As Cat Stevens, the young man born Stephen Georgiou to a Greek-Cypriot restaurateur in the heart of London’s entertainment district, was one of the most successful singer-songwriters of his generation. Establishing his name with two Top 10 hit singles in 1967, Matthew And Son and I’m Gonna Get Me A Gun, Stevens went on to enjoy a string of million-selling albums during the ‘70s. As Yusuf Islam, the name he adopted in December 1977 after converting to the Islamic faith, he has spent much of the following three decades as a pious family man, a philanthropist and, increasingly, a spokesman whose views inevitably make international headlines.
A return to the pop mainstream seemed unlikely, until one day, two years ago, when Yusuf’s guitar-playing son left his instrument on a couch at the family home. ‘One morning, after everybody had prayed and gone back to sleep,’ Islam remembers, ‘I picked it up and found I still remembered the chords. Then I started to sing along to some of the tunes and the words that I’d been writing and said, “hey! I think I have a job to do.’”
The result of that casual encounter is An Other Cup, a smart, well crafted 12-song set that plugs instantly into Stevens’ best-selling work from the ‘70s. It’s all there: the mellow voice, the introspection, the tea-and-cake intimacy, and the gently compelling melodies.
An Other Cup represents a lot of musical tastes and journeys,’ he says. ‘If I look back I’ve been influenced by a whole range of textures and styles of music: blues, jazz, Greek, Spanish, Gaelic and hymns. There are a lot of different blends of influence in the record and that’s the way I like music. I don’t like to only stick with one kind of style.’
That’s certainly true. The album starts off with the Latin-flavoured Midday, draws from 13th century Sufi mysticism on Heaven, fuses Middle Eastern and Gaelic styles with assistance from Youssou N’Dour on The Beloved, comes over all Ramsay Lewis for a reworking of I Think I See The Light, and brings pizzicato strings to the album’s only cover version, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. ‘That [song] has obvious connotations for my position these days,’ he explains.
Above all there is that voice, more comforting even than before and, of course, instantly recognisable. ‘I like the fact that if people hear my voice they feel as if they know me, and they can connect with me and I think that’s a gift,’ he says. ‘My voice is my trademark. It’s me, and it’s the closest thing you can ever get to, I suppose, the vibration of the heart and the whole human being.’
The young, frilly-shirted, mid-’60s soloist whose songwriting prowess gave him a head start over aspiring contemporaries such as Marc Bolan and David Bowie, gave little hint of the path he’d later tread. Memorable as they were, his earliest hits – not forgetting The Tremeloes’ success with his utterly infectious Here Comes My Baby – ought rightly to be regarded as something akin to pre-history.
Islam rarely discusses this period of his work. The first stirrings of the adult, more spiritually aware Cat Stevens came in 1968 after the singer contracted a life-threatening bout of tuberculosis.
It signalled the start of a search that for the next decade co-existed alongside his career, which he had resumed in 1970. Greenfields, Golden Sands, the penultimate song on the new album, dates from this time. Written at the outset of his two-year convalescence, it had dropped from sight by the time of 1970s Mona Bone Jakon. It was the song that lit the spark for the new album.
'my voice is my trademark. It's the closest thing to the vibration of my heart'
‘When I wrote that, it was like a dream,’ Islam says, ‘like any dream of this world - trying to find a better place, a place where you can always be happy.’ He is especially pleased that one line, ‘And I’m not the only one who’s dreaming’, was echoed three years later in John Lennon’s Imagine. ‘I thought that was incredible, because my song had never been heard,’ he says, ‘but of course there was a resonance in the universe that somehow we joined in this thought together. That is still lovely to think about.’
Such unforced synchronicities are quietly pleasing – and partly a way of life - to Yusuf Islam, and in many ways, that’s the story of An Other Cup. It certainly explains how he came to team up with producer Rick Nowels, whose previous clients include Madonna, Mel C and Rod Stewart. ‘I never really looked very hard for a producer,’ he insists, ‘but Rick found me. He had obviously been producing a lot of hit records [though] I didn’t know many because I hadn’t really been listening. But I liked the guy and I found him very sensitive to my kind of music. He’s a lover of melody and so am I.’
The pair booked a studio in Wembley, London, and worked together on Greenfields, Golden Sands. ‘It was an experiment to see how it felt to use the piano, to use the whole facility of the studio again,’ he says. ‘It felt really encouraging, and it was evident that my voice was still there. I could see that Rick was excited, and so was the engineer. I was reading that, and saying: “this is quite good.”’
But Yusuf Islam had not yet heard the certainty of a calling. ‘I don’t think we went into the studio again for some time,’ he says, ‘but I had gone and written a few more songs. There was no plan to actually have an album. It was much more sporadic, and whenever I felt I had something, I’d say, “Hey Rick, are you coming to London sometime?” We’d do some more and . . . gradually we realised this thing was being built in front of our eyes that was really quite beautiful. And then,’ he chuckles, ‘I realised I was in the music business again!’
While the singer’s conversion to Islam prompted a dramatic change in the way he conducted his personal life, on record the differences between Cat Stevens and Yusuf Islam are rather less marked. Whereas contemporaries such as James Taylor and Jackson Browne had written from a more domestic perspective, Stevens’ work often reached out beyond the material world. From Wild World and Peace Train to Morning Has Broken, his reputation as a singing mystic with Biblical looks was reinforced in interviews, where he openly discussed his continued search – which took him from Taoism to astrology and many points between.
‘I believe people have to look a little bit deeper into themselves,’ he says. ‘There’s a thing called the conscience. This is something which is extraordinary about the human being because it drives us either to wipe it out or follow it.’ He cites a new song called In the End as ‘a good example of the way I’m trying to turn a mirror towards the listeners, so they start to ask themselves… It’s not making judgements about people. It’s asking people to make judgements themselves - about themselves.’
'you can argue with a philosopher but you can't argue with a good song'
For many years Yusuf Islam found neither space nor need for music in his life. However, his recent reawakening has prompted him to reassess its role in the secular world. ‘Music is one way of coming back to a place of harmony within this universe, which is very large and very frightening sometimes,’ he says’, ‘especially when you meet people who may be not that friendly. I think it’s one of the reasons why I picked up the guitar again, because I found that even within myself it helped me to just find that little space where I could relax. You need that space, and sometimes there’s a song that needs to be sung, and maybe you’ve got to sing it.’
At a time when some fear civilisation is teetering on the brink of another potential, faith-driven catastrophe, Yusuf Islam’s attempt to reconcile the secular with the spiritual will be keenly watched by the prying, perhaps desperate eyes of the world. However, he is optimistic that if he keeps his message pure, then the outcome must surely be a positive one.
‘Music is a universal language,’ he insists, ‘and if it stays out of these dangerous border areas, I think that’s where it can live and breathe, so that everybody can enjoy it and breathe it. That is like the tone I tried to strike with this album. The universal approach to life is one that I think I’d like to share . . . You can argue with a philosopher, but you can’t argue with a good song. And I think I’ve got a few good songs.’
An Other Cup confirms a strong musical line from Yusuf Islam to Cat Stevens. But is he still able to recognise his previous, secular self? ‘There’s not really a split personality,’ he concludes. ‘There is, however, a cultural difference between what I represented as Cat Stevens to what I represent today as Yusuf Islam. That’s true. But it’s me. And all the things I was dreaming about as Cat Stevens, my God, a lot of them have come true as Yusuf Islam.’