Cat Stevens

• 1. Introduction

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  Cat Stevens sold more than 100 million records before he walked away from pop music entirely. Born Steven Demetre Georgiou on the 21st of July 1948, in the Marylebone area of London, he grew up above a restaurant his parents ran on the north end of Shaftesbury Avenue, a short walk from Piccadilly Circus. His father was Greek Cypriot and his mother was Swedish. His first guitar cost his father £8. Within a decade, that eight-pound instrument would be the engine of one of the most celebrated songwriting careers in British pop history.

  But the story of the man known as Cat Stevens is not simply the story of a musician. It is the story of someone who found, lost, and reinvented himself across six decades. What drove him to abandon a career at its peak? What did he build in its place? And what finally brought him back to the stage after more than two decades of silence?

• 2. Soho Beginnings

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  The Moulin Rouge restaurant on Shaftesbury Avenue was the family's entire world. Steven Georgiou grew up there alongside his older sister Anita and his brother David Gordon. All family members worked in it. His parents divorced when he was around eight years old, yet they continued to run the restaurant together and both lived above it.

  He taught himself piano on the family baby grand, since no one else there played well enough to teach him. At 15, the popularity of the Beatles drew him toward the guitar. He persuaded his father to pay for a first guitar and immediately started writing songs. On evenings off, he would slip away to the rooftop and listen to music drifting from Denmark Street, then the center of the British music industry. He later said that West Side Story gave him "a different view of life".

  A spell in Gävle, Sweden, with his mother deepened his interest in drawing. Back in London, he attended other local West End schools and described himself as "constantly in trouble" and doing poorly in everything but art. He completed a one-year course at Hammersmith School of Art and genuinely considered a career as a cartoonist. By 1965, he had decided on music instead and began performing under the name Steve Adams at Hammersmith. That same year, he signed a publishing deal with Ardmore and Beechwood and recorded several demos, including his first version of "The First Cut Is the Deepest".

• 3. Rise and Near-Fall

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  In 1966, at age 18, manager and producer Mike Hurst heard him perform and arranged a record deal. His first singles moved quickly up the UK charts. "I Love My Dog" reached number 28; "Matthew and Son" reached number 2; and "I'm Gonna Get Me a Gun" hit number 6. The debut album Matthew and Son, released in March 1967, reached number 7 on the UK Albums Chart.

  Pirate radio helped fuel his early momentum. Wonderful Radio London gave him significant airplay, and in August 1967 he was among the artists who recorded farewell messages during the station's final broadcast hour. Then, in December 1967, his second album New Masters failed to chart entirely. For the next three years, he would place no new singles in the British charts.

  The silence had a physical cause. Stevens contracted tuberculosis in 1969 and came close to death when he was admitted to the King Edward VII Hospital in Midhurst, West Sussex. He spent months in the hospital and a year convalescing. He later described it: "To go from the show business environment and find you are in hospital, getting injections day in and day out, and people around you are dying, it certainly changes your perspective." He took up meditation, yoga, and metaphysics, explored multiple religions, became a vegetarian, and wrote as many as 40 songs during this period.

  Convalescence also gave him a clear view of what he wanted to change. He resented producer Hurst's push to recreate his debut album's heavily orchestrated pop sound. He admits he deliberately sabotaged his own contract by making expensive orchestral demands and threatening legal action, with the specific goal of being released from Deram Records, a sub-label of Decca Records. It worked.

• 4. The Breakthrough Years

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  Chris Blackwell of Island Records offered Stevens the chance to record his songs however and with whomever he chose. Agent Barry Krost recommended Paul Samwell-Smith, previously the bassist of the Yardbirds, as his new producer. Samwell-Smith in turn paired Stevens with guitarist Alun Davies, who was then working as a session musician.

  Their first studio project together was Mona Bone Jakon in 1970. The lead single, "Lady D'Arbanville", was written about Stevens's young American girlfriend Patti D'Arbanville. It had a madrigal quality unusual for pop radio, built around djembes, bass, and two guitars. It reached number 8 in the UK and was his first song to gain real US airplay. The single sold more than one million copies and earned him a gold record in 1971.

  Tea for the Tillerman followed and became a Top 10 Billboard hit. Within six months of its release, it had sold more than 500,000 copies, reaching gold record status in both the UK and the United States. Its single "Wild World" was credited as giving the album enough force to get it played on FM radio. Island Records head Chris Blackwell called it "the best album we've ever released". In 2001, the RIAA certified it as having sold three million copies in the United States. Rolling Stone ranked it number 206 on its 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

  Teaser and the Firecat, released in 1971, achieved gold record status in the United States within three weeks. It included "Peace Train", "Morning Has Broken", and "Moonshadow". Stevens described writing "Moonshadow" during a solo trip to Spain: "I went there alone, completely alone, to get away from a few things. And I was dancin' on the rocks there... the moon was bright, and I started dancin' and singin' and I sang that song and it stayed."

  His next album, Catch Bull at Four, released in 1972, reached gold record status in just 15 days and held the number-one position on the Billboard 200 for three weeks. It spent fifteen weeks at number one in the Australian charts. For several months in 1971 and 1972, he was romantically linked to Carly Simon. She wrote at least two Top 50 singles about him, "Legend in Your Own Time" and "Anticipation". He responded with a song about her titled "Sweet Scarlet".

  The song "The First Cut Is the Deepest", which he had originally sold for £30 to P. P. Arnold and which became hits for Keith Hampshire, Rod Stewart, James Morrison and Sheryl Crow, earned him back-to-back ASCAP "Songwriter of the Year" awards in 2005 and 2006.

• 5. Conversion and Departure

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  While on holiday in Marrakesh, Stevens heard the Islamic call to prayer, the adhān, for the first time. He later described his reaction: "I thought, music for God? I'd never heard that before - I'd heard of music for money, music for fame, music for personal power, but music for God!?"

  In 1976, he nearly drowned off the coast of Malibu, California. He later said he called out to God in that moment and was carried back to shore by a wave. His brother David Gordon, a convert to Judaism, brought him a copy of the Qur'an as a birthday gift from a trip to Jerusalem. Stevens said on BBC's Desert Island Discs: "I would never have picked up the Qur'an myself as a free spirit; I was more aligned to my father's Greek Orthodox beliefs." He was quickly absorbed by the text and began to identify with the story of Joseph, which he said mirrored how he had increasingly felt within the music business. He formally converted to Islam on the 23rd of December 1977 and took the name Yusuf Islam in 1978.

  In April 1977, just before his conversion, he had released the album Izitso, which updated his folk rock sound with synthesisers. Its track "Was Dog a Doughnut" is noted as an early techno-pop fusion piece and a precursor to 1980s electro music. The final original album under the name Cat Stevens was Back to Earth in late 1978.

  In 1979, he auctioned his guitars for charity. On the 22nd of November 1979, he headlined a UNICEF charity concert at Wembley Stadium, appearing with freshly shorn hair and an untrimmed beard, for what would become the start of a 25-year hiatus from pop music. He married Fauzia Mubarak Ali on the 7th of September 1979, at Regent's Park Mosque in London. In 1983, he founded the Islamia Primary School in Brondesbury Park. He also founded The Association of Muslim Schools in 1992, and his Small Kindness charity, which initially helped famine victims in Africa and later supported orphans and families in the Balkans, Indonesia, and Iraq.

• 6. Controversy and Clearing

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  In 1989, following an address to students at Kingston Polytechnic in London, Islam was asked about the fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses had prompted a violent backlash. His responses were widely reported as supporting the fatwa. He said: "He must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear - if someone defames the prophet, then he must die." He later stated that the show was improperly edited and that he was joking, and in subsequent years he repeatedly denied ever calling for Rushdie's death.

  On the 21st of September 2004, Islam was aboard a United Airlines flight from London to Washington. He was travelling to meet Dolly Parton, who had recorded "Peace Train" and was planning to include another Cat Stevens song on an upcoming album. Mid-flight, his name was flagged on the No Fly List. The flight was diverted to Bangor, Maine, and he was detained by the Department of Homeland Security. The following day, he was denied entry and returned to the United Kingdom. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw complained personally to US Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations.

  In October 2004, British newspapers voiced support for his exclusion and claimed he had supported terrorism. He sued for libel and received an out-of-court financial settlement, with both publications printing apologies stating he had never supported terrorism. They also noted that he had been given a Man of Peace award from the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. Islam said he intended to donate the financial award to help orphans of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

  A second lawsuit, in July 2008, produced substantial undisclosed damages from a news agency that had published a story claiming he refused to speak to unveiled women. The false allegations had originated after he collected the Echo music award in Berlin in March 2007 for life achievements as a musician and ambassador between cultures. On the 12th of August 2022, Rushdie suffered a knife attack in New York state. Islam tweeted in response: "Saddened and shocked to learn about the horrific act on Salman Rushdie my wish is for us all to live in peace."

• 7. Return and Reinvention

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  Islam credited his son Muhammad, also a musician and artist known professionally as Yoriyos, with drawing him back to pop music. When Yoriyos brought a guitar back into the house, it opened what Islam called "a flood of new ideas and music". Yoriyos also created the cover art for Islam's 2006 comeback album, An Other Cup, a tradition that echoes Cat Stevens designing his own album sleeves in the 1970s.

  An Other Cup was released internationally in November 2006 on his own label, Ya Records, the 40th anniversary of his first album. He credited the album as "a necessary hurdle" he had to overcome before reaching his next work. In 2009, the follow-up Roadsinger earned wider promotion, with Islam making appearances on American television programs including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Colbert Report.

  In April 2014, Art Garfunkel inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. He performed "Father and Son", "Wild World", and "Peace Train" at the ceremony. In September 2020, he released Tea for the Tillerman 2, a re-imagining of the original album to mark its 50th anniversary. In 2021, teaming with Playing for Change, he recorded a new version of "Peace Train" with more than 25 musicians from 12 countries.

  In 2017, he released The Laughing Apple under the name Yusuf / Cat Stevens, using the Cat Stevens name for the first time in 39 years. The album earned him his first Grammy nomination, for Best Folk Album. His son Yoriyos had also bought back at least one of the guitars Islam sold at auction in 1979. On the 25th of June 2023, he made his first appearance at Glastonbury Festival, performing on the Pyramid Stage. In October 2025, he released his official autobiography, Cat on the Road to Findout.