The Cat Man ... Yusuf/Cat Stevens embraces both his identities on upbeat new record Tell ‘Em I'm Gone. Picture: Supplied. Source: Supplied
HE was Cat Stevens. Then he was Yusuf Islam. Now he is Yusuf/Cat Stevens for the release of Tell ‘Em I’m Gone, his first new studio record in five years.
A surprising collection of happy and upbeat blues tunes signals that Yusuf, as he prefers to be called, is delighted to be engaging with his audience and the wider world again.
Now based in Dubai, the British singer songwriter who became globally successful with ‘70s folk anthems including Peace Train, Wild World and Father and Son, decided to embrace the American blues and r&b music that inspired him as a teenager.
Half covers and half new songs, fans would spot the return of his mischievous cat motif on the record, a recurring metaphor for his own misunderstood character.
Cat And The Dog Trap is a veiled narrative of the trials of his own life since converting to Islam in 1978.
Feline puns ... Yusuf/Cat Stevens uses cats as a metaphor for his life on new record. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied
But even more than that, it seems Yusuf always felt on the fringe.
“You’re absolutely right; I do a little bit of lampooning in a way of my own life and it’s OK, it’s fun,” he says.
“That song is a metaphor for my life. Cats are lonely creatures, you know, and sometimes they are not treated that well.
“You see a lot of them starving on the streets and those that are cared for live in luxury. But not every cat has that life.”
Yusuf has enjoyed a creative renaissance in the past decade after quitting music to focus on his faith and humanitarian efforts.
He was welcomed back into the bosom of his peers — and the US after being controversially denied entry to America in 2004 on “national security grounds” — when inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame earlier this year.
Folk hero ... Cat Stevens was globally famous for his hits throughout the 1970s before he quit music. Picture: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns Source: Supplied
Tell ‘Em I’m Gone, produced by music guru Rick Rubin, seems in part to be a sonic bid for acceptance from his covers of You Are My Sunshine, Dying To Live and The Devil Came From Kansas interspersed with his own compositions including Editing Floor Blues.
In short, Yusuf is tired of being misunderstood, most infamously when statements he made in 1989 were misinterpreted as endorsing a fatwa made against author Salman Rushdie after he published The Satanic Verses.
When he finished the album and listened back, he said the album revealed a prevailing theme of freedom.
And he was frustrated that he has remained chained to the media’s perceptions of him in the decades after his conversion to Islam.
“I think my whole experience with the media over the years is that I haven’t been a totally welcome guest at that party. Sometimes I feel alone in the corner and everybody else is talking among themselves. I get left out,” he says.
“Or if I am included, it will be something that’s a bit acrimonious and that’s not been fun.
“It’s easy (to target me) because here’s the hippie recluse singer songwriter who became a Muslim and therefore becomes an object of ridicule for many people who possibly didn’t listen to my lyrics closely enough.
Welcomed back ... Yusuf returned to the stage in 2009. Picture: Supplied. Source: Supplied
“If you had, for sure I had major ambitions in the spiritual realm … but that apart, I think there’s a lot more I can say today.
“I have written a lot of these songs in a way to indicate where my mind is and how I want to be understood and that in a way, is a claim to freedom. It is a freedom every artist has when he picks up a pen.”
His underlying artistic intentions may be serious but Yusuf not only imbues the performance of the songs with upbeat energy but plenty of wry humour.
He jokes that the equally spiritually-invested Rubin was “fasting much more than I was.”
“No really, he introduced me to a very stringent diet thing that he was on, I couldn’t carry on with it. I love my pizzas in the middle of a session. Jalapeños with anything,” he says.
And the 66-year-old musician finds it endlessly amusing that he is a hipster icon.
“Yeah I notice I am in fashion now. Even football players have them which looks slightly weird. A guy who looks slightly like one of the saints kicking a ball does look weird. Men naturally grow hair on their faces, so it’s nice, even wise, that everyone is doing it,” he says.
In December, he will play his first shows in America since 1976, cheekily calling the six-concert run the Peace Train … Late Again tour.
Children’s book ... Yusuf hopes to resurrect his Moonshadow The Musical after he publishes an illustrated novel. Source: News Limited
He confirms a return visit to Australia in being planned for next year.
And he also hopes to restage his Moonshadow musical which opened in Melbourne in 2012 but closed four weeks early after mixed reviews.
Yusuf says he wants to complete the children’s book the musical will be based on before attempting to launch it back into theatres.
“That was an incredibly important learning experience because you never know what sort of show you have until you put it on stage,” he says.
“The Australian audience was incredibly honest and very receptive in some sense and I think our biggest problem is we didn’t quite communicate what this Moonshadow musical was.
“Now I have started work on the children’s book with illustrations so that people will get to know the story before they see the musical. Usually it’s that way, book before musical, and I did it the wrong way around.”
Tell ‘Em I’m Gone is out now.
