One of the advantages of having older sisters in the early seventies when I was just starting to discover music was the inheritance from them of certain classic albums. In retrospect, I admire their generosity, because it’s not everyone who relinquishes large parts of their music collection to younger siblings (I’m not sure I would have, had I had any). Nonetheless, I came to own and appreciate at a young age such seminal records as David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars, the Moody Blues’ In Search of the Lost Chord, and Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin II. Oh, and also three classic albums by the subject of today’s blog, Cat Stevens, namely Mona Bone Jakon, Tea for the Tillerman, and Teaser and the Firecat.
These three albums sprung out of what was an impressively rich period of output from Cat: in order, they had been released in April 1970, November 1970 and October 1971. Not that I knew the order of release back then – I wasn’t yet a geek – they were simply records, but records chock-full of warm, catchy folk-pop, occasionally with a Greek tinge in homage to his part-Hellenic heritage (his father was Cypriot, his mother Swedish, and Cat himself – Steven Georgiou – was born in Marylebone, London).
Songs that resonated: Katmandu from Mona Bone Jakon, a lilting, mystical acoustic song awash with flute from a 19-year-old Peter Gabriel, and a paean to all things simple and peaceful, a metaphoric Eden away from Western civilisation. Years later I would be riding a bus into the real Kathmandu in Nepal with this track playing meaningfully on my Sony Walkman.
From Teaser and the Firecat: Peace Train, and its hopeful, anti-war lyrics (Out on the edge of darkness, There rides a peace train, Oh peace train take this country, Come take me home again). Idealistic, sure, but it certainly struck a chord with me at the time, and if you can’t be idealistic as a young teenager, when can you be (the gimlet eye of experience hadn’t yet been acquired)?
And from Tea for the Tillerman, the beautifully crafted Father and Son, a poignant exchange between a father failing to understand his son’s desire to break away, and the son struggling to articulate the drive he feels to seek his own destiny. I always had travel in my soul, and dreamt of taking off into the wider world, so this spoke to me in volumes, even though I didn’t actually have to deal with any such cultural misalignments with my own dad.
After famously converting to Islam and changing his name to Yusuf Islam in 1978, and dropping out of the spotlight for many years, Cat returned to pop music in 2006 and released an album of new pop songs (for the first time in 28 years), under the name Yusuf. In September 2020, and now under the combinatorial name Yusuf/Cat Stevens, he released Tea for the Tillerman 2, a reboot of the original to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Another great song from that album was Where Do The Children Play? and here is Cat playing a simple acoustic version of it and proving that he’s still got a voice like warm molasses. A shout out to my mate Graham for sending me this and inspiring this week’s blog!
