So, this is the new abnormal. I’m sitting at home in Oxfordshire talking to a man called Yusuf in Dubai on a conference call on the evening after his 72nd birthday. I wish him belated happy returns. “Too nice! Bye bye!” he laughs. How did he celebrate? “With the grandkids and we had two cakes. One’s a special occasion Swedish celebration cake, recipe handed down from my mother Ingrid. The other is a lovely strawberry cake baked by my wife, Fauzia Ali Mubarak.”When he was known as Cat Stevens, he adored receiving presents. So much so that, when he bought himself a house in Fulham, he had more gift-wrapped goodies than furniture, many of them purchased by himself. “That was the old days,” he says. “I hardly buy anything nowadays. I’ve got everything I need, which is good. A better place to be.” So, nothing, then. “Actually, I did get a new pair of sandals.”To paraphrase one of his latter-day hits, does he still remember the days of the old school yard? Yusuf was born Steven Demetre Georgiou in the Middlesex Hospital, Fitzrovia in July 1948 and brought up in the flat above his Greek Cypriot father’s restaurant Moulin Rouge, situated at the confluence of High Holborn, New Oxford Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, where West Central One becomes WC2. It’s the heart of London’s theatre district and only a stone’s throw from Denmark Street, or Tin Pan Alley. That was where his father bought him an acoustic guitar for eight quid so the 15-year-old could pretend to be a pop star playing his favourite songs like Little Richard’s Baby Face, the first record he ever bought, then the songs of The Beatles with whom he became infatuated. Buddy Holly, the Everlys, George Gershwin, Sinatra and Nina Simone played in the background, courtesy of his siblings.The Moulin Rouge, run by papa Stavros and mama Ingrid Wickman, was a fabulous café, one I stopped by on occasion en route from my home in Holborn to the clothes shops of Shaftesbury Ave. It was a happy hunting ground situated right in the centre of Swinging London. The ground level caff had an art deco counter and a new-fangled coffee machine. “That counter was an important art piece dad brought back on his travels in New York,” he recalls. “It was like a drug store milk bar fitting with coloured glass and chrome like you get in Ed’s Diner. My parents sold lunchtime café food and there was a downstairs restaurant [Shaftesbury Avenue Restaurant] that did stuff like burgers, fish and chips, and spaghetti bolognese and mixed grills. Mum was in charge of the sandwiches and pastries that she made, fantastic Swedish rock cakes and macaroons. I served at the tables. All of us did: me, my older sister Anita, and my brother David.“In retrospect I did have an unusual upbringing,” he reflects. “I was a cockney kid raised Greek Orthodox and Baptist who then went to St Joseph’s Roman Catholic primary school in Covent Garden, just off Drury Lane. It prepared me to take an observer’s stance on life because I wasn’t quite anything; I was a lot of things. At school I could participate in lessons but I couldn’t attend Catholic Mass. I never knew what that thing they ate tasted like. What was it…?” The Wafer, body of Christ. “Yeah, that’s it.”Somewhat exotic, Steve, as everyone called him, endured the casual teasing of his peers. “I was also a figure of envy to some ’cos I could go home and drink Coca-Cola whenever I wanted,” he says.A young Steve and his chums would sneak into the backstage loading area at the Drury Lane Theatre Royal’s Catherine Street side entrance and play hide-and-seek amid the scenery. “It felt like a vast Aladdin’s Cave. We hid among the props and played games trying to not to get caught but I reckon they knew we were in there.” The cheeky little scamp also ran the streets getting up to mischief. “I used to play some dangerous games,” he recalls. “I’d go up the fire escape of the Prince’s Theatre over the road [where the musical Hair had its London run later] and walk across the rooves.” Above the chimney pots he felt the throb of Alexander Borodin’s musical Kismet coming up beneath his plimsolls and gazed at the stars above. As fate had it, Kismet was partially set in a Baghdad mosque in the time of the Arabian Nights, where an imam prays to beggars hoping to make their pilgrimage to Mecca. “It was very risky. I often nearly fell off, so certain death,” he laughs.When his parents divorced, adoring mother Ingrid took the kids to Sweden for a spell. “I was an outsider again but I developed an interest in art, thanks to my uncle.” Steve wanted to be a cartoonist but would soon concentrate on watercolours. By the time he was old enough to attend Hugh Myddleton Secondary on Sans Walk in Clerkenwell near Old Street, he was well used to flying by the seat of his grey school uniform pants. In a 1972 interview for American magazine Stereo Review he recalled, “I was lucky all the way through school and I’ve always been in a position where people were following me and observing what I was doing. In school I was ‘that artist boy Greek kid’. I was beaten up. But I was noticed.”When Hugh Myd got too lairy, Ingrid whisked him away to the private Hyde Park College. “Most of the kids had rich parents,” he notes. “Fathers who were entrepreneurs. I didn’t. It was quite formal. We learned Latin.” He also teamed up with a couple of other Greek Cypriot mates and ran an extortion racket that “failed within three days when nobody paid up.” Good at English but excelling in art, Steve went to Hammersmith College Of Art in 1965, opposite the BBC’s Lime Grove, where he learned to drink vodka and smoke 40 Woodbines a day, and discovered the joys of the “wacky baccy”. He baked illicit cakes and tried to persuade his mum to sell them. She didn’t, but she did try one. A year or so later he’d be inside those same studios sashaying through the deadpan mod boys and girls on the Top Of The Pops set singing his first Top 10 hit, Matthew And Son, backed by John Paul Jones’ bass, Nicky Hopkins’ harpsichord, lush strings and belting brass.But Cat was cooler than the mods. He sang about a city firm where the work’s never done and the clerks are wage-slaves. He got the title from his tailor Henry Matthews, who dressed him in his glad rags – crushed black velvet suit plus pristine white frilly shirt. More Beau Brummel than Pete Townshend, Stevens was drop-dead gorgeous. He became an instant pin-up and a heartthrob, all smouldering olive skin, brown eyes and Scandinavian cheekbones. Girls fell at his feet, infatuated with an artist christened “Cat” by a friend of Anita’s who told him, “You’ve got eyes like a cat.” Quite the dandy and oozing self-confidence, he landed on his feet in a time when teenage girls’ magazines were insatiable for sexy young men. Happy days.If he played up to his image with his orchestrated baroque pop, Cat was an incredible talent. Consider he was a teenager when he wrote The First Cut Is The Deepest for PP Arnold, Here Comes My Baby for The Tremeloes and Keep It Out Of Sight, a mod classic, for Paul and Barry Ryan, all in 1967. He was barely 18 when he knocked off his debut single, I Love My Dog, written about family pet Pepe, and not much older when he threatened I’m Gonna Get Me A Gun. When Stevens sang, “And all those people who put me down, you better get ready to run,” he didn’t have to wander far back to remember the bullying, cheap racism of his recent youth. Either way, it was just another pop classic knocked off on the baby grand at 245 Shaftesbury Avenue and delivered for his producer Mike Hurst, Dusty’s former partner in The Springfields at Decca/Deram Records, to demo and cut in time for tea. Labelmates and peers David Bowie and Marc Bolan knew all about that.…Gun caused mild controversy when it was played on Juke Box Jury on 25 March 1967. Panellist Jimmy Savile berated Cat for glorifying violence but, since Stevens was that week’s “hidden guest”, the record was buzzed a “hit” by host David Jacobs after Lulu, Jayne Mansfield, Pete Murray and members of the teenage audience overruled Mr Moral. Yusuf later disowned the song, though at the time he appeared onstage to promote it with a prop pistol.Encouraged by management to undergo endless touring, Stevens’ health became cause for concern. Frail at the best of times, his lifestyle – booze, fags and all-night partying – was exacerbated by nervous exhaustion. On the plus side, a residency at Brian Epstein’s Saville Theatre supporting Georgie Fame (the venue a two-minute walk from home) and a 1967, 26-date, two-shows-a-night package tour with The Walker Brothers, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Engelbert Humperdinck had kudos. But meaningless appearances at workingmen’s clubs, where he trotted out his hits by rote, were more soul-destroying. Viewed as a popular entertainer rather than a serious artist, his career seemed beyond his control.“The final break actually came when the agent that Mike [Hurst] had appointed wanted me to go into pantomime over Christmas,” he muses. “When I refused, the agent told me I was making the biggest mistake of my life. I’m pretty sure it was Cinderella and I was being lined up for the role of Buttons.”Hit singles aside, Stevens’ album successes were fitful. Matthew And Son (1967) cashed in on the hit but follow-up New Masters (1967) flopped, as did the bitter, dope-induced 45rpm Kitty. In March ’68 he was diagnosed with pleurisy, a collapsed left lung and tuberculosis, the latter still a killer in Britain, and he ended up in the King Edward VII Sanatorium Hospital, in the Sussex countryside. An extended period of convalescence was broken by a return to performing when he reappeared on the BBC Radio 1 show Pop North in October and started doing interviews again.Recuperating in the hospital’s rolling grounds, Stevens discovered Buddhism thanks to a book he was given by friend Paul Ryan: Paul Brunton’s The Secret Path. He also developed a passion for Bach and began churning out songs, some performed at an LSE Benefit at Chalk Farm Roundhouse in February ’69, where he supported The Who and smelt the electricity.Those sanatorium endeavours supplied the basis of new album Mona Bone Jakon (1970) and a work-in-progress musical he called Revolussia, which included a song called Tea For The Tillerman. Re-energised, he contributed another new number, But I Might Die Tonight, to a German art-house movie called Deep End, starring Jane Asher, that also featured music by Can. With his business head screwed on, he got out of his Deram deal uncontested since he’d signed his contract as a minor (under 21) and was snapped up by Chris Blackwell’s Island Records to record Mona… Island’s transatlantic link to the US label A&M secured him his first proper advance, allowing him to form a group with the Welsh guitarist Alun Davies, who’d become his right-hand man, the producer Paul Samwell-Smith and arranger Del Newman. The die was cast. An on-off relationship with the actress Patti D’Arbanville inspired the hit single Lady D’Arbanville, ushering a change of direction and promising American interest. Stevens provided his own artwork. The title Mona Bone Jakon referred to an intimate part of his anatomy so he drew a picture of a spurting phallic dustbin. The working title for the LP had been “The Dustbin Died The Day The Dustman Cried”; Blackwell told him that was ridiculous. Still, it was a long way from being photographed covered in kittens or playing the teen idol for Fab 208, agreeable as that once may have been.Three months later, Stevens returned to the studio to make what became his landmark album, Tea For The Tillerman, with more striking cover work, this time painted using oils and enamel. The nursery book-styled “Teatime” scene, showing a bucolic Tillerman enjoying a sunny cuppa while toddlers Grady and Timmy played in a tree, indicated Cat was in playful mood even if the music within had dark qualities exemplified by the opening eco-anthem Where Do The Children Play? and another Revolussia hopeful Father And Son, whose measured tempo was in contrast to Matthew And Son. Both songs drew on the artist’s relationship with father Stavros and his family business work ethic.Wild World, notably covered in prototype lovers rock style by the reggae star Jimmy Cliff, was a courtly farewell to 19-year-old Andy Warhol starlet D’Arbanville, soon briefly squired by Mick Jagger. Within the year Stevens enjoyed an intense relationship with Carly Simon after they hooked up at the LA Troubadour, so it wasn’t all bad.Tea For The Tillerman was released in November 1970 to great acclaim and slow-burning sales, until Cat’s version of Wild World crashed American FM radio. Blackwell was ecstatic, insisting,“It’s the best album we’ve ever released.” Stevens was just 22 and a millionaire.He’d been working all day, as he once sang, and the view from the top looked good.It was about to get even better…Yusuf takes RC through the making of what he calls T4TT2 (Tea For The Tillerman²) – a reimagined version of his classic 1970 album.My son Yurios set it in motion when he brought the guitar back into the house. In 2016 we reimagined Matthew And Son and I Love My Dog for their 50th anniversary and he said, “Let’s do that with Tillerman.” It felt exciting to take it to another level.
Where did you record?In La Fabrique in Provence, so we had a great time. Fabulous French cuisine, great weather and the place to ourselves. The studio has atmosphere. It used to be a factory where they dyed the red jackets of Napoleon’s Hussars; round the corner is where Van Gogh painted most of his work. Layers of history.
Different to the original London studios, then…Completely. In 1970, we used Morgan in Willesden, Olympic in Barnes and Island in Basing Street. Morgan was great, very musician-friendly, comfortable with a café, so you could stop a session and grab a bite. It was more like a living room. Olympic had wooden parquet floors. It was less personal and a lot bigger.
Olympic is a rock star’s studio.Yeah, but I found it less intimate. Island was okay but didn’t have much character. The offices were great, though: open plan with Habitat decoration, exposed brick and a community feel. I guess they were all hippies. Portobello Road was round the corner.
Portobello Road was the B-side of your debut single.Kim Fowley wrote that with me. An unusual man. They took him away finally [laughs].
The LP opener is Where Do The Children Play? How did you adapt that?I developed the riff, gave it augmentation, put a third over it musically but it builds to the same fatalistic climax. It has to, because the world is in a critical and dangerous position. The ending talks of science and moral borders: “Will you tell us when to live… when to die?” That’s more pertinent now. Read what Bill Gates is trying to do: population control via science might be incredibly useful but it threatens our humanity.
The new version is reflected in the new cover art you’ve made.On the original you’d see a beautiful sunny scene. I made it much darker. Day becomes night. The Tillerman is wearing a space suit and, who knows, we may all be doing so. Not to go to space but to survive this earth. The kids in the picture are gaming and listening to music on headphones. Very different to 1970.
You’ve changed the tense of Hard Headed Woman…Because I found her when I met my wife. So, it’s a positive now, not a search. Musically I love the bluesy, almost Stax rhythm section. Much closer to R&B.
Wild World is radically different.The new version might damage everyone’s memory of that song [laughs]. It’s monochrome, black and white, with a 1940s European mood. A bit jazz, a bit rag – the working title was Wild World Rag. Perhaps there’s some Kurt Weill in there, too – I loved his work. My image of it was writing a song for a film like Casablanca. There’s a polka mood, too, that came from messing around with a Yamaha clavinola. The buttons on that instrument go round the world. I hit the rag button and the chords worked. It will divide opinion – might make the original sound better! Persevere, please.
Was Sad Lisa a real person?For sure. She was a Swedish au pair for our family when we lived above the café. Maybe she was dreaming about a boyfriend. I wrote that first time on the piano in our living room bought as a present for my sister’s birthday. I was learning guitar and tried to transcribe the chords I knew for piano, though I never had a tutor or any lessons. I thought it had a beautiful, almost classical melody and a French lilt like those melancholy ballads they excel at.
In old money, Side One closes on Miles From Nowhere.We hardened it with more electric guitar from Alun Davies. The riff was inherent but you never heard it this way. It’s much stronger and heavier. Lyrically, it told you where I was at then. I was loving everything, success, money etc, but I was still searching. I always had questions about the finite dimensions of life. Most religions tell you that life isn’t an end in itself. The ancient Greeks had their idea of fate but we take so much for granted now. Like saying “see you tomorrow” – what does that mean? There’s no such thing as tomorrow. That song was important to my discovery.It’s pessimistic…Not at all, more metaphysical, realistic if you want. Humans have the capacity to see beyond the shape of our lives; I don’t think other animals do. If there is a climax to life, you’d best be sure you arrive the right way and don’t damage whatever comes to follow.
But I Might Die Tonight retains the orchestration…Originally that came from arranger Del Neman and violinist John Rostein. This time we developed ideas with AR Rahman and that changed as it went along. There is an element of a dialogue, a touch of Buddhism. Also, something of William Blake’s dark satanic mills updated. The idea being, “I am not just a number, I don’t want to keep on being part of a workplace”.
You must have enjoyed early 60s black-and-white kitchen-sink films like Saturday Night And Sunday Morning…I did. We were on the cusp of the 70s and the concept of the drop-out was important at that time. Pink Floyd pursued that idea: “We don’t need no education.” I don’t want to drop out now.
Longer Boats ties in with the prevalent 60s/70s paranoia of the apocalypse and how to escape it. Think Jefferson Airplane’s Wooden Ships or Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush.Originally it was about an invasion from outer space. Now it could be about immigrants coming to other people’s shores. We’ve given it a spiritual feel with a Brother Ali rap. There’s a James Brown groove, slightly funky. I always loved him.
And we’ve just got time to revisit Father And Son…I think we achieved a unique thing here, because I sing with myself from 50 years ago. The son’s part is taken from a show live at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. I sing the father’s part in my role today, which means the son is now 50 and the father has just been born. Otherwise you can’t really play around with it too much because it’s a perfect composition. It does have a new melodic theme but the discussion is intact.
Is T4TT2 your own favourite work? The original had such an impact…That frightened me a little because it was so popular that I had to move on very quickly to Teaser And The Firecat or I’d have been stuck. It was a classic when it came out and I didn’t see how I could orchestrate a similar off-the-cuff follow-up. It was a moment and it was awesome to me that it affected so many people’s lives, but I didn’t want to constantly refer to it. I wanted to keep developing. It is possibly the best album I made in that time but I couldn’t stand still and say, “Well, that’s it. I’m done now.” My attitude is that the past informs the present and the present must look to the future.
What’s for after Tea?Stevens’ third album in 15 months, Teaser And The Firecat, released in October 1971, was even more successful than Tillerman. Far more. Gold and platinum discs started to arrive at his new Fulham home with the Japanese garden. So did some whopping royalty cheques.Using the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, Firecat had the familiar whimsical cover Stevens might have modelled on 1930s children’s books. He turned the title into such a thing with the same title (published by Scholastic Press). For the rest of the lavish package, David Bailey was hired to shoot those moody snaps.Musically, it was comfortably reassuring, though Stevens told Record Mirror’s Keith Altham in June ’71, “It’s very different from the others. Some people will like it, some won’t. I’ve got this sound people associate with me, and yet I want to move and change. What I want them to see in all my work is clarity. I can’t stand music that’s unclear.” Since he was listening to hero Stevie Wonder’s Where I’m Coming From, that was rich.The advance single, Moonshadow, was destined for Tillerman but considered too strong not to save. Treat them mean… Moonshadow was written after Stevens’ discovery that, in Spain, unlike on London tarmac, he could see his own moon shadow for the first time. It became an instant bedsit folk rock classic, even if Stevens was listening to Sly Stone, John Lennon (“he always seems to come through for me”), Biff Rose and Leo Kottke at the time.Touring America as an artist rather than a hit factory did Stevens a power of good in the early 70s. On a visit managed by Peter and Gordon, he’d played New York’s Fillmore East and Philadelphia with Traffic, the Warehouse in New Orleans in November 1970 (a few days before Jim Morrison’s last ever Doors show) and, to top things off, the legendary Village Gaslight and the LA Troubadour where he could play his best new songs, including the throbbing Peace Train, with its smart reggae backdrop. That song became a worldwide smash the following March. Island/A&M started looking at his contract and promised him the world. Why kill the goose…?Evidently, his way worked. He insisted on recording a version of Eleanor Farjeon’s glorious 1931 secular hymn Morning Has Broken, locating its early English folk vein.“I picked it up from the hymn book one time when I was searching for ideas,” he admits.“It was quite a traditional song sung in the church, and I just did my own arrangement. I fell in love with the melody and the words, and people think it’s mine.”Maybe. But he’d certainly have heard it played over an old gramophone at his primary school, since it and Sergei Prokofiev’s opening theme to Peter And The Wolf were on heavy rotation as classes trooped in for assembly. Pianist Rick Wakeman helped Cat transform the hymn into a piece with four compelling key changes. This was before Wakeman was hired by Bowie to take Life On Mars? to another spiritual dimension. Chinese whispers were rife in the small world of the London studios, especially among former Deram rivals.The best song was undoubtedly the jaw-dropping tearjerker How Can I Tell You. Producer Paul Samwell-Smith summed it up: “My favourite of all Steve’s tracks. Recorded at Morgan Studios, two sweet acoustic guitars, Andy Roberts and Alun Davies, Steve singing as an overdub later. The solo is Andy Roberts playing his guitar/organ – my track list calls it a ‘string organ’ but I since found it’s called a Kriwaczek String Organ, a little like a pedal steel guitar. Steve’s on harpsichord – ever since I produced The Yardbirds’ first hit For Your Love, I wanted to use a harpsichord again somewhere – and Linda Lewis sings the beautiful, improvised female part at the end.”Linda’s erotic soprano moan in the finale ricocheted around London-based musicians; more so since she was romantically linked to Cat at the same time they endured their quasi-operatic liaison. Lewis replicated her hair-raising squawk on Bowie’s Panic In Detroit – aka the Spiders’ finest four minutes and 25 seconds.Stevens was in England when he heard his own favourite cut take shape. Samwell-Smith played him the final cut of Rubylove, laid down in February ’71 at Paramount Studios, Los Angeles with bouzouki aces Andreas Toumazis and Angelos Hatzipavli, and a second verse sung in Greek that must have been recorded for his father Stavros. He was still Steven Demetre Georgiou. But he was also Cat Stevens, superstar. London, Los Angeles, Larnaca.
Tea For The Tillerman² Reimaginedis on UMC.