Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, was blooded in Swinging Sixties London but found his voice as a 1970s soft-rock staple. Like Donovan, he trod the hippie trail in search of self-discovery; like James Taylor, he was a strikingly handsome purveyor of AOR standards, tunes such as Matthew & Son, Wild World, Peace Train, Moonshadow, and Father and Son.
For my money, his finest three minutes is The First Cut Is the Deepest, a baroque-pop masterpiece covered to fine effect by Rod Stewart and, later, Sheryl Crow.
He was born Steven Demetre Georgiou, a West End boy, son of a Greek Orthodox Cypriot father and Swedish Baptist mother, and came of age enthralled by the stage-school musical tradition, R&B and psychedelia, by Westside Story, The Beatles and Dylan.
Soon enough Cat scored a record deal and a couple of hits, toured with Hendrix, had a fling with Carly Simon and collaborated with Hal Ashby on Harold & Maude, the cult classic from 1971. All rich material, but it’s poorly utilised here: the subject’s prose can’t make his experiences live, his sentences riddled with adverbs – thankfully, proudly, luckily, sadly, regretfully – exclamation marks and the passive voice. Even the book’s title is garbled: can there be such a thing as an unofficial autobiography?
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The most interesting parts of the story are when Cat’s career goes offroad. Early on, at the age of 19, he runs out of hits and is deemed a washout. He coughs up blood; doctors diagnose TB. Weary of the business and suspicious of the press, he remakes himself as a world traveller and a spiritual seeker, reading Rumi, investigating numerology, writing illustrated children’s stories, travelling from Brazil to Australia to Japan.
Then, in 1975, when his brother takes an interest in the Koran, Cat senses an escape from the pop industry’s venality. He visits the Holy Land and begins attending a mosque. On July 4th, 1978, he changes his name, asks his mum to dispense with the liquor in the house, throws out his old drawings, gives away his instruments, marries and becomes a father and human-rights activist.
The most committed writing in Cat on the Road to Findout by Yusuf/ Cat Stevens describes the inner conflict of a young man who has converted to Islam against the backdrop of the Iranian revolution and East-West proxy wars in Afghanistan. Its second act is a travelogue of humanitarian and philanthropic missions, interrupted by controversy over Ayatollah Khomeini’s issuing of a fatwah condemning Salman Rushdie to death over The Satanic Verses.
Yusuf personally writes to Viking, petitioning for the withdrawal of the book. He finds himself caught between secular free-speech advocates and protesters calling for death to blasphemers. At a public talk at Kingston Polytechnic, in London, he’s questioned by an undercover tabloid journalist, and later claims his remarks have been twisted into an appearance of support for the killing of Rushdie.
The prose here is clear and direct, as if Yusuf the writer believes the frivolity of his pop years deserved the least of his literary attentions. His subsequent accounts of peacekeeping sorties during the unrest of the Gulf War era and in Bosnia-Herzegovina are equally satisfying; his account of anti-Muslim racial profiling in the wake of 9/11 even more so. In time, arriving into the certainty of his beliefs, he comes to a rapprochement with music itself and returns to the studio and the stage.
Cat on the Road to Findout is an extraordinary journey, but it might have been better served by the ministrations of a ghostwriter, or a professional biographer. As it is, and contrary to most rock memoirs, this would have been a better book if it had begun at the end of the subject’s musical career.
Peter Murphy is the author of the novels John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River (Faber & Faber). His latest release is the album and prose-poem Ghost Voltage (published by Drunk Jack Press)
