Outcast, alienated, and almost literally lost at sea before being outcast again,
here are a few tragic things about Cat Stevens that you may not know.
Born Steven Demetre Georgiou in 1948 to a Greek Cypriot father and Swedish mother,
Cat Stevens was exposed to many cultures and religions at an early age. His parents owned
and lived above a Greek restaurant in London's Soho District. Inspired by big Greek weddings,
Nina Simone, and musicals he overheard across the street, young Stevens soon developed an
aptitude for music. He began learning piano and guitar, inspired by Lead Belly and The Beatles,
He admitted later that it was a lonely life, with his unique heritage isolating him from his peers.
He had dreams of becoming a painter or cartoonist, but he struggled with less creative subjects
and became something of a troublemaker. Telling Stereo Review Magazine in 1972,
"In school, I was 'the artist boy'. I was beat up but I was noticed."
He also never felt particularly masculine, telling Melody Maker Magazine,
"I saw these idols like Spartacus and Kirk Douglas and I thought I'm not of
that. [...] When I was very young, I never really
felt one sex or the other. Gradually I was brainwashed into thinking I was a fella,
but maybe when I write a song or a story about a relationship it has many more areas."
Cat Stevens started performing songs at local bars in the early '60s under the name Steve Adams,
and it wasn't long before he caught the ear of local record producer Mike Hurst,
who signed him to Decca Records. According to a 2002 interview with The Australian Women's Weekly,
Stevens chose the catchier stage name Cat Stevens because a girlfriend once told him he had cat-like
eyes. By 1966, he had scored his first hit with the offbeat love song, "I Love My Dog."
Stevens' original career plan was to write songs for other artists. His 1967
song "The First Cut is the Deepest" became a smash hit for soul singer
P.P. Arnold and countless others over the decades. But with the 1967 release of his
album "Matthew & Son", he became a bona fide pop star by the time he turned 18.
The introverted Stevens was thrown into a hectic world of nonstop interviews,
production, and performance. That year, he embarked on a tour with Jimi Hendrix,
which introduced him to a destructive lifestyle involving smoking, drugs,
and alcohol. In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, he admitted to drinking to ease
extreme stage fright, and later wrote in his 2004 essay "How I Came to Islam",
"They made me larger than life, so I wanted to live larger than
life. And the only way to do that was to be intoxicated."
Cat Stevens' first album, Matthew & Son, saw immense commercial success on Decca
Records under the direction of producer Mike Hurst. Naturally, Hurst was eager
for a similar follow-up, and that's where the trouble began. As Stevens told Voxpop in 1972,
"It's not as easy as that. Because the songs aren't like that. Life isn't like that,
you just don't do the same thing over and over again. [...] It was just a business after a while.
The whole music element, the thing that made me want to create music, was suddenly shoved aside."
Stevens sought a more authentic folk sound, while Hurst pushed for more polished pop
songs with heavy instrumentation. In 2004, Steven recalled to Classic Rock Magazine,
"There were a bunch of musicians in the studio who interpreted your own
music for you. It seemed to me that I had to get more control."
The result of this tension was Stevens' second album, 1967's New Masters, which failed to live
up to the hype of its predecessor. Hurst later admitted to making mistakes, noting
the intense legal battle that ensued, telling renowned music journalist Chris Charlesworth,
"We did the second album with lawyers actually in the studio. It was horrendous."
Hurst explained to Cherry Red Records in 2020 that everything was eventually settled
out of court and Stevens was released from his contract with Decca Records.
In 1968, at the age of 20, Cat Stevens' pop star lifestyle caught up with him.
"Everything that one could do, I think I did it."
After years of overworking himself, smoking and drinking heavily, and enduring a stressful legal
battle with his record label, he fell dangerously ill. He lost an alarming amount of weight and
developed a persistent cough. He finally sought medical advice after he started coughing up blood.
Stevens was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis, which had caused a collapsed lung and severe
pneumonia, and was immediately hospitalized. He spent three months in intensive care,
suffering through painful lung procedures, and around a year
recovering from the life-threatening illness. Stevens told Charlesworth,
"TB ruined my career and put a halt to my dream. I was back on Earth, stuck in
hospital and that was a big lesson. [...] I had a lot of time to reflect. Death was on my mind."
During his long convalescence,
he wrote around 40 songs, which would provide the material for his next three
albums: 1970's Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman, and 1971's Teaser and the Firecat.
In 2021, he told Goldmine Magazine that the despair-laced song "Trouble"
was directly inspired by his struggle with tuberculosis,
its title and lyrics being a play on "TB," the colloquial term for the illness.
Shortly after recovering from tuberculosis, Cat Stevens met American model and actress
Patti D'Arbanville at a party in London. As D'Arbanville recalls in an interview
with famous groupie Pamela Des Barres in her book "Let's Spend the Night Together,"
she found Stevens approachable and became close with him after the two rode a roller
coaster together. They dated for around two years, watching the 1969 moon landing,
and spending time in his red-painted bedroom, which contained only a bed and a piano.
D'Arbanville's career frequently forced her to travel extensively, and eventually,
into the arms of Mick Jagger. Heartbroken, Stevens penned the haunting ballad "Lady
D'Arbanville," in which he professes his love to her corpse. D'Arbanville admitted to Des Barres,
"I cried the first time I heard it. Because that's when I knew it was really over."
Stevens' relationship with D'Arbanville inspired a few other songs as well,
including "Maybe You're Right" and most notably, 1970's sweet and candid
"Wild World," which became a breakout hit for the newly reinvented Stevens.
When he was 25 years old, Cat Stevens put himself in voluntary exile. Having
become a superstar with several successful albums, he began to feel lost and uninspired
in the bustle of fame and excess, and suffered an identity crisis.
"I mean I left music, the music business, in a way, not just music,
because I wanted to get my life fixed. Music is a luxury"
Donating his tax money to children's charities rather than the British Government, he moved
to Brazil and did some soul-searching. He told Melody Maker Magazine in 1975,
"I had a house there and I stayed alone. I couldn't even talk to the lady who
cooked and kept the place clean. I really felt alone and it hurt for a long time."
He also shaved his trademark long curly hair and beard, rendering himself virtually unrecognizable,
and visited politically and socially troubled places like Ethiopia,
Bangladesh, and Kenya, in order to explore his humanity again.
The result was 1973's Foreigner, an even-more-stripped-down departure from
his previous work. The album centered around the theme of being misunderstood, and Stevens
recorded songs with local musicians and produced the entire album himself. He told Melody Maker,
"To be able to write with feelings,
you have to know yourself. Writing has to be an affair with yourself and you
have to be able to live with yourself and get through all your hang-ups. And I did."
In 1976, the same year as his explosive Majikat Earth Tour,
Cat Stevens experienced a pivotal moment in his life. Alone on a beach in Malibu, California,
he decided that the water looked inviting and went for a swim, where he found himself caught
in a dangerous riptide, which was quickly pulling him out to sea. As he told KQED'S Michael Krasny,
"After I was swimming for about half an hour, I couldn't get back to shore. At that point,
quite simply, there was no one to help me. [...] I said, 'Oh God, if you save me,
I'll work for you. And at that moment a wave, however big it was, came from behind me and
pushed me forward and suddenly I had all the energy I needed. [...] It was a miracle."
Shortly after the near-death experience,
Stevens' older brother gifted him a copy of the Qur'an. He told The Independent in 2020,
"It became the gateway. After a year I could not hold myself back. I had to bow down."
In 1977, Cat Stevens surprised the world when he converted to Islam,
and again in 1978 when he changed his name to Yusuf Islam. Stevens chose the
name Yusuf after reading about the Qur'anic prophet Joseph, finding the parable in which
he is sold like a commodity similar to his own experiences in the music industry. But
the biggest shock came in 1979, when he decided to quit making mainstream music.
Though being a musician was not expressly forbidden in Islam,
Stevens was already disenchanted with the music industry, fame,
and the rock star lifestyle, and chose instead to embrace a more conventional existence.
Stevens told Chris Anderson during a TED interview in 2017,
"So, If you had listened to my lyrics, you would have heard that I was on a path
and I was definitely looking."
He continued,
"And if I was sincere at all about what I wrote, it meant that if I found something, I'd have to
grab it. Otherwise, I'd be a hypocrite to myself and to others. And that would be a bad example."
Fully committed to his new faith, Stevens sold all of his guitars and donated the money to charity.
In 1979, Cat Stevens married Fauzia Mubarak Ali – a Pakistan native with a Master's
degree in Literature. Many believed it to be a traditional arranged marriage,
but Stevens set the record straight on his personal website, stating,
"I had two prospective girls I was interested in marrying. [...] I had
no intimate relationship with either before marriage. Therefore, to Western standards,
and my own previous track record, this was a stark departure from the norm."
The couple has five children together; four daughters and a son. Their son,
Muhammad, is a singer-songwriter who goes by the stage name Yoriyos Adamos,
a nod to his Greek heritage. He also serves as his father's manager.
Sadly, as Stevens noted on his personal website, their sixth child, a son,
died at just 13 days old due to a heart condition. The couple has been married
for 44 years as of 2023, splitting their time between London and Dubai.
In 1988, author Salman Rushdie published "The Satanic Verses," a magical realist
novel deemed offensive to Islam. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini placed a
death fatwa on Rushdie, in effect ordering Muslims to kill the author. As a result,
Rushdie endured several assassination attempts and the novel's translator was murdered.
Cat Stevens became involved in 1989 when he was asked about the fatwa following
a speech at Kingston University, appearing to support it. Stevens
told Rolling Stone that his university comments were taken out of context,
claiming that he was merely quoting directly from scriptural texts.
Later, he made similar statements on the Australian TV show Geoffrey Robertson's
Hypotheticals. Following that, he explained on his website that the incriminating television
interview was the result of editing combined with his British sense of humor, writing,
"I never called for the death of Salman Rushdie nor backed the fatwa issued by
Ayatollah Khomeini – and still don't. The book itself destroyed
the harmony between peoples and created an unnecessary international crisis."
He also claims to have released a statement immediately afterward clarifying his opposition
to the fatwa, but this received little press. Nonetheless, the public's outrage was great.
Stevens' music was banned from many radio stations, DJs smashed his records on air, and
10,000 Maniacs removed their cover of his song "Peace Train" from their catalog.
Rushdie made his feelings on Cat Stevens clear.
"Because he's not a good guy. It may be that he once sang Peace Train, and I know there
was a point when I was a college student and I had a copy of Tea for the Tillerman,
you know, but he's not… he hasn't been Cat Stevens for a long time."
Accusations of terrorism didn't end there. Cat Stevens was denied entrance into Israel
in both 1990 and 2000 due to allegations that he had donated money to Hamas,
an Islamic terrorist organization, during a visit in 1988. Stevens denied these allegations,
claiming he was only providing humanitarian aid, writing,
"I have never knowingly supported Hamas or directed money to them, and use my charity
worldwide to help victims of war and natural disasters, particularly children and orphans."
In September 2004, while flying to Washington, D.C. to meet Dolly Parton for a collaboration,
the name Yusuf Islam was identified on the No Fly List. His plane was rerouted to Maine,
where he was interrogated by Homeland Security officers, and deported back to London. Stevens
told ABC News that he believes it was a case of mistaken identity, as he was repeatedly asked to
spell his name. He has since returned to the U.S. several times without incident.