Yusuf / Cat Stevens: "The idea of looking after people rather than big companies has gone out the window"

Artists scarcely come more revered than Cat Stevens – or, as he’s been known since 1978, Yusuf Islam. The singer is in town on a promotional tour for his memoir, Cat On The Road To Findout. The gig mixes anecdotes from the book with acoustic renditions of the hits. ‘Father And Son’, ‘The First Cut Is The Deepest’, ‘Wild World’ and the rest all get a run out, much to the delight of a transfixed Dublin audience.

When he’s not singing, Yusuf is sitting on a chair beside a small table on the stage. He recounts being squirted with a water gun by Jimi Hendrix while on acid, explains how the Salman Rushdie fatwa controversy was blown out of proportion, and traces his path from ’60s pin-up boy to selling over 100 million records; as well as the spiritual journey that led him away from music and towards faith and humanitarian work, before he came back to a place where he could bind it all together.

Rumours of an interview have been circulating since the morning. Some of the questions taking up real estate in my notebook are answered during the show, and many more are added.

The next day, after navigating a triple lock of managers and PRs, I’m told we’ll get 20 minutes with the man over Zoom. It’s not nearly enough to dissect the life and times of Yusuf Islam, but you could be stranded on Great Blasket Island with him for a year and still only get half the story.

When he joins the call, his camera is off and some stuff is going on in the background. It’s hard to make out exact words, but there’s shouting.

“We’re being told we can’t do the interview here,” he says, sounding flustered and on the move like a war correspondent.

There’s little indication as to where ‘here’ is – but five minutes later, Yusuf hops back on the call, apologises for the delay, and says he’s good to go…

Cat on the road to findout.

You looked like you were enjoying yourself last night.

Oh yeah, it was superb. I really think it was the best audience we’ve had so far on this tour. I’ve always had a soft spot for Ireland, to be honest, but the welcome yesterday was overwhelming. It was amazing. So lovely.

Where does the affinity for Ireland come from?

I went to St. Joseph’s (Catholic school in London). It gave me a love of Ireland for some reason. There was compassion, there was honesty, even though it was a bit brutal sometimes from the nuns (laughs). But it was honest, and it was heartfelt. I think there’s heart in Dublin and in Ireland. That’s why we love it.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear you’re a big Dubliners fan.

Oh, absolutely. That was one of our favourite CDs in the family. All the kids know the songs. ‘The Captains & Kings’ – I amended that song to suit my feelings about killing children, and called it ‘The Little Ones’. Of course, that song had its beginnings in Sarajevo, but at the same time there was Dunblane. So I made it a dedication, but it obviously expands to what’s going on today.

It’s sad that the song is still so universal.

Yeah, and the little ones, the children, so innocent, so pure, haven’t had a chance to even get on with their lives without it being snatched away by the vile effects of war.

Do you find it hard to tour and create while all this is going on? Or do you see music as a way out of this?

Well, I think from the reaction yesterday, you can see so many hearts are leaning the same way, and music does tend to bring us together. It can be powerful as a means of inspiring people towards goals. It can unite hearts, which is important, especially in a fractured world like we have today.

Is that something you’re more conscious about when you make music now, compared to when you first began?

I was always concerned with the subject of humanity and what it means. First of all, you think about yourself. But it means that you’re finding your place in this sea of humanity. And you’ve got to find out who you are, first of all. And I think that was a big challenge for me. That’s where my songs led me. They defined my journey towards more understanding and discovery.

Why was now the right time to write a memoir and look back at your life?

Well, it would have been premature at 35, that’s for sure (laughs). You know, 77 is a good age. You’ve done quite a lot and there’s still things to do. A lot of it is now management. 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. I mean, it goes on and on. So it’s fun.

Was there anything new that you learned about yourself?

It was new to get it all in chronological order. That was baffling me sometimes. I was like, ‘When did I do this?’ And actually what I found was by referring to the record charts, I managed to find out a lot of the dates of when things happened.

You measure your life by the soundtrack of your life. That made it much easier for me to then know exactly when things took place. Just to get that in order was a sort of mental therapy.

Cat Stevens in 1966.

You left the music industry in the late ’70s. Was it difficult to adjust from being a rock star to a more modest lifestyle?

Not really, because I was always in a mode of discovery and change. Even if you look at my record history, I would never be satisfied with the last record. So I was always moving on. The natural thing for me, when I found some of the answers that I was looking for, was to move on.

Music was not going to deliver what I needed, because finally, I got that from revelation, you can say. And revelation doesn’t come to everybody. It comes to a specific chosen few. That’s why I was able to move on to that next level, where a lot of my songs became realised. A lot of the things that I’d sang about somehow, subliminally, were becoming true.

So you feel some of your earlier songs foreshadowed your journey? There’s a line in ‘Sitting’: “I’m on my way, I know I am, somewhere not so far from here”.

Yeah, exactly. When I look at a song list, when I’m doing a show like this, it becomes apparent that a lot of the things that I wrote about were absolutely on the button, you may say. It was accurate in showing my internal visions, which became real.

You said last night that you used to ignore the Islam section in bookshops because of your Greek-Cypriot father’s attitudes against the Turks. How much do you think the biases we grow up with hold us back in life?

It’s massive. You can’t in any way even imagine the amount of pain and suffering which is caused by ignorance. And most of it is ignorance. People being held back from a certain kind of knowledge, which might be beneficial for them, but they’ve been shielded from it because of their environment, their social upbringing or their culture.

They don’t get a chance to see another side of life. It’s sad really, but that is the state of the world, unfortunately. Ignorance is based on the word to ignore. A lot of people do ignore the search for truth and reconciling what they see with reality – or what they’re told is reality.

Do you think you’ve ‘found yourself’ now?

Oh yes, mate. No problem. I have found that sense of balance and my place in this universe is quite clear.

When did that come to you?

It’s not a kind of thing which pops. It’s a gradual awakening. You have to peel back a lot of things before you get to the core. Getting back to humanity, or finding out what that means in terms of balance and honesty, truth, love, peace – all these things are kind of abstract for so many people. But I believe that if you follow the right path, you can attain these high values.

What do you think the right path is? Is it the same for everyone?

You’ve got to think. You’ve got to ask yourself: has God been favouring some over others? I don’t think so. Yes, in certain cases by sending a message to a certain tribe. The Bani Isra’il – at one time they received so many prophets and messengers, but that message was not only meant for them, it was meant for the world.

If you look at Noah, and if you look at the final prophet, you’ll realise that God has spread this message to everybody, so that everybody can benefit. But if they ignore it, then it’s to their own detriment.

What about people who manipulate those messages? You talked about the Holy Lands yesterday. There’s people who would say they have a right to live there because of what was written thousands of years ago. The Catholic Church in this country also used old texts and teachings to oppress people.

Well, you can never unwind that, because the human race is based on a history of movement and migration. You go back to square one and that was Adam. The world was made for Adam and Adam had his children. That’s who we are and we spread. There are people who would try to own the blessings of God, but that comes with a covenant and that covenant means behaving yourself.

And how do you find your own interpretation? You spoke about people at your mosque saying music shouldn’t be allowed, but that you didn’t read that anywhere in the Quran.

There’s a saying of the Prophet, peace be upon him, that the truth is something that settles firmly on the heart. Evil is that thing which wavers from side to side. So you can kind of measure it in some way, with how much of a conscience you have and how much your conscience is at peace with what you’re doing. We’ve all got this barometer in us, but some of us are just not using it.

What are your thoughts about what’s happening in the UK now? People like the EDL and Reform, who paint immigrants and Muslims in a bad light.

I think that’s manipulation by certain politicians. They created this as a diversion from their failure to actually care for the real needs of British people. Nobody would deny the fact that there’s hardship out there. A lot of people find it hard to make ends meet.

But rather than building homes, creating jobs, industries, and all that stuff, you just go down the high street, you’ll see all these brands. Massive corporate giants that get away with paying nothing in taxes, right? And nobody can argue with that. You don’t have any room anymore for the small shopkeepers.

The idea of looking after people rather than big companies has gone out the window. So you can see there is anger, but the anger should be directed at those who are creating this problem. Waving a Christian flag with a cross on it at an immigrant – that cross was also a sign of compassion and relief. So get your priorities right. Are you a Christian or not? If you are, then behave like one.

Do you worry for children, or ‘The Little Ones’, in the West too? You mentioned big brands and consumerism. Through no fault of their own, a lot of young people are being sucked into that.

Absolutely. That is to me, the limitation of moral, social and ethical education. It can’t be detached from belief in God and goodness of God. I just don’t think so. But you’ve got it now in the UN, right? You’ve got all these great lofty ideals, which are all listed and being shoved under the table right now. When it’s not suitable for certain classes of nations, they forget about these things. So where’s righteousness in this?

You mentioned your brother David a lot last night. How much of an influence did he have on the way your life ended up? I mean, he critiqued your songwriting in the beginning, but was also the man who handed you the Quran.

He’s big in my life. He’s very big. Brothers, you know, we fight, but we love. He’s always been really important in my life. He’s always been there for me and I’m there for him.

Cat Stevens in 1972

How do you find writing now? Does it come as easy or is there more craft involved?

When you’ve been writing songs for 70 years, it’s kind of easy. The mechanisms of writing a song and composing come from almost nothing. But inspiration is a process of being surprised by things that come to you inadvertently, and you can’t always control that. If you’re in the right place at the right time, you can catch it.

I’ve written a lot of songs, a lot of which were motivated by my search. So now you can ask the question, well, what about when you’re so secure in what you believe about life, death, and your purpose in the universe? What does songwriting mean now?

What it means to me is bringing a bit of that wisdom into my art and not making it in any way sort of abrasive, just enjoyable. That’s what I do.

You’ve had a few near-death experiences – almost falling off a roof as a child, Tuberculosis and nearly drowning in California. How do you look at death these days, considering all you’ve gone through?

Well, you’ve got to realise that the big one is waiting. And that is something that human beings, as opposed to animals, have got to live with. That’s where you need to work out a lot of stuff, before that hits you. I was fortunate in some way to have these near-death experiences, because it got me on the road to asking vital questions about the end of the road.

On that road there were various spiritual flings with beliefs like numerology and Buddhism. Do you see them as wrong turns, or steps in the right direction?

They’re all part of the beautiful picture within the search. I was just looking at the museum here in Dublin, at the Buddhist section. There’s so much you can learn. A lot of it has been slightly altered by time and distance. For instance, could you imagine Buddha accepting the fact he had been turned into a gold statue? I don’t think that’s what he meant it to be. You could say the same with Christ.
But they’re very important. I think you can look at the figureheads of great major religions and see they’ve all got commonality of compassion, love, understanding and holding up the truth.

What do you hope people take away from this memoir?

The missing bits. They’ll get the missing bits. That’s basically it. I wrote it so that people would not just get the headlines, and 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.

Do you feel like you’re clearing your name?

I mean, my name is pretty good. A lot of people respect it. Those who don’t haven’t read my book! (laughs)

• Cat On The Road To Findout is out now.