Monthly Archives: October 2022

Music

Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman (1970)

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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!

Cat Stevens
Film, TV, and Theatre

Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner (1967)

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Although I was too young at the time to watch the original 1967 airing of this British TV series, I guess it must have been re-run in the eighties or perhaps my friend Alec had it on video and shared it with me? Whatever, at some point in the eighties I discovered The Prisoner and, hooked from episode one, I became, with Alec, a big fan. Here was a TV series that was not only entertaining but actually made you think. Nothing was ever what it seemed, no-one had a real name, you never knew who the good guys were and who the bad; it had a unique, surreal vibe, and it incorporated elements of science fiction, allegory, spy fiction and psychological drama.

The show was created while Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein were working on spy drama Danger Man (fun fact: Ian Fleming worked in the development stage of Danger Man, and its protagonist, played by McGoohan, announces himself as “Drake…John Drake”). The exact details of who created which aspects of The Prisoner are disputed though majority opinion credits McGoohan as the sole creator of the series, and it’s certainly true that it was McGoohan who pitched the idea verbally to station boss Lew Grade. One can only imagine the inner workings of Grade’s mind as the concept and plot were laid down for him; however, he went with it and the project was born.

So, what was that plot? An unnamed British intelligence agent is abducted and wakes up in a mysterious coastal location known to its residents as the Village. His captors designate him as Number Six and try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job, something he steadfastly refuses to divulge. His chief antagonist is styled Number Two (and no, we never satisfactorily learn who is Number One), the identity of whom changes with nearly every episode, allowing a roster of well-known sixties’ actors, like Leo McKern, Anton Rodgers and Peter Wyngarde, to play their part.

Most of the residents are prisoners themselves, while others are embedded as spies or guards. The Village is surrounded by mountains on three sides and the sea on the other, and any would-be escapees who make it out to sea are tracked by CCTV and recaptured by Rover, a huge mobile translucent white balloon-thing. Everyone uses numbers for identification, and most of the villagers wear a standard outfit consisting of coloured blazers, multicoloured capes, striped sweaters, and a variety of headwear such as straw boaters. They are generally very polite, though that tends to make you very suspicious of them.

Catchphrases abound, and I remember Alec and I gleefully repeating them ad infinitum: “I’m not a number, I’m a free man!”, “Be seeing you” and the gloriously libertarian “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered!”. The latter phrase I had emblazoned on a t-shirt bought from the gift shop at Portmeirion in North Wales, where The Prisoner was filmed and which I visited on pilgrimage in 1987.

Let’s enjoy the opening credits, enhanced by the excellent soundtrack from Ron Grainer.

Number Six

 

Art

Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch Of The Glen (1851)

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Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) was a London-born painter and sculptor whose artistic talents were recognised early on: at age thirteen he exhibited works at the Royal Academy as an “Honorary Exhibitor” and was elected as an Associate there at the minimum age of twenty four. He was able to paint extremely quickly and perhaps these days would have attracted a cool nickname like snooker players Hurricane Higgins and Whirlwind White (Lightning Landseer, perhaps); he was also reputed to be able to draw simultaneously with both hands. One biographer wrote:

…upon the occasion of a large party assembled one evening at the house of a gentleman in London, the conversation having turned upon the subject of feats of skill with the hand, one of the ladies present remarked that it would be impossible for anyone, however skilful, to draw two things at once.
“Oh, I can do that,” said Landseer quietly; “give me two pencils and I will show you.” The pencils were brought, and Landseer, taking one in each hand, drew simultaneously and unhesitatingly the profile of a stag’s antlered head with one hand, and with the other the perfect outline of the head of a horse.

Certainly, Landseer’s renown stemmed from his paintings of animals, particularly horses, dogs and stags, although his most famous work is undoubtedly the set of four bronze lion sculptures at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Today’s subject is probably his next most famous work, though, being, as it is, the ultimate biscuit tin image of Scotland: The Monarch of the Glen.

The Monarch of the Glen is an oil-on-canvas painting depicting a red deer stag, set against the steamy rugged hills of the Scottish Highlands. It was completed in 1851 as part of a series of three panels intended to hang in the Refreshment Rooms of the House of Lords, although that commission never came off due to some dispute or other and it was sold into private ownership. It also, however, sold widely in reproductions and became one of the most popular paintings of the 19th century. It probably helped that Queen Victoria was a big fan.

The painting was purchased in 1916 by the Pears soap company and this kicked off the Monarch’s career in advertising. It was sold on to John Dewar & Sons distillery and became their trademark before similarly being used by Glenfiddich on their whisky bottles. A derivative of the Monarch graced the shelves of Harrods and Fortnum & Mason via the cans of Baxter’s Royal Game Soup, and of course, as implied, it adorned many a tin of shortbread biscuits. In 2017, the painting was finally sold by its last owner Diageo to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where it can now be viewed by the public in all its majesty.

The stag has twelve points on his antlers, which in deer terminology makes him a “royal stag” not a “monarch stag”, for which sixteen points are needed, but let’s not quibble; he’s a magnificent beast.

The Monarch of the Glen