Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam: The Songwriter Who Walked Away From Pop at Its Peak

In 1968, a twenty-year-old pop singer with two UK hit singles already behind him was told he had tuberculosis and needed to rest, possibly for the better part of a year. Most careers built on momentum don't survive that kind of stop. His did, because he spent the layoff doing the one thing that didn't require standing on a stage: he wrote. By his own account, roughly forty songs came out of that sickbed, and a good number of them ended up on the two albums that made him famous.

That's Cat Stevens, before almost any of the things people now know him for: the run of early-seventies albums that never really left the radio, the religious conversion and stage name that took him out of pop music for nearly three decades, and the return, in his late fifties, under a new billing that finally held both names at once. It's a career with more real turns in it than almost anyone else in this series, and every one of them is worth understanding on its own terms.

From "Cat Stevens" to a sanatorium bed

He was born Steven Demetre Georgiou in London in 1948, the son of a Greek Cypriot father and a Swedish mother who ran a restaurant near Shaftesbury Avenue. He taught himself piano, then picked up guitar around fifteen, listening to Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. A producer named Mike Hurst spotted him performing in London clubs in 1966 and signed him to Deram Records, and it was around this time a girlfriend told him he had eyes like a cat. The stage name stuck. "I Love My Dog" reached the UK top thirty later that year, and "Matthew and Son" hit number two in early 1967, quickly followed by a top-ten debut album of the same name.

By 1968 he'd contracted tuberculosis and a collapsed lung, serious enough to put him in Harley Street and then a sanatorium in West Sussex for an extended convalescence. He's said the experience changed how he saw things: watching people around him seriously ill "certainly changes your perspective," as he later put it. It also gave him time away from Hurst's management and Deram's pop-machine version of him, and when he came back he came back with a different producer, Paul Samwell-Smith, and a different sound.

Turning convalescence into a classic run

Mona Bone Jakon, released in 1970, was the sound of that reset: sparser, acoustic, built around his own guitar and the guitarist Alun Davies, who became his closest musical collaborator for the rest of the decade. Tea for the Tillerman followed later that same year and turned him into an album artist rather than a singles act, going triple platinum and carrying two of his most enduring songs, "Wild World" and "Father and Son."

"Father and Son" has a stranger origin than most people assume. Stevens had originally written it around 1969 for a stage musical he was developing with actor Nigel Hawthorne called Revolussia, about the Russian Revolution, built around an argument between a father who wants his son to stay on the land and a son who wants to join the uprising. The musical never got made, but the song survived the TB diagnosis that shelved it and became the first piece written for Tea for the Tillerman. It's a good thing for any songwriter to notice: a song written for one project that falls apart doesn't have to die with it. Sometimes it's just waiting for the right album to actually need it.

Teaser and the Firecat, released the following year, kept the streak going and reached number two in the US, going gold within three weeks. It gave him "Peace Train," "Moonshadow," and his recording of the traditional hymn "Morning Has Broken," arranged with Rick Wakeman on piano. By his early twenties, Stevens had written or recorded a stretch of songs that would still be covered, sampled, and played at weddings half a century later.

A wave off Malibu

The version of the story Stevens has told publicly is this: while swimming off Malibu in 1976, he got caught in a current and, thinking he might drown, called out that if he was saved he'd dedicate his work to God. A wave carried him back to shore. Around the same time, his brother David gave him a Quran as a souvenir from a trip to Jerusalem, and Stevens found himself drawn to the Quranic story of Joseph, said in Arabic as Yusuf, a man bought and sold in the marketplace, which he's said he related to his own experience of the music business.

He formally converted to Islam in December 1977 and took the name Yusuf Islam the following year. His last concert before stepping back from the industry was a UNICEF benefit at Wembley Stadium in November 1979, after which he auctioned his guitars for charity. It's a genuinely rare thing in popular music: an artist at the height of his commercial power choosing, on his own terms and for his own reasons, to simply stop.

Two decades building schools instead of albums

What followed wasn't silence so much as a completely different kind of work. Yusuf Islam founded Islamia Primary School in north London in 1983, helped establish the Association of Muslim Schools UK, chaired the relief organization Muslim Aid through the late eighties and early nineties, and founded the charity Small Kindness, which has funded famine relief and orphan support across several countries. This period also included real public controversy: in 1989, during the uproar over Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, he made remarks that were widely reported at the time as endorsing violence against the author, a characterization he has disputed ever since. That dispute belongs to a different kind of article than this one, which is about the songs; what's relevant here is that it happened during two decades in which he wrote almost no pop music at all, occupied instead with the schools and charities he was building.

Picking the guitar back up

The return started small. His son Muhammad brought a guitar into the house, which Yusuf has described as something of a turning point, and after performing "Wild World" at Nelson Mandela's 46664 AIDS benefit concert in 2003, his first English-language performance in a public setting in a quarter century, he released An Other Cup in 2006, his first album of new pop material since the seventies, credited simply to "Yusuf." Roadsinger followed in 2009. It took until 2017's The Laughing Apple for the billing to finally read "Yusuf / Cat Stevens," holding both chapters of his career in one name rather than asking listeners to pick a version of him.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019, and he's kept working since, releasing Tea for the Tillerman 2, a fiftieth-anniversary reimagining of the original album, in 2020, and a new studio record, King of a Land, in 2023.

What's worth taking from his career

Stevens/Yusuf's catalogue holds together less because of a consistent sound than because of a consistent instinct: write plainly about the biggest things you're actually thinking about, whether that's a father and son who can't agree, a world you're worried is running out of time, or a faith that reorganizes your whole life. He wrote "Father and Son" for a musical that never happened and "Wild World" out of a breakup, and both outlasted the specific circumstances that produced them because the writing itself was honest rather than clever.

His career is also a rare, useful example of an artist choosing to step fully away from music at the top of his game, and finding, decades later, that the songs and the audience were both still there when he was ready to come back. Not many songwriters get to test whether that's true. He did, and it was. If you're working through your own version of the song that's too big or too personal to finish alone, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame: Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Wikipedia: Cat Stevens, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Cat Stevens, American Songwriter: The Story Behind 'Father and Son', Songfacts: Father and Son, Wikipedia: Cat Stevens's Comments About Salman Rushdie