Yusuf / Cat Stevens on his new memoir Cat On The Road To Findout: "I wrote it so that people would not just get the headlines"

Yusuf Islam / Cat Stevens has told Hot Press that he wrote his new memoir "so that people would not just get the headlines".

The legendary songwriter was in Dublin  last month for show at the 3Olympia to promote his new book, Cat On The Road to Findout, which is officially released today. During the gig, he recalled stories from his long and varied life, interspersing the anecdotes with stripped-backed renditions of his greatest hits.

The memoir opens with his upbringing in the West End of London, where he was born Steven Georgiou in 1948.

After starting out as a musician in swinging sixties London, his career was put on pause in 1969 when he contracted tuberculosis and spent a year in isolation, where he wrote over 40 songs. Several of those would appear on 1970’s Tea for the Tillerman, namely ‘Father and Son’ and ‘Wild World’.

Following a decade of immense success, Stevens walked away from music in converted to Islam, adopted the name Yusuf Islam and stepped away from music, focusing his efforts on philanthropy and humanitarian relief. He did not regularly record or perform in his prior folk style until the early 2000s.

"I wrote it so that people would not just get the headlines, but look beyond and see the rationale because I have been quite rational in my journey, but a lot of people didn't see the links," Yusuf said on his motivations behind writing his memoir. "They'll get the missing bits. That's basically it."

"It would have been premature at 35, that's for sure!" he added, reflecting on why it was the right time to look back at his life.

"77 is a good age. You look back and you've done quite a lot and you know, there's still things to do. A lot of it is now management. Because we have so many things going on.  we're touring, we're making records, we've got schools, we've got centres, we've got books, we've got websites.

"It was new to get [my life] in chronological order. That was baffling me. I was like, 'When did I?... ' And actually, by referring to the record charts, I managed to find out a lot of the dates of when things happened. You measure your life sometimes by the soundtrack of your life. That made it much easier for me to then know exactly when things took place.

"It was great. Just to get that in order was a bit of mental therapy."

Earlier this week, the musician announced that the North American leg of his book tour had been postponed over visa delays.

"Waiting months for visa approvals, we held out as long as we could," he said in a statement. "However, at this point, the production logistics necessary for my show cannot be arranged in time.

"North American audiences may still get a chance to see the tour if visa approvals eventually come through. Those dates would be some time away because of other travel tour plans but, hopefully, fans will be able to hop on the Peace Train route at some time in the future.