Yusuf live at Shepherd's Bush Empire

It’s a balmy Friday night in London, and the Shepherd’s Bush Empire is jammed to the rafters for the third in a series of five big shows being thrown to celebrate iconic record label Island’s fiftieth birthday celebrations (Grace Jones and The Fratellis have already played, tomorrow is Paul Weller, and Keane are on Sunday). Hot Press arrives too late for Noxshi, whose lead singer is Yusuf Islam’s son, but makes it for Senegalese singer Baaba Maal and his enormous band.
African music is notoriously difficult to review; the whole thing comes across as being entirely spontaneous. Maal plays a number of tracks from his forthcoming album Television, but they’re hard to isolate amongst the bongo-driven rhythms and jammed guitar grooves (though his cover of Marley’s ‘One Love’ goes down a storm). Really, his show is just one big theatrical party.
Encoring with an impassioned cover of U2’s ‘One’, Maal stops the song midway and announces, “I have a friend, a brother who really takes care of everything. We share the respect of Nelson Mandela’s vision. We need people to understand. We didn’t make it yet, but we are on the way. As we continue fighting poverty especially on the continent of Africa.”
This is U2’s cue to come out. Fearful of overshadowing anyone else, the biggest band ever signed to Island have opted for a low key appearance at Island 50, but the crowd go predictably wild. Edge is on acoustic, while Larry eschews drumsticks and hammers out his rhythms with his bare hands on an African drum.
After ‘One’, Maal and his band depart as U2 neatly segue into a largely acoustic version of ‘Vertigo’. Midway through the song, Bono humorously sends a shout out to Island founder Chris Blackwell: “Chris once said to me, ‘All of this, all of this can be yours, all of this can be yours... just give me what I want and no-one gets hurt!’”
Two songs and that’s it. There’s a 30 minute break before Bono reappears to introduce the Cat formerly known as Stevens, Yusuf Islam. “A seeker,” he pronounced. “A troubadour. A pilgrim. A poet. A guitar picker. A natty dresser. A family man. A pop star. An icon. An iconoclast. A singer and writer of some of the best songs ever written. A serious Cat.”
There’s uproar the moment Yusuf – who looks uncannily like Sawdoctors manager Ollie Jennings – walks on stage for his first UK concert in more than three decades. He opens the show with ‘Welcome Home’, the opening track from his new album Roadsinger, and for the next hour serenades an appreciative audience with a set that leans heavily on new material, with a few reliable old crowd-pleasers thrown in at appropriate moments – ‘Where Do The Children Play’, ‘Wild World’ (dedicated to his granddaughters, who’re here) and ‘Miles From Nowhere’ all get an airing. His voice isn’t quite as fervently strong and urgent as it once was, but it’s instantly familiar and recognisable as Cat Stevens. ‘Father And Son’ is sung back to him by the crowd.
All told, pretty nifty for a 60-year-old. Welcome home, Yusuf!