\n<\/p>\n
W<\/span>hen Cat Stevens changed his name to Yusuf Islam and announced his conversion to\u00a0the Muslim faith and retirement from music in the late 70s, Bob Dylan apparently remarked that he had \u201cfinally stopped trying to be the prophet and begun to follow The Prophet\u201d. It\u2019s a quote that Islam reproduces in his autobiography, viewing it as a benediction, but it also tells you something about the music that made him globally famous.<\/p>\n In the early 70s, the charts were awash with sensitive folky singer-songwriters. Their constituency, as Islam perceptively notes, was \u201cthe college generation, away from home, lonely and trying to find their place in\u00a0the university of high academic expectations\u201d. But none were as obsessed with spirituality as Cat Stevens, with his album titles that namechecked Buddha or referenced Zen poems, his conceptual song cycles\u00a0based on numerology, his lyrical exhortations to \u201ckick out the devil\u201d and \u201cget to heaven, get a guide\u201d, and Morning Has Broken, the hymn he\u00a0made a 1972 US No 1. If you\u2019d had to\u00a0place bets on which 70s\u00a0superstar would pack it all in for religion, you\u2019d\u00a0have got far lower odds on Cat\u00a0Stevens than, say, Noddy Holder.<\/p>\n Indeed, reading his autobiography, his retreat from pop stardom seems less surprising than the fact he stuck it out for as long as he did. Living above his parents\u2019 Shaftesbury Avenue cafe, he enjoyed a \u201cstreet-loose\u201d childhood: the early chapters depict a London baffling to the modern reader, in that ordinary people could actually afford to live in W1. Equally surprising is Islam\u2019s love of his primary school. When a 1950s nun-run Catholic school appears in an autobiography, it\u2019s almost invariably a source of unending misery, but no; he\u2019s enraptured by the mysticism of mass, and haunted by the suggestion that angels start taking note of your misdeeds when you turn eight.<\/p>\n There are plenty of misdeeds to note: by his early teens, he\u2019s attempting to balance school with life\u00a0as a pill-popping mod. Galvanised by Dylan, he\u00a0becomes a folkie and starts writing songs. He spends less than a year trying to attract interest, before scoring both a record deal and\u00a0an immediate hit with his 1966 debut single, I Love My Dog. Its follow-up, Matthew and Son, reaches\u00a0No 2 in the\u00a0UK. It\u2019s a meteoric rise \u2013 he\u2019s still only 19 \u2013 and Islam seems to have hated every minute. Live shows are \u201cdegrading\u201d and \u201cintolerable\u201d, having his photo taken is \u201cas close to hell as I ever want to get\u201d, interviews are akin to being \u201cplaced in the stocks\u201d, appearing on television is more like \u201cthe gallows\u201d, and his mohair suit is too itchy (\u201ca horror\u201d). Within months, he\u2019s calculating how much money he\u2019ll need to make in order to retire.<\/p>\n Buddhism, the Bible, meditation, the I- Ching: you couldn\u2019t accuse him of not shopping around before settling on Islam<\/p>\n A brush with tuberculosis and a stay in hospital prompts a rethink: out with the heavily orchestrated pop singles, in with guitars and soul-searching lyrics. In remarkably short order, he\u2019s more successful than ever: 1970\u2019s Tea for the Tillerman and 1971\u2019s Teaser and the Firecat each sell nearly 4m copies worldwide. Their sleeves featured children\u2019s book illustrations suggesting a certain faux naivety \u2013 so, for that matter, does each chapter in his autobiography \u2013 but the lyrical soul-searching isn\u2019t a posture. As the 70s progress, he tries Buddhism, the Bible, meditation, the I Ching: you couldn\u2019t accuse him of not shopping around before settling on Islam, spurred by a near-death experience in the ocean off Malibu.<\/p>\n Booze and drugs are abandoned, his girlfriends (tellingly plural: for a man who didn\u2019t care for stardom, Islam certainly enjoyed its spoils) are ditched in favour of a traditional Muslim marriage. Giving up music seems to have been less of a wrench than you might expect. His songwriting had \u201creached a cul-de-sac\u201d: with his royalties to live off, he genuinely seems happier doing charity work.<\/p>\n Given his aversion to interviews, he\u2019s an unlikely choice as a spokesperson, but he can\u2019t escape his old celebrity. The media are either baffled or hostile, particularly after 9\/11, when his high profile lands him on a no-fly list (\u201ca real success story in the war on terror,\u201d quips US chatshow host Jon Stewart, \u201cwe finally got the guy that wrote Peace Train\u201d). Occasionally, he doesn\u2019t help himself: it probably wasn\u2019t the smartest idea to make what he insists were jokes about the Salman Rushdie fatwa on national TV (he also alleges canny editing on the programme-makers\u2019 part).<\/p>\n Still, he claims that the ensuing furore led him to investigate Islamic jurisprudence further, which in turn led him back to music: cue comeback albums, tours, Glastonbury, even a return to the name Cat Stevens. He seems happy, ending his story with a poem that opens \u201cwhen I was a little foetus\u201d. Whatever you make of that, it reads remarkably like one of the more wide-eyed lyrics from his heyday. Yusuf Islam has been on quite a journey, but some things never change.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/span><\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n <\/em>Cat: On the Road to Findout by Yusuf\/Cat Stevens is published by Constable (\u00a325). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Cat Stevens changed his name to Yusuf Islam and announced his conversion to\u00a0the Muslim faith and retirement from music in the late 70s, Bob Dylan apparently remarked that he had \u201cfinally stopped trying to be the prophet and begun to follow The Prophet\u201d. It\u2019s a quote that Islam reproduces in his autobiography, viewing it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[14770,5011,1554,7505,3964,14767,3359,1085,1377,14769,14768],"class_list":{"0":"post-24284","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-autobiography","9":"tag-cat","10":"tag-charity","11":"tag-faith","12":"tag-fame","13":"tag-findout","14":"tag-memoir","15":"tag-review","16":"tag-road","17":"tag-stevens","18":"tag-yusufcat"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}