#CAT STEVENS SAD LISA CRACKED#
The album cracked the top ten in the United States, helped by the advance single ‘Wild World’. Songs like ‘Father and Son’ and ‘Where Do The Children Play?’ are loved for their universality, meditations on growing up and environmentalism. Stevens isn’t the flashiest or most charismatic singer/songwriter, but he’s very relatable. While that album was a promising career reboot, Tea for the Tillerman is a huge step forward, with Stevens turning in a bunch of his best loved songs. There are moments of excellence on Mona Bone Jakon, but Stevens would refine his skills as a singer-songwriter even further.Ĭat Stevens was back in the studio soon after Mona Bone Jakon was released. Stevens’s gentle voice is much better suited to mellow material like the closing ‘Lillywhite’ than the sardonic ‘Pop Star’. The opener ‘Lady D’Arbanville’ is memorable, like a renaissance madrigal, but uncomfortably overwrought as Stevens equates a failing relationship with a death. ‘Kathmandu’ features Peter Gabriel on flute, while my favourite song is ‘Fill My Eyes’, with the lines “I’m just a coaster but my wheels won’t go”. Oddly, the best material is clustered at the end of the record. Most infamously, ‘Mona Bone Jakon’ is titled around the pet name for Stevens’ penis. Mona Bone Jakon is a grab bag of literary styles – from the melodrama of ‘Lady D’Arbanville’ to the hippie mysticism of ‘Kathmandu’. While Stevens has the musical approach and the team around him that created his best known albums, he’s still figuring out his lyrical approach here. While his early hits resembled the baroque pop of the 1960s Bee Gees, he returned in the 1970s with a simpler sound, centred on the acoustic guitars of Alun Davies and Stevens. Matthew and Son | New Masters | Mona Bone Jakon | Tea for the Tillerman | Harold and Maude | Teaser and the Firecat | Catch Bull at Four | Foreigner | Buddha and the Chocolate Box | Numbers | Izitso | Back to EarthĪfter a bout of tuberculosis and a long convalescence, Cat Stevens returned as a very different artist. I’ve only covered four of his early 1970s albums at this point – let me know if I’m missing anything essential. He returned to music with 2006’s An Other Cup, recorded as Yusuf Islam. Stevens took a long absence from recording music, although he did hit the headlines for declaring a fatwa against author Salman Rushdie an action that prompted 10,000 Maniacs to remove their cover of ‘Peace Train’ from their album In Our Tribe. As the 1970s went on, Cat Stevens’ music became like a spiritual quest, and in 1977 he converted to Islam, leaving the pop music industry after 1978’s Back to Earth. On these albums he was accompanied by Alun Davies on guitar and backing vocals, and produced by Paul Samwell-Smith, formerly of The Yardbirds. Most of Stevens’ best loved work is concentrated on two early 1970s albums – 1970’s Tea for the Tillerman and 1971’s Teaser and the Firecat. Stevens had a particular appeal of lyrical commonsense songs like ‘Father and Son’ and ‘Peace Train’ had a dash of hippie mysticism, but were universally relatable, helped by Stevens’ humble vocals. But a serious bout of tuberculosis led Stevens to became a folk rock singer, performing introspective songs that expressed with the self-reflection he’d undergone during his illness and convalescence.Įven though Stevens was English, his stripped back music fitted in with the American singer-songwriter zeitgeist of the time, and he hit his peak in the early 1970s, at the the same time as James Taylor and Carole King. He started his career as a handsome teen idol in 1967, scoring hits like ‘Matthew and Son’ and ‘The First Cut Is The Deepest’. His birth certificate says Steven Demetre Georgiou and he later went by the name of Yusuf Islam, but he’s best known by his stage name Cat Stevens.
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