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!