the world, Islam wanted to make a contribution towards reconciliation and felt the urge to pursue this ambition through his greatest passion: art. He wanted to channel his passion and share his experiences of tolerance with a world that was increasingly becoming divided.

“In 2001 when 9/11 happened the world looked like it was going to explode and I realized that there is a chance for me perhaps to come back and sing about peace and try to bring people together again with love and wisdom,” he said.

Islam’s performances have inspired people across the globe to listen to music that promotes messages of love and peace, messages which are often sorely lacking in today’s turbulent times.

 

[Al Arabiya News, 21. Febr. 2012]

 

 

 

 

 

"The uprisings here..." Cat Stevens (or Yusuf Stevens or Yusuf Islam or whatever) began. And the Lebanese audience went as wild as the wild world. They chorused his name. They stood and shouted and clapped. That one word "uprisings" had not a magical effect but a cathartic one, perhaps a kind of drug; it touched everyone. Yusuf Stevens or Yusuf Islam – you'll have to get used to this – stood on the Beirut stage in front of more than a thousand Lebanese. He was scarcely an hour's drive from the Syrian border, an hour and a half from Damascus. No one needed the message spelled out.

But his decision to sing "My People", written long after he decided to embrace Islam and – this is a Fisk opinion, I fear – frittered away more than 20 years of his life without producing the music his fans loved – perfectly fitted these times of excitement and terror in the Middle East. "When you gonna leave/ My People? Give them room to breath/ My People? Stop oppressing My People?"

The Lebanese are a very smart people. They know all about Stevens' conversion to Islam, his deportation from Israel because he allegedly gave funds to Hamas – "I have never knowingly... given money to Hamas" was his response at the time, but, then again, being deported from Israel is, for most Lebanese, the equivalent of a music award. Yusuf Stevens/Islam (again, you have to live with this) was chucked out of the US in 2004 because the gruesomely named Homeland Security – "Heimat" or "Homeland" being a rather Nazi-era word – claimed they had "concerns of ties he (Stevens) may have to potential terrorist-related activities", all denied by Yusuf himself.

This particular allegation – as big a piece of tosh ever to come from the Bush administration (with the exception of WMD, Iraqi ties to al-Qa'ida, etc) – is enough to earn poor old Cat/Yusuf a Nobel Prize in Lebanon. So no wonder they wept to the words of "My People". "My people/ All they need is dignity/ A chance to be free... Let them out of jail... My People/ When you gonna show you care/ Join the people in the square/ My People..." It was a haunting message, but still contained an extraordinary prescience. Let them out of jail. Who now could not think of jails in Egypt or Bahrain or Syria? Who could not think of the people in "the square" without remembering a place called Tahrir?

Stevens was famously caught up by the Muslim call to prayer, the "Adhan" which, so he was told, was "music for God". He had heard of music for money, for fame, for personal power. "I thought," he asked himself then, "music for God? I'd never heard that before." But, personally, I've always wondered about this Stevens reflection. I can think of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Handel, all the Masses and Oratorios and I ask myself, weren't these classical folk writing music for God? "Confutatis maledictis" ("silence the accursed") may be a little more disturbing than the "Adhan", but surely it's about prayer.

Stevens' new songs seemed to have lost originality – a Muslim woman told me she found the religious songs childish – but the old songs, "I love My Dog", "Father and Son", his fans know them all, retained their freshness. "My People", however, was a kind of re-birth. He loved the whole gig in Beirut – his curtain call almost as long as the second part of the show – but of course the great man had to be made to talk about the "uprisings".

Yusuf Islam (that's what it said on his little booth behind the scenes) was exhausted, blue-tinted glasses now (they didn't suit him) and the usual straggly beard and the slightly tired English voice, someone who had sung the same songs too many times. Or had he?

But I buttonholed him with all the enthusiasm of a cub reporter. The Arab Awakening, Yusuf? Anything to tell the world about the Arab Spring? "I'm inspired," he said. "But I'm also afraid – because of the lack of defined leadership. Dictatorship is easy but democracy is about consensus – and that's hard. But it's like the sun coming up." Great stuff. If only the Clintons and the Hagues and the Juppés could listen to Cat-Yusuf Stevens-Islam...

 

[The Independent, 22. Febr. 2012]