Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, London Palladium, October 27, 2025.

‘Long Black Veil’ is an American folk ballad that dates from 1959, written by Marijohn Wilkin and Danny Dill, that tells the sad story of a man hung from the gallows for a murder he did not commit. He chose not to declare his alibi – he was “in the arms of my best friend’s wife” – in the courtroom so as not to betray his lover who “walks these hills in a long black veil”. It’s been covered by many – I heard it for the first time on The Band’s debut LP Music From Big Pink, sung plaintively by Rick Danko – and on Sunday night, at the London Palladium, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings chose to sing it for their sixth and final encore. 

But this was no ordinary encore, no ordinary climax to a wonderful concert, no ordinary way to close an evening that many will remember for a long time to come. Slightly overcome by the endless ovations, Welch and Rawlings stepped away from the microphones that amplified their voices and guitars, and walked towards the platform that covered the theatre’s orchestra pit. “This is something we’ve never done before,” said Welch. “We love this theatre. It’s like an old schoolhouse. You’ll have to keep very quiet now.”

You could hear a pin drop in the big old Palladium as the pair began, Welch strumming her Gibson, Rawlings picking out the odd note on that elderly Epiphone he so plainly adores. “Ten years ago, on a cold dark night…” And when they’d finished, after we’d strained but just about succeeded in hearing them perform acoustically in the strict sense of the word, the audience exploded, as they had time and time again during the previous three hours. 

        The current brief tour of the UK by the King and Queen of Americana is long overdue. My wife and I saw them the last time they were here, in 2011, in Brighton, and the long wait to see them again has been frustrating. Their stage set was absurdly simple, a pair of matching rugs, four microphones on stands, a small table and one stool, no drums, no back line, no lighting rig aside from spots that shone down on where they stood and a wash of whirly circles that spread across the deck. At just after 8 o’clock a lone roadie brought a banjo on to the stage, leaving it on a stand next to the table. It raised a cheer which he failed to acknowledge. 

        Then they arrived, Welch in a long, patterned dress, flared below the waist, country style, her shoulders bare; Rawlings dressed as a cowboy, scruffy old jacket, faded blue jeans and matching shirt, on his head a big hat that hid most of his face, its brim turned up at the sides. Welch chose her words carefully between songs, and seemed visibly moved by the warmth with which they were received. Rawlings said next to nothing, leaving his extraordinary guitar skills to speak for him. “Don’t hold back Dave,” said Welch at one point, grinning. At another, after songs that required both harmonica and banjo, she said: “You’ve heard it all now. Banjo and harp, that’s all we’ve got.” She's very droll. 

        They sang 25 songs in all, divided into two sets with a brief interval. Though they began the concert with ‘I Wanna Sing That Rock And Roll’, from 2001’s The Revelator, a good few – I counted seven in all – were from their Woodland album, released earlier this year. They nowadays have a deep well of material from which to draw, and the subtle change in billing that seems to have taken place fairly recently – they’re officially a duo in name now as well as in reality – adds Rawlings’ own recordings to their repertoire which now tots up to ten albums’ worth of songs between them, plus a covers set, some live recordings and archive releases. Very few songs from Welch’s first five albums were performed. 

        But whatever they sang, from whatever stage of their career, didn’t really matter. Each and every song was delivered with tenderness and care, with perfect harmonies and subtle accompaniment that gathered momentum only when Rawlings took a mesmerising solo, frantically picking away at his instrument, fast, clear lines, arpeggios and ringing top notes that took him well past his 12th fret. He hugs that Epiphone like a newborn baby. Almost every solo he took inspired applause that somehow launched the pair into the next, often final, verse of whatever song they were singing and thus created a fabulous momentum to close it. On most songs Welch set the pace, crouching forward to establish a chorded rhythm that Rawlings picked up very quickly, inking in the details in his spindly, spider-web fashion. For many they were joined on double bass by Paul Kowert who either plucked or bowed his instrument, its deeper timbre balancing the sharp tone of Rawlings’ guitar and adding depth to the music’s overall tonality.

        Highlights? Too many to count really. Rawlings’ ‘Ruby’ and Welch’s ‘Red Clay Halo’ which closed the first set. More came in the second: Rawlings’ lovely ‘What We Had’ and ‘Hashtag’, both from Woodland; ‘Six White Horses’ from 2011’s The Harrow And The Harvest, with Welch hamboning and even stepping forward for a well-received twirl and two step; ‘Revelator’, with Rawlings’ sprawling, cresting solo; and all the encores, beginning with a delightful ‘Make Me Down A Pallet On Your Floor’, which, said Welch, they learned from Doc Watson himself, running through Neil Young’s ‘Cortez The Killer’, played furiously, a triumphant ‘I’ll Fly Away’, almost but not quite a singalong, Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’, another furious, incendiary cover and the icing on the cake, that pure rendition of ‘Long Black Veil’.

At the front of the stage – look, no mikes – for the final encore. 

        It takes a good deal to prise me from my nest in the country these days but it was more than worth it to spend three hours in the company of these ambassadors of a country that is no longer as great as it once was. Here’s hoping Gillian Welch and David Rawlings don’t leave it another 14 years before they visit our shores again. 

CAT ON THE ROAD TO FINDOUT by Yusuf/Cat Stevens – Part 2

The life of Cat Stevens was forever changed in the autumn of 1975 when, by his reckoning, he was saved from drowning by the Almighty. Swimming in the Pacific off the coast of Malibu, a powerful undercurrent pulled him away from the shore, his heart froze and his limbs felt too weak to get him back to land. “In a split second of the rapidly dwindling moments that remained of my life, I looked and prayed, ‘Oh God if you’ll save me, I’ll work for You.’” 

He was as good as his word and, though it didn’t happen overnight, Cat Stevens soon became Yusuf Islam and thereafter followed the Muslim faith, devoting himself largely to good works prescribed by a religion that, in his opinion, doesn’t get a fair crack of the whip in the Western world. 

        “Never was there a troubadour more handsome than Cat Stevens, nor a career so coloured with romantic stories and downright peculiarity,” I wrote in 1983 as the introduction to my book about Cat Stevens, and 42 years later – after reading his autobiography – I have come some way to understanding why he did what he did and, perhaps more importantly, what this likeable man had to endure when he swapped pop stardom for life as a Muslim. 

        It is a book of two halves, the first devoted to his life as Cat Stevens, initially as a rather dandyish and, we are told, reluctant pop star, then as the sensitive singer/songwriter who sold millions of records and became rich. The second half, roughly from 1977 onwards, is devoted his life as a Muslim, with plenty of emphasis on the difficulties he faced, some brought about by his earlier vocation, others by what he perceives as an antipathy towards Islam by an unsympathetic media that concentrates only on negativity. To this end he deals with issues like Salmon Rushdie, the Iranian Revolution and 9/11, invariably pointing out that – as in all religions – there are the good, the bad and the ugly. 

        This sets the book well apart from just about every other music biography I’ve ever read, as does Yusuf’s focus on his family, be it the mum and dad who raised him and his elder brother and sister in the Moulin Rouge restaurant near Cambridge Circus, or the family of four daughters and one son he raised after marriage to fellow Muslim Fawziah Ali in 1979. Yusuf writes about them all with affection and the frequency that other musicians devote to bass players, drummers and record producers. The on-off relationship with his brother and sometimes manager David is an ongoing sub-plot to the book.

        The slightly precocious, independent-minded child christened Steven Demetri Georgiou was fascinated by religious belief from an early age and, though the earthly temptations that came his way through exposure to the pop world were hard to resist, his eventual conversation seems somehow inevitable. Still, he road-tested other religions, among them Christianity, Buddhism and the I Ching, before settling on Islam to which he was drawn after David gifted him a copy of the Koran. 

        The clues were there in many of the songs he wrote between 1970 and 1975; expressing the thoughts of a seeker (‘On The Road To Find Out’ and ‘Miles From Nowhere’), climate-conscious environmentalist (‘Where Do The Children Play?’), disquiet at materialism (‘Hard Headed Woman’) and hope for mankind (‘Peace Train’ and ‘Sitting’). ‘Morning Has Broken’, of course, is an arrangement of a Christian hymn from 1931 while ‘How Can I Tell You’, to my mind his greatest love song, scores through the writer’s inadequacy to express himself. More than once in the book Yusuf recounts his dislike of being interviewed, and frustration at how the media misrepresented whatever opinions he was trying to express. 

        Yusuf has a friendly, unpretentious writing style and though some may be deterred by the detours into religious reasoning that occupy large chunks of the book’s latter stages, I shared his exasperation at incidents where he was shoddily treated by immigration officials in the US and Israel. Much of this he attributes to his high profile as a one-time celebrity, the quid pro quo being his ability to fund charities and Islamic education from the fortune he amassed as a million-selling artist. His gradual re-emergence as a musician, somewhat unexpected after selling his guitars and giving the proceeds to charity, is a welcome relief towards the end of the book. 

        It’s a long read – 554 pages – and, unusually, the 24-page b&w photo section is at the back. Inexplicably for a lengthy autobiography, there is no index. Finally, I need to mention that he’s in no doubt that Carly Simon wrote ‘You’re So Vain’ about him. “I never understood the endless hide-and-seek of finding out who [it] was about bro!” he writes. “Naturally, I knew it was me.” His song ‘Sweet Scarlett’ from his 1972 LP Catch Bull At Four was his response. 

CAT ON THE ROAD TO FINDOUT: THE OFFICIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Yusuf/Cat Stevens – Part 1

Just Backdated is off on his holidays, taking with him Cat/Yusuf’s autobiography which will be read by the pool alongside the house of friends who live in Valbonne, about 20 miles north east of Nice on the French Riviera. The book is of special significance to me because of my on-off relationship with the man I first knew as Steve in 1970 and – by way of a preface to my review of his book – here’s a bit of background.

The new-look Cat Stevens landed in the charts at number 21 with ‘Lady D’Arbanville’ in June of 1970 – the same month I joined Melody Maker. It was MM’s custom to publish stories on newcomers to the charts but Stevens, or Steve as he was known to his friends, was no newcomer. He might as well have been, however, since his new image was far removed from the foppish, velvet-suited Cat Stevens who’d graced the charts three years earlier with ‘I Love My Dog’ and ‘Matthew And Son’. 

        For this reason, instead of an interview he was invited to be the subject of MM’s Blind Date feature, during which musicians were played records ‘blind’ and invited to identify the artist and comment on their music. This was conducted by me in our offices and, meeting him for the first time, we got on pretty well. “He took a keen interest in the records played,” I reported, and among them were singles by Diana Ross & The Supremes (‘Love Child’ – “I don’t really like their sparkling dresses but they’re one of the greatest”) and The Moody Blues (‘Melancholy Man’ – “That’s a nice song. Their covers always look like cheap encyclopaedia covers”). 

        The following month I saw Steve performing for the first time at the NJF Festival at Plumpton Racecourse in East Sussex. Accompanied by his guitar playing sidekick Alun Davies, he “looked confident with a black pre-war Gibson that Sotheby’s might be interested in,” I wrote in the following week’s MM. “His quiet, pleasant and pretty songs drifted into the warm air with superb clarity, building up to ‘Lady D’Arbanville’, the song which, he said, had made him a pop star again.”

        In December that same year I interviewed Steve in the Red Lion pub behind MM’s office where he ordered a large vodka and told me he was concentrating on LPs now after recovering from the TB that took him out of the limelight for almost two years. “It seems as I am making a comeback but I have never been away,” he told me. Early the following year I was invited to watch Steve’s In Concert TV show being filmed at the BBC HQ in Shepherds Bush and I saw him again a year later at the Drury Lane Theatre in Covent Garden, a prestigious affair at which he was accompanied by a small choir, miniature string ensemble and, for the song ‘Rubylove’, a quartet of Greek musicians playing bouzoukis. My date was a huge fan, clearly besotted with him and rendered speechless when I introduced them at the post gig party. I sensed that women of all ages and backgrounds adored him. 

        Constantly surrounded by the rich and fashionable, Stevens mixed not with the rough and tumble of the rock’n’roll trade but with society friends, introduced to him by his manager Barry Krost, a flamboyantly gay man. He was courted by artists and models, actors and actresses, debutantes, dress designers and fashion photographers. 

        By now I had become a fan and his next two LPs, Tea For The Tillerman and Teaser And The Firecat – both multi-million sellers worldwide – were in constant rotation on my record player. He had become a leading light in the bed-sitter singer/songwriter genre and his name was coupled with a series of high-profile beauties, among them Linda Lewis and Carly Simon. 

        In June of 1973 I conducted a lengthy interview with Stevens at his well-appointed terraced house in Fulham. He was now a big star, of course, and this interview occupied a double-page spread in MM. I saw him only once during my period as MM’s editor in the US, in March of 1976 at Madison Square Garden, and attended a post-gig dinner for him afterwards. He was as friendly as ever and on his arm was another beautiful girl. 

        After I left MM in the spring of 1977 I lost touch with most of the rock stars I reviewed or interviewed, Steve among them, and when he converted to the Islamic faith and retired from music in 1978 I figured I would never see him again. However, in the autumn of 1982 I was approached by Proteus books to write a book about him. I told them I would do so only if Yusuf Islam – as he was then known – would co-operate in some way, and to this end set about finding him. 

        A helpful chap in a shalwar kameez at the London Central Mosque in Regents Park told me that Yusuf worked out of offices on Curzon Street in Mayfair, running an organisation called The Companions Of The Mosque and a children’s charity that was funded largely by the royalty stream from his back catalogue of music. He gave me the address, which I recognised as being the same as where his one-time manager Barry Krost once had offices. I wrote Yusuf a letter, enclosing my phone number, and hoped for the best.

        Sure enough, within a few days Yusuf called and invited me to meet him there. With his short hair and long beard he looked very different from the man I once knew but he recognised me from old and seemed interested when I told him about the book proposal. Our meeting was interrupted by prayers – he went off into another room to join colleagues while I listened to incantations and twiddled my thumbs – but he consented to help me, within limits, on condition that Proteus donated to the charity he headed. 

Yusuf explained to me that in the Muslim world there is a stipulation that no one must be seen to rise above anyone else lest this be interpreted as an attempt to challenge Allah, or God, and the publication of a biography might contravene this proviso. Nevertheless, although he declined to be interviewed, he agreed to read what I wrote, and correct any errors, and was as a good as his word, reading my manuscript and changing the text here and there. I knew he was something of a ladies’ man in the past but thought it best not to go into this, nor that he enjoyed a life of carefree indulgence in those days. I think he respected this discretion on my part. Our relations were friendly. 

        After a couple of these meetings I persuaded him to talk to me a bit about his life after he left music, his day-to-day routine as a Muslim, which he did, in part because he wanted to dismiss the popular notion that he was an eccentric recluse. He was also frustrated at having become a sort of unelected ‘spokesman’ for Muslims, this because whenever there was a news story about Muslims he was the one the media turned to for a comment, for no better reason than they knew of no one else to approach beside this ’former pop star’. 

        “There’s no equivalent of the Pope, Archbishop of Canterbury or Chief Rabbi in Islam,” he pointed out to me. “Everyone is equal.” Often, the stories were negative which meant he was forced to defend Islam, and he didn’t feel comfortable having to do this, time and time again. I sympathised with him.

        When it came out, the book, simply titled, Cat Stevens, was only about 26,000 words but for years afterwards was the only source of biographical information about him, and after its publishers went out of business it became rare and quite valuable. I once saw it advertised for over £1,000 on Amazon but it is no longer available, though last week one was on sale on eBay for £200. 

        By the mid-nineties the rights to books published by Proteus had been acquired by Music Sales, the sheet music publisher that also owned Omnibus Press, of which was now senior editor. Music Sales had acquired the rights to publish Cat Stevens’ songs as sheet music and when he turned up at our offices in Frith Street for a meeting about this he seemed delighted to see me again. I suggested we put my book back into print and when he asked if I had a copy to spare I gave him one of two that I owned which he never returned. Now I have only one. 

        After a bit of umming and erring, Yusuf decided he didn’t want it in print again, nor to take up my alternative suggestion to allow me to write a new book with his co-operation. Always gracious, he explained to me that he felt more comfortable out of the spotlight and iterated how unhappy he was at the way he’d been portrayed in the media over the years. The media continued to turn to him as a spokesman on Islamic matters, purely because he’d once been a pop star and was therefore the most prominent Muslim in the UK, at least to non-Muslims. It was not a role he wanted and one he wanted to shake off. A biography, he reasoned, would make this more difficult.

         I tended to agree with him, so no new biography appeared, though I had no doubt that the rather peculiar circumstances of his life and the many issues surrounding Muslims in the UK would make for a commercially successful book. Since his life outside music is largely an unknown quantity yet would need to be covered in some detail, no such book could be written without his co-operation. I never met with him again but by a strange coincidence I found myself often in the company of Alun Davies, his former accompanist, because Alun and his daughter Becky often performed – as Good Men In The Jungle – at The Compasses, the pub in my Surrey village. Alun, who was still in regular touch with Yusuf, kept me informed of what he was up to, and I asked him to put in a good word for me should Yusuf ever decide to write an autobiography and needed an editor. It never happened but Alun did mention to me that from time to time he continued to appear alongside Yusuf at isolated concert appearances. 

        In 2014 I was approached by Yusuf’s older brother David Gordon who planned to write a book about Yusuf. We met at our offices along with a woman who would ghost-write the book for him, and even went as far as to include David’s book on a schedule of forthcoming Omnibus books for 2016, the year I retired. David’s book never happened but along the way I told him that what I really wanted was for Yusuf to write his own book which Omnibus would gladly publish. This book didn’t happen either, well not for Omnibus. 

More recently, by which I mean during the past decade, Yusuf’s once strict devotion to Islam seems to have moderated. He’s released lots of new music, performed on stage with his guitar many times, including a Glastonbury appearance in 2023, and even accepted induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Many of his old LPs have been remastered and reissued, and I was even commissioned by Universal to write sleeve notes for the first two issued by Decca from Stevens’ early pop-star period. What I wrote can be fond elsewhere on Just Backdated. 

        Now along comes the autobiography – at last – all 550 pages of it, which is on the bulky side for a holiday read but, as you can imagine, I’m looking forward to reading Yusuf’s take on his extraordinary life. 

        I’ll review it next week.