It has been almost 30 years since Yusuf Islam became a Muslim, changed his name from Cat Stevens and announced that his career as a rock star was incompatible with his new religious beliefs. “My imam at the Central Mosque said there was no problem with making music,” Islam tells me. “In fact, he encouraged me — he said if the songs are moral, not offensive, then go ahead.” Yusuf Islam has a pronounced cockney accent, which shouldn’t be surprising given that he was born and raised in Soho, the son of a Greek Cypriot restaurateur, but somehow it is. “Then I heard another kind of voice saying this is a dangerous business, you should be away from it, all the associations that go along with that way of life, you should get away from. I just decided to take the safest position and get out.” Instead, Islam entered into what he says was erroneously described as an arranged marriage — “I simply had two girls that I was, in a way, interested in marrying. I invited them home separately and asked my mother which one she thought I should marry and, by God, she was perfectly right.” He started a family, devoted his time to charity work, the founding of three Muslim schools and, less successfully, an Islamic hotel that foundered due to the decision to open it in Willesden, an area of London hardly renowned for its massive infl ux of tourists, Muslim or otherwise. “Location, location, location,” he sighs. Meanwhile, he found his position on music slowly shifting: “Of course, being in some way a kind of icon of a generation, where music played a fundamental part in growing up and development — turning away from that the way I did was a little bit harsh. As you age, and as you gain wisdom in life, you realize where you made mistakes.” He hadn’t touched a guitar for “a couple of decades” when he discovered that his son had brought one into the house and was writing songs on it. “I was a bit shocked, but what could I do? I wasn’t convinced that it was wrong, but it was how it was going to be used.” The discovery precipitated a gradual return to the music business. First there were a string of religious releases called things like A Is For Allah, and a handful of live appearances. Occasionally, for a good cause, he could be prevailed upon to belt out an a cappella rendition of his 1971 US top 10 hit Peace Train. Two years ago, there was a charity duet, alas with Ronan Keating, on a version of another old hit, Father And Son.
Now there is a new “secular” album, An Other Cup. Give or take the occasional eastern infl uence, it sounds almost exactly like the multiplatinum-selling Cat Stevens of the early 70s: Easy-listening acoustic singer-songwriter material with a ponderous lyrical bent. Given that James Blunt and Katie Melua, both ponderous easy-listening singersongwriters, are currently doing enormously good business, Islam’s new album could be seen as a determined return to the mainstream. It was recorded with Rick Nowels, one of those dizzyingly successful songwriter/producers-for-hire, whose CV encompasses everyone from Charlotte Church to Rod Stewart and Craig David.
The news of its release has not, Islam admits, been greeted with untrammeled delight in every section of the Muslim community: “It’s creating heat — there are people pointing fi ngers at me, saying you shouldn’t be doing this, but quite honestly they are not having an effect on anybody, and I’d much prefer to think that what I’m doing now with my little guitar is helping to make things better in the world.” In any case, his record company clearly has high expectations: The co-president of Polydor has predicted it will be “one of the biggest musical highlights of the year.” Nevertheless, the atmosphere around the table in Home House, a private members’ club at Marble Arch, is slightly strained. He’s stylishly dressed in a brown corduroy suit, rather than the kufi and Arab robes in which he’s occasionally been photographed when commenting on Islamophobia or intervening in an attempt to save the life of a British hostage in Iraq or getting refused entry to Israel, but still cuts an unlikely fi gure in Home House’s opulent environs. It is the popular choice of venue for rock royalty with an album to promote — Depeche Mode conduct their interviews here, Madonna once used it as her British base of operations — but what Islam has been most famous for lately is not making or promoting albums.
He is scrupulously polite, but clearly uncomfortable. “Right now,” he says, offering a pained smile, “I sing better than I talk, and probably this interview will prove it.” He seems a bit nonplussed that I’ve read a long article he published on his website, which quotes the Qur’an in defense of his decision to return to music: “This was for Muslims’ consumption, mostly.” He picks his words with the tentative delicacy of someone using chopsticks for the fi rst time, particularly when the conversation veers toward politics.
In recent years, he has made regular appearances in the news, both in his own right — expressing his “heartfelt horror” at the 9/11 attacks, writing a witty comment piece for the Guardian about US authorities’ refusal to let him into the country in 2004 — and as a spokesman for organizations such as the Forum Against Islamophobia And Racism. But he claims all that happened largely by accident. “I became in some senses a little bit of a mascot,” he says. “People would use me and utilize me as a member of their board on this or that organization in order to attract funds and credibility. I didn’t realize all that was happening at the time. Then sometimes there would be an occasion when there would be news and I was asked to comment, and really I wasn’t equipped for that: I was being pushed to respond, and because I wasn’t singing, there was nothing else I could do.” Today, questions about current events are fi rst met with evasion — for someone who doesn’t want to talk about politics, he’d make a surprisingly good politician — then stonewalling: “I don’t think we’re going to go into that; I’d prefer much more we stick to the music,” he says, politely but fi rmly slamming the door.
There is no mistaking his air of suspicion. He vaguely hints at a media conspiracy against Muslims — “I can’t help but think that somewhere along the line there’s somebody who has a position, and perhaps something to guard and protect, that stops people from knowing about Islam.” When I produce my Dictaphone, he reaches into his bag and pulls out a virtually identical model, with which he tapes the interview.
This was his wife’s idea, he says, a means of combating his wariness of the press. “I had a few occasions when I had a brush with the press and it was very harsh, very hostile to my conversion.” In the past, he has blamed “journalistic malice” for stirring up controversy over his alleged support of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, and he successfully sued the Sun and the Sunday Times for libel after they suggested he had funded Hamas. Today he seems particularly aggrieved about the aftermath of a 1979 Unicef concert at which Abba and the Bee Gees performed and where he accepted an award for his charity work: “So, my moment came, they announced my name, everybody applauded, rapturous applause. At home, two weeks later, I’m watching the television with my mum.
I said, ‘Here it comes, Mum, here ... just ... Where is it?’ It was gone. Edited out. Well,” he frowns, “what kind of fair journalism is that?” In fact, looking through his old interviews, you get the impression that the singer was both cutting an unusual fi gure and displaying an antipathy to the press long before Islam entered the picture. In his earliest incarnation, he made for a slightly peculiar pop heart-throb: His fi rst hit, I Love My Dog, unfavorably compared his feelings for his amorata with his affection for a dachshund, pretty weird even in the anything-goes musical climate of 1966. His career as a teen idol was brought to a premature close by a combination of bad management — one story has them trying to force him to go into panto as Buttons — and a lifestyle that included palling around with Jimi Hendrix.
“I was drinking too much and just wasting myself away and I contracted tuberculosis,” he says. “Suddenly I’ve got this medieval disease. I had to extract myself from the limelight. I was stuck in the hospital in Surrey, just contemplating my life and where I wanted to go. It was a time to begin meditating. I was looking for that center of existence that would make everything clear.”
He re-emerged an acoustic troubadour with a lyrical tendency toward mysticism and spirituality, and succeeded on such a scale that it obliterated his brief period as a teen idol.
Indeed, it’s easy to forget just how big Cat Stevens was, partly because he detached himself from music so completely after his conversion, and partly because his oeuvre has never undergone the critical re-evaluation afforded less commercially successful peers such as Nick Drake or John Martyn. He sold 50m albums. Tea For The Tillerman — home to Father And Son, Wild World and a title track that currently provides the theme tune to Ricky Gervais’ Extras — spent 79 weeks on the US chart in 1970. His music was an inescapable presence even in primary schools, where no assembly was complete without one of the trendier teachers strapping on a guitar and favoring the audience with a rendition of Morning Has Broken, the 1931 hymn Stevens popularized on his album Teaser And The Firecat.
Even at the height of his success, however, journalists invariably found him heavy going in person. He complained of being “misinterpreted,” but it’s hard not to feel that most interviewers just didn’t have a clue what he was going on about in his opaque pronouncements about everything from Maoism to UFOs. At one juncture, he claimed to have been abducted by aliens, an experience alleged to have inspired a song called Freezing Steel. Some writers’ interpretations were more imaginative than others. A Melody Maker reporter came to the conclusion that he was “something of a lay guru, whose passive introspection and self-examination might develop into the cure-all of love which would outface the baddies and save the world,” which is certainly one way of describing a rather confused-sounding pop star.
He eventually gave up interviews altogether and moved to Brazil for what was widely reported as a period of austere seclusion and meditation. “People called it a seclusion and I suppose it was,” he frowns, before going on to describe what sounds like a very 70s rock-superstar notion of monastic asceticism. “I had a flat and a whole host of friends, a kind of Brazilian clique, film stars and models. Everybody had their pads on mountainsides, apartments with water flowing underneath them, an amazing lifestyle.” He pauses for a moment. “At the same time, there was this incredible poverty in between. In Rio, you’ve got these shantytowns, and if there’s a heavy rain, people lose their homes. So my conscience couldn’t bear that either.”
Reading his interviews during that time, he never seems as happy as you might expect of someone enjoying vast success, unimaginable wealth and the company of a host of Brazilian models. The path to his conversion famously began with getting into difficulties while swimming off the coast of Malibu — Islam prayed to God and was swept back to shore.
His faith was sealed when his brother gave him an English translation of the Qur’an in 1976, but it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that he might have given up music even if spiritual enlightenment had not intervened.
By the end of the 70s, the public’s affection for sensitive singer-songwriters had begun to wane. His albums were still selling, but not in the kind of quantities they had earlier in the decade. The Greek leg of his final world tour, which he felt sure would be a triumphant homecoming, was a disaster — “The same time they booked me into this big hall in Athens there was a football match and the exams were on, hardly anybody bought tickets, so I said, ‘I’m not doing this in my great Greek moment of glory! It’s the end!’ and walked off.” The experience compounded an aversion to performing live.
“I don’t like applause, I must admit,” he says. “Ultimately artists are shy creatures, they’re introverts. To get up on stage and do this ... that’s why I still fi nd it so diffi cult. The private little world that I create with my music is something that most people like to listen to alone and get into. The big mass concert experience was the thing I think that also made me want to leave the business.”
This all rather makes you wonder why he has chosen to come back to it. He concedes it’s hard to divorce his return to secular music from current events. “Maybe some people may have thought or imagined that Islam drains all creativity. In fact, when you look at history, you discover that the golden age of Spain is what actually produced what we call the guitar.
Sciences, medicines, even the fact that we drink coffee today on every corner is a result of this fantastic kind of moment of civilization in the Muslim world, where art and life was one, and entertainment was part of that. For me, to sing again means to reaffi rm the creativity of Islamic thought, of what it can do to a person and how it can express itself. If a person thought, ‘Well, he wrote great songs as a non-Muslim, but he can’t write them as a Muslim’, here’s the proof otherwise.”
He pulls out a deluxe edition of the CD and points to a picture of himself drinking coffee underneath a poster that reads THE RETURN OF ZIRYAB. “Have you read about this guy, Ziryab?” he asks. “It’s an incredibly interesting story. He was a musician, astronomer, fashion designer and gastronome, he was one of the architects of Andalusian culture.” For the fi rst time in the afternoon, he sounds neither wary nor evasive but genuinely enthusiastic. “He brought all sorts of culture to Spain and thus through to Europe,” he continues.
Muslims don’t know about this, it’s become so stark. I think we’ve got to push the premise that culture is something to be shared by everybody. It’s not a divisive issue. Whenever anything is good, a lot of people fl ock to it and want it, and that’s why I’m singing songs again.”
