On his book tour, he refused to go below surface-level for everything from his career to conversion to Islam
An evening of storytelling interspersed with song should suit Yusuf/Cat Stevens. The 77-year-old has certainly had one of the more interesting careers in British pop: an all-time great who moved from making off-kilter 60s tunes to selling more than 60 million albums in his 70s golden phase as a singer-songwriter making beautifully sweet, warm, socially conscious songs; his subsequent conversion to Islam was often misunderstood and controversial, occasioning a 17-year hiatus from music. Since he was reintroduced to a new generation of fans with a stellar legend’s slot at Glastonbury in 2023, he’s ready to tell his truth: this week sees the publication of his memoir, Cat on the Road to Findout, a mighty 568-page tome that forms the basis of his current tour An Evening of Tales, Tunes and Mysteries.
But there wasn’t a great deal of mystery on what proved to be a pleasant evening, rather than an illuminating one – a worthy, if somewhat surface-level, recap of the Yusuf story. He was an amiable easy-going host on what was the definition of a hometown gig – he grew up just yards away from the West End venue – as he walked on to a voiceover that cast his life as a journey to reach a magical place of enlightenment. He proceeded to tell the headlines of that journey sat at a round table with a pot of tea to a backdrop of illustrated videos and unseen photographs.
The first half conversation was a pretty standard summary of his rise to success, followed by his disillusionment with fame. Save telling us he nearly died aged eight climbing the rooftops of Shaftsbury Avenue, there wasn’t a great deal a fan wouldn’t already know; that he survived a dose of TB, giving him a new outlook that fuelled his best work; that the masterful “Father and Son” was originally written for a never made play about the Russian Revolution; that he nearly drowned at sea in Malibu in 1975, saved after he shouted out for the help of God. How he felt about all this is skirted over. A story about taking LSD with Jimi Hendrix is amusing, though the book tells a darker story.
The second half concerned mostly with his discovery of and conversion to Islam, culminating in a smattering of applause when he fully converts. “Some of you might not want to clap that, and that’s ok,” he said awkwardly, before joking “the book will just cost you a bit more.”
There was a lot of minute detail about his road to conversion that even Yusuf seemed to recognise wasn’t the most riveting entertainment – “All this is in the book, you can go home now if you want to,” he says – but disappointingly little detail about how it affected his career. He skirts over his retirement from secular music – he expresses surprise his local mosque told him music wasn’t permitted, but doesn’t say how he felt about it – and talks vaguely about the reaction to his decision in the press and with the wider public. He said after 9/11 his life was “unbearable” but didn’t elaborate (in 2004 he was wrongly arrested for potential terror-related activities by the FBI and denied entry to the US).
He addressed the infamous Salman Rushdie fatwa controversy all too briefly, telling the audience there had been “a contentious fatwa against The Satanic Verses and the author”, which he has long-since denied ever supporting – despite evidence to the contrary. But Yusuf divulged nothing and didn’t even mention Rushdie by name. “That is all in the book so you can read it there” he said. It felt like a cop out.
But the music, though occasionally dispatched in snippets, was invariably wonderful. Yusuf has a magnificent songbook that he chose to perform either on his own or, more often than not, with two musicians on supplementary guitars and keyboards (“the orchestra”). “Moonshadow”, “The First Cut is the Deepest”, “Oh Very Young”; they all sounded majestic. Even lesser known material like “The Little Ones” – his response to the “ethnic cleansing” in 90s Serbia where he gave aid – were beautiful. He made a comparison to what he found in Serbia to what’s going on in “The Holy Land” in Gaza and Israel.
By the end, it actually felt like a proper gig; classics “Peace Train”, “Wild World”, and “If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out” showed the side of Yusuf we all know; the unifying master tunesmith. For everything else, buy the book.
‘Yusuf/Cat Stevens: An Evening of Tales, Tunes and Mysteries’ is touring until 22 September
