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.