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Cat Stevens “Catch-Bull At Four” (1972)
Sitting/The Boy With A Moon And Star On His Head/Angelsea/Silent Sunlight/Can’t Keep It In//18th Avenue (Kansas City Nightmare)/Freezing Steel/O’Caritas/Sweet Scarlet/Ruins
‘I
gotta show the world, world’s got to see, see all the love, love that’s in me’
Three hugely successful albums within two years, the
best-selling UK single of 1971 ([70] ‘Morning Has Broken’) and critical
plaudits galore just three years after Catty nearly died from TB and thought at
the least that his career is over if not his life. Surely he’s feeling happy?
Vindicated for taking such a career change? Hopeful for the future? Content
with life? Well, not exactly. Even though Cat’s albums have become bigger and
bigger with every passing release to date, the first time Cat sat down to write
songs as a big established star left him feeling under pressure. How do you
follow up a hit album sequence that only came out that way because you nearly
died? What are you going to do, die all over again? The euphoria of surviving
also seems to have worn off a little, with Cat all too aware that while the
public believed in his songs enough to buy them the world in general wasn’t
going to change paths in a hurry. The era of Watergate wasn’t one for hope but one
for trouble and confusion and Cat delivers an album that doubles back a little
on what he’s delivered before. The dreams are still here but they’re
interrupted by nightmares, the need to keep moving is tempered by reflective
moments of mere sitting and Cat is all too aware that breaking down everything
and starting again means you have to come to terms with the ruins you leave
behind.
Cat’s clearly
feeling fragile and isolated, hemmed in by public expectation and a world that
seems to judge success by chart sales rather than artistic growth. ‘Catch-Bull
At Four’ isn’t quite as eccentric and audience-shunning as the follow-up ‘Foreigner’
but it straddles a foot in that world alongside the sunnier world of ‘Teaser’
being an album that covers the good and the bad in life with a slightly less
commercial sound. ‘Catch-Bull’ also possesses a much bigger band sound than the
one on best-sellers ‘Tea For The Tillerman’ and ‘Teaser and the Firecat’ and
material that’s a little more (how can we put this politely?) eccentric. Some
would claim that this album is more of the ‘real’ Cat, that he simply got lucky
with the feel and texture of ‘Tillerman’ and kept as close to that sound as he
could for the follow-up, but no – like most artists but more so, Cat was a
restless, evolving creature who simply didn’t like going in the same place
twice. He is more than ever desperate to stick to the truth orf life as he sees
it across this album, even if it means giving us long passages in Greek we
can’t readily translate, an obscure repetitive metaphorical song that at six
minutes is two longer than his previous longest song, performances that come
barely in a whisper and some tracks like ‘Freezing Steel’ that are deliberately
ugly, like life. This is, if you will ‘Catch No Bull-Shit’.
This is an album that finds the paths on the ‘road
to find out’ are not all pretty. The LP starts with a narrator being forced to
‘sit still’, confined to a chair against his will when all he wants is to break
out and find something ‘new’, but secretly afraid that he’ll ‘wind up where I
started from’. It also ends with the narrator walking through the ruins of a
desecrated city, one ostensibly hit by a cold war bomb but also seemingly
destroyed by its inhabitants’ inability to embrace change and the new. In
between relationships end, sunlight pouring through a window signals change,
Cat has nightmares about being trapped in Kansas City that only end when he
flees to the airport, he waits for a religious sign that doesn’t come on
‘Freezing Steel’ (Cat’s about four years early for the religious symbol he will
get in 1976, setting him out on the Muslim path, not yet as enlightened as he
wants to be) and ‘O’Caritas’ ends with the discomforting line that ‘we who will
perish salute death, while life goes on alone’. All the time this album screams
‘new, new, new’, utterly refusing to go near the warmer sounds of ‘Tillerman’
and ‘Teaser’ (much to the horror of period critics, if not fans who always seem
to have embraced this album against expectation), with ten experimental
variations on what we’ve had before, roughly half of which work quite well and
half of which don’t really work at all. Still, unlike some albums that are
simply the same as last time, but worse (a common problem in 1972 especially,
the year of AAA nearly-albums like ‘Harvest’ ‘Wildlife’ ‘Sometime In New York
City’ and ‘Everybody’s In Showbiz’) at least Cat is bravely trying to go
somewhere new and the listener often ends up praising this work, even if they
slink off quietly to play ‘Tillerman’ or ‘Teaser’ again while this album gets
quietly shelved. The times they are a changing, as they say, and Cat for one
can’t wait for them to get a move on.
Even the album title, greeted as a bit of classic
Cat gobbledegook at the time until the singer admitted decades later it was
based on the Buddhist work ‘The Ten Bulls Of Zen’, is all about welcoming
change. In this text there are ten stages towards enlightenment, represented by
‘capturing’ ten elusive invisible ‘bulls’ representing the spiritual world –
the first three are variations on seeing the ‘bull’ and realising that there is
another spiritual world beyond ours, the fourth about ‘catching’ it and and the
last six stages about taming it and integrating it as part of everyday life;
traditionally the fourth stage is the ‘longest’ one as the bull forever escapes
and the believer has to completely change the way they think about life with
many giving up at this stage and going back to their material worlds. Cat
claimed later that he regretted choosing the fourth stage (‘I’m not sure I was
out of the first back then’), but it’s a very fitting title for an album that’s
all about being in the process of changing the way that we understand how life
works. Cat’s front cover drawing, of a small boy staring down an angry-looking
bull, is also a good fit for an album about facing up to challenges and mishaps,
more austere and cold than his usual front covers but powerful in its
simplicity and looking like a still from ‘Avatar’ (not the awful film with blue
meanies but the animated series with cabbage merchants). To go back to the ‘Ten
Bulls Of Zen’, though, is it just me or is there quite a neat analogy for the
ten post-TB Stevens albums here too, all representing a different stage of
discovery? (‘Mona Bone Jakon’, in 1970, is very much ‘in search of a bull’
while Cat’s happiest album – ‘Buddha and the Chocolate Box’ in 1974 – is surely
‘The Great Joy Of Riding The Bull Home’ represented by stage number six and
what is album no 10 ‘Back To Earth’ if not ‘A Return To Society’?) Could Cat
have had this ten-album list in mind from the first (or near-first, perhaps
discovering the ‘Zen’ paper on his sick-bed aged eighteen? It might not have
been a coincidence that his contract with Island records – signed shortly after
in 1970 – was for the very round figure of ten albums). Or is it just a
mystical coincidence? Cat, of course, never fully embraced Buddhism, but he’s
still toying with different religions as late as his final ‘Cat’ album in 1978
and it’s ethos of peace and wisdom is very in keeping with Cat’s lyrics in the
first half of the 1970s especially.
The change that hits you first, if you’re listening
to these albums in order, is the sound of this record. ‘Tillerman’ and ‘Teaser’
are ‘warm’ and ‘happy’ records for all of their occasional troubles and
tribulations; the sparse ‘Mona Bone Jakon’ is less so, but it’s more out of a
toughness and brittleness and Cat’s determination that illness and illusion
will not get the better of him, full of very human fighting spirit.
‘Catch-Bull’ is equally sparse and isolated for the most part, but it’s an
isolation born of sadness and mourning, a world where Cat feels distant from us
as if he’s left his audience behind somewhere and is calling to us from back
down a mountain-top, less interested in whether we will join him there.
Traditionally this record is seen as having an ‘up’ side (the first) and a
‘down’ side (the second), not unlike ‘Teaser’ in fact, Cat grouping his more
despondent songs together at the end. However even the supposedly ‘happy’ songs
on part one seem ‘down’ compared to [72] ‘Peace Train’ [71] ‘Moonshadow’ et al;
‘Sitting’ is as loud and commercial as any of Cat’s past songs, but the sound
of it (with a piano sounding like it’s being whalloped over the head by drums
and Cat at his lowest and most snarling vocally yet) is far from upbeat.
‘Angelsea’ is catchier still, but it’s cast from a backing that includes a
swirling, out-of-control synthesiser (the first on a Cat Stevens record, but
far from the last) that sounds like a black hole sucking all the usual
Cat-style ‘bounciness’ from the heart of the song. ‘Silent Sunlight’ is a
faintly optimistic piano-ballad, which should be the most ‘Teaser’ like on the
record – only instead of being loud and in-your-face, it’s muted and desperate,
as if it’s been recorded down the end of the corridor. The only traditional
sounds come from ‘The Boy With The Moon And Star On His Head’ which lyrically
is still quite different for Cat, a parable that’s the most impersonal thing he’d
written since his ‘teenage’ years as a ‘pop’ singer and ‘Can’t Keep It In’ the
one great unambiguously happy moment on the record, neatly placed in the middle
to make everything around it feel lifted up. As for side two, well, only the
side-long title track of ‘Foreigner’ comes close to this one for Cat at his
most upset and emotional. Nightmares, feeling lost, waiting for
Armageddon, saying goodbye to Carly
Simon and walking through the ruins: this is not the sound of [70] ‘Morning Has
Broken’ and [71] ‘Moonshadow’ anymore.
So what could have caused this? Well, Cat was back
to being the most eligible bachelor in town. His break-up with Patti D’arbanville
was receding into the difference. Since then he had had two girlfriends,
neither of them that serious yet. Linda Lewis, two years Cat’s junior, had
befriended him and even sang back-up vocals on ‘Teaser’, by this time a
twenty-two-year old veteran of the music business who’d had hits with such
songs as ‘Rock-A-Doodle-Doo’. On this album she sings on ‘Angelsea’, the one
track I think its safe to say is almost definitely written for her. However
it’s notable just how ephemeral she is on this track in contrast to the very
earthy songs for Patti – she’s talked about in terms of astrology and imagination,
a mysterious unknowable creature with rainbows in her hair, a million miles
away from the usual ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’ with which cat approached his love
songs. And then there’s American singer-songwriter Carly Simon who had
befriended Cat during his first shows in public in years in 1970 as he made his
comeback, helping him backstage at The Troubadour Club in Hollywood where she
was a veteran. The pair got on so well they didn’t want to part ways after the
weeks of shows so set up a date. Cat, unusually, was running late as he rushed
to see her with a box of chocolates under his arm. Carly wrote ‘Anticipation’
while waiting for him, a song that became one of her biggest hits, full of
longing and pondering how their lives turned out. Cat was embarrassed that he
had only thought to bring chocolates and offered to write her a song in return.
Unfortunately their romance fizzled out as they both went back to their
separate lives and by the time Cat kept that promise on ‘Sweet Scarlet’ they
knew it was over (my favourite ever Carly song is also for Cat, ‘Legend In Your
Own Time’, her tearful goodbye song where she captures Cat well: ‘A legend in
your own time, a hero in the footlights, whose a lonely boy who goes home
alone’ a single released alongside ‘Catch-Bull’ in 1972). There’s also the
feel-good love song of ‘Can’t Keep It In’, a track which could have been about
either girl (or maybe a third?!?) On the
other seven songs, though, it’s strange just how alone Cat sounds on his first
release since urging the world to ride a ‘Peace Train’ with him. He sits alone
on the opening track, he alone can see that the world ‘will never last’ on
‘O’Caritas’ and he ends the album as the only survivor on ‘Ruins’. This is not
the vision of his life Cat had imagined from his hospital bedside as he dreamed
of re-entering the world and even though he’s back amongst humanity he still
feels alone, marking time until his life moves forward again.
I think Cat’s unhappiness came partly from a growing
realisation that his ‘second’ career was as ‘pointless’ and ‘empty’ as his
first, even with all the happiness it brought other people. Cat had prided
himself on staying true to his music and his beliefs, re-creating his image as
a singer of believable, impassioned, bearded songwriter who cared little for
appearance (in contrast to the clever but often empty songs of a talented
teenager year old with a taste for hip shirts). Cat must have been thrilled
when Island offered him a ten-album deal and when the first three albums did
much better than he’d ever dreamt of. On this album though Cat must have really
felt it that he wasn’t anywhere near halfway through that load yet. To his horror
too Cat’s spiritual quest had brought him further and further away from
anything he could write down in words and melodies and from this point on the
freedom of music becomes more of a restriction, limiting him to what he can say
even to his now-bigger and more open-minded audience. Cat’s never quite
revealed when it took place, but he’s meant to have started thinking ‘deeper
thoughts’ after taking a holiday in Morrocco and hearing the Islamic call to
prayer for the first time. After asking what the awe-inspiring music was, Cat
was told it was – in the closest English translation – ‘music for God’. Having
written music for money and girls for two years, and for his audience for the
next three, Cat suddenly felt very ashamed not to have ‘written music for God’
even though he wasn’t yet sure what his definition of God was and which
religion’s interpretation of God he meant. Most commentators put this story as
happening later, when Cat is already started down the ‘road’ to becoming a Muslim,
but I think that sudden decision after nearly drowning on another holiday in
1975 is too late, the moment that forced Cat’s hand after years of pondering
these deep questions. This first story fits better here – the moment when Cat
not only realises that there is a spiritual side to life but seeks to ‘catch’
that power for himself, the moment he goes back to being a seeker again rather
than an answerer. That would explain the interesting change in direction for
the sound and style of this album, too, where Cat’s characters are often
‘imprisoned’ against their will, desperate to break free and where he often
sounds almost ashamed of what he is singing, ducking the music and especially
his vocal in the mix as if he only half-wants us to hear what he says any more
(the mix has been cleaned up greatly for CD compared to my old vinyl copy, but
it still doesn’t have the ‘shine’ of the other ‘Island’ albums). Cat even sings
one song in Greek until the last verse (thankfully providing a translation on
the lyric sheet), perhaps because of this uncertainty over what he is doing and
whether he wants us to hear it. If ‘Tillerman’ was an album of sunshine and
‘Teaser’ a record of ‘moonshadows’ then much of ‘Catch-Bull’ feels as if Cat
knows he is still really in the dark, stumbling blindly with less certainty
than he had in 1970-1971.
This might explain away some parts of the album,
then, but the big question as ever on this site is whether the music is any
good. And the answer as ever on this site is yes, but for the first time since
‘New Masters’ only in parts. Critics at the time complained that there was
nothing on this album as ‘immediate’ as [72] ‘Peace Train’ and [71] ‘Moonshadow’,
perhaps forgetting that just a year earlier they’d been praising ‘Mona Bone
Jakon’ for being a ‘mood piece’ unbroken by need for commercial singles.
‘Catch-Bull’ has the best of both worlds; ‘Can’t Keep It In’ might not be the
deepest single Cat ever wrote and didn’t sell quite as many copies or move as
many minds but it’s still one of his best, music and words perfectly going
together on a song about joy that’s impossible to dislike and never sits still
for a minute. It also sounds even better on album, brightening up the rest of
an often downbeat record like the sun coming out. Oddly it was only ever
released in Britain, Cat splitting his sales between the Atlantic. ‘Sitting’, the
American choice, too deserved to do better in the singles chart, a bleak and
angry record that still successfully conveys frustration and material chains in
the context of a catchy song with a hummable riff. ‘Angelsea’, too, is the
single that never was from this album, a churning hypnotic spacey rocker about
a mystical lady that’s the crazy-paving lyrics of ‘Lucy In The Sky With
Diamonds’ combined with the earthy music of a ‘Helter Skelter’. Elsewhere the
quieter, humbler songs are a mixed bag: ‘Silent Sunlight’ and ‘Ruins’ are
clever sparse songs about endings in two different ways, sensitively played and
sung on backing tracks that don’t need anything more to make them sparkle.
However the rest is seemingly deliberately wilfully strange. ‘18th
Avenue (Kansas City Nightmare)’, is a largely interesting experiment, a
nightmare in sound as well as well as words, with an unsettled centre that
keeps twists and turns and simply refuses to go back in the box of the main
key, resolving onto the last key you’d expect several times over. The rest though
are less successful. ‘The Boy With The Moon And Star On His Head’ is the
closest Cat ever came to being boring without even a chorus or instrumental to
enlighten it’s three long verses. ‘Freezing Steel’ isn’t a bad song, but it
suffers from coming straight after ‘18th Avenue’ (a song it closely
resembles) and possessing a curious short, stuttering riff that keeps sticking
on the handbrake every time it ought to be soaring away into the distance.
‘O’Caritas’ ought to be a fascinating glimpse into Cat’s Greek heritage (both
his parents are from Greece, although Cat himself was born in London), but
instead it’s a rather severe and humourless piece about the end of the world
that would have worked just as well in English. Finally ‘Sweet Scarlet’ is clearly
from the heart – and I must confess has a much more interesting lyrics than I
thought before studying it for this review – but the mutedness of the mix and
the rather awkward melody don’t place it among Cat’s most interesting work.
An album of transition, then, with cat aware of the
enlightenment that lies in front of him but not yet sure how to get there and
feeling lost and frustrated again so soon. For my money Cat’s later, lesser
known albums are still more interesting (‘Buddha’ and ‘Numbers’ especially) and
his earlier work has a power and punch that isn’t always there in this ‘middle’
period (‘Mona’ and ‘Tillerman’ being his greatest work to my ears). But Cat
always releases something special on every record he makes – even his
much-maligned pop year of 1967-68 and his past-caring heading-into-retirement
years a decade later have several strong and impressive songs amongst the
ranks. The end result is that ‘Catch-Bull At Four’ is somewhere in the middle –
a sometimes accessible, sometimes-mad, sometimes-great, sometimes-bad,
sometimes-happy-but-more-often-sad album from a singer-songwriter who always
something to say and more than a little knowledge about the best ways to say
it. If there’s a slight awkwardness creeping in here, a boredom with the sound
of the hit albums and a restless urge to try something new that stops it being
as well loved and well regarded as ‘Tillerman’ and ‘Teaser’, there’s also a
real sense of excitement at times over what’s to come and what will fill that
gaping spiritual hole gnawing away inside Cat. The fact that the answer to what
that hole was becomes even more dramatic, unexpected and life-changing across
the years to come than Cat expected and put into song here shouldn’t get in the
way of what an at-times brave and uncompromising record this is, from a time
when Cat was no longer the ‘New Master’ but not yet the ‘Foreigner’ of his
album titles. Would that other songwriters of the day had reached even the
first stage of the ‘Ten Bulls Of Zen...’ (I would say the Spice Girls are still
at stage one - 'the search for the bull' – only I think the bull ran away and
is now wearing ear-muffs!)
The
Songs:
[78] ‘Sitting’ sounds from the title as if it’s
going to be a nice, quiet, gentle, contemplative sort of a song, but not a bit
of it: this is the sound of a toddler forced to sit still against his will,
desperate to immerse himself in everything the world has to offer but feeling
held back. Impatience has long been shown to be Cat’s Achilles heel: it’s why
he got sick in the first place instead of seeking rest and he paid the price
for being unable to burn the candle at both ends by being confined to bed for a
year. Cat is by now up and about, but still troubled: what if it happens again
when he sleeps? Will he ‘sleep too long’ and miss something important? Will he
even wake up at all? He feels as if he should be doing something important and
has just spent three albums telling us he’ll do just that, but by the time he
gets here he feels himself just going round and round in circles and that each
exploration ends up merely a dead-end and he may as well have stayed at home
thinking. In a neat return of the previous year’s song ‘On The Road To Find
Out’ Cat opens the album with the lyric ‘I’m on my way, I know I am’, but his
voyage sounds less likely to succeed this time around and Cat’s insistence is
sung through gritted teeth not certainty. A turbulent middle eight is so sudden
it seems to drop out from the ceiling, crashing into the song mid-note (i.e.
not on the natural beat you’d expect) and what a middle eight it is: ‘I keep on
wondering if I sleep too long will I even wake up again?’ This is the sound of
a writer afraid to slow down or loosen up in case he misses some vital clue top
life and it makes for a very interesting comparison with the much more patient
patient of the ‘Mona Bone’ years (when Cat was of course felled by physical
rather than spiritual malaise). Adding that there’ll be time to sleep when he’d
dead and buried, Cat’s narrator is busying himself with spiritual books and
ideas the same way his younger self used to drown out his fears of inadequacy
with endless parties and drinking. The song ends with a curious repeat of the
middle eight with new lyrics that’s almost incomprehensible (‘If I make it to
the waterside, I’ll be sure to write you a note or something’) which sounds
dismissive about his audience more than anything. The very end, too, is
unexpected and downbeat, Cat finally addressing the audience rather than
himself and warning us that everything he’s told us so far might turn out to be
a lie after all (‘Keep pushing hard, boy, but try as you may you’re gonna wind
up where you started from’). In fact, a silly throwaway reference to ‘the power
growing in my hair’ aside (Cat must have been reading the Bible and the ‘Samson
and Delilah’ passage along with all his Buddhist and Islamic texts) this is one
of Cat’s better lyrics, as spiritual as any in his canon but much more earthy
and ‘real’. The accompaniment to all this turbulence and frustration is
suitably dramatic, less a melody than a string of phrases stuck together with
only the vaguest and fragile of glues that often threatens to break apart.
‘Sitting’ is difficult to listen to, perhaps, and doesn’t have the cosy glow of
his better known work, being a brave if not suicidal choice as a single, but
‘Sitting’ is arguably closer to the real, uncertain, slightly guilty, reluctant
millionaire Cat Stevens of the first half of the 1970s than [72] ‘Peace Train’ [71]
‘Moonshadow’ or [70] ‘Morning Has Broken’. As a footnote, Cat will return to
this song’s central phrase for [155] ‘Be What You Must’, a track from the 2009
work ‘Roadsinger’ which takes quite a different tack, deciding that everyone
works at their own spiritual speed and shouldn’t be coerced into going faster
just because of some feeling that enlightenment is at hand, offering up a kind
of ‘Father and Son’ monologue to his younger self to be more patient and to let
wisdom come through experience over knowledge.
[79] ‘The Boy With The Moon and Star On His Head’ is
a bit of an oddball in the Cat Stevens canon. On first hearing the largely
acoustic arrangement makes it the most traditional of the ‘Catch-Bull’ songs,
but the whole structure is more like a medieval ballad than a pop song and
there are none of Cat’s classic middle eights here, or even a chorus.
Lyrically, too, this is a parable clearly not told by Cat or a stand-in version
of Cat but a character who seems to have walked out of a fairy-tale, a place
with names like ‘The Whisper Woods’ and where babies are left in baskets on
doorways. We’ve reflected before how Cat tends to use ‘I’ and ‘you’ in his
songs much more than other writers (Paul Simon and John Lennon being the two
exceptions) and like those writers Cat rarely if ever uses another ‘voice’ to speak
to us, as it were (Lennon does so only when writing about ‘social’ matters and
Simon only in his ‘Capeman’ musical about a teenage murderer from Puerto Rico –
both are widely held up as their creator’s weakest works at least in part for
this very reason). And yet, given the lyrics that Cat will go on to write, it
sounds as if there might be a ring of truth in the lyrics after all. The boy of
the title is the son of the narrator, a father who doesn’t know of his son’s existence
until the lad turns up on his doorstep after a brief liaison with a ‘gardener’s
daughter’, who makes good on her promise to give birth to a boy ‘with the moon
and star on his head’. Compare this lyric to the much more realistic one on [98]
‘Sun/C79’ (from 1974’s ‘Buddha and the Chocolate Box’) where Cat’s child asks
him ‘why are we here?’ and instead of the expected spiritual speech gets a
history lesson on his daddy meeting his groupie mum backstage at a gig, her
hotel room number still ringing in his head with a sort of spiritual glow.
Officially Cat only has his first child in the 1980s and we stress that we
don’t know any better – but the proximity of the two songs (recorded two albums
apart) does make you wonder. Is this Cat writing a fairy-story for the child he
can never see, first denying and then recognising him as his? He proudly
imagines a future when his boy will make him proud, travelling the world to
deliver the message of peace (actually Yusuf’s son Muhammed travels the world
in a grunge band, but the two aren’t as far apart as you might think). Unfortunately
this kind of speculation is all there is to enliven up what is, by Cat’s high
standards, a very dull song indeed. The tempo is slow, the rhyming scheme
apparently deliberately simple and long-winded (to better fit the ideas of an
Elizabethan sonnet) and the whole song is rigidly unchanging. Cat and backing
band (including the ever-excellent Alun Davies) liven the track up as best they
can – adding sudden brief bursts of period chamber music as fits with the words
occasionally – but you know a song is doomed when a songwriter is trying to
distract from the drabness of his own work with breakaway moments like this.
Thankfully Cat never tried anything like this again, the track appearing to
last for much longer than its six minute running mark (almost a sixth of the
running time of the album as a whole) as it’s lyric of symbols and allusions is
no substitute for his usual honesty.
Thankfully [80] ‘Angelsea’ is much better, a song with more of the customary Cat Stevens easy
breeziness than either of the album’s first two tracks. This song deserved to
become the album’s first single, in fact, a catchy breathless singalong about
some mysterious ethereal creature that sounds a little like [38] ‘Lady
D’arbanville’ sped up. Few songwriters ever got quite as carried away when in
love as Cat did and this song, surely for Linda Lewis, features her charming
harmony soaring over the top. This song excels through the clever trick of
merging airy-fairy ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ lyrics with a wonderfully
earthy, tough melody and performance. The creature of the title might be an
angel, with unlikely things surrounding her golden ochre hair as she lives in
the clouds, a ‘mistress to magicians’, but the punchiest performance on the
album by far reveals just how lustfully Cat feels towards her, all cluttering
drums on Gerry Conway’s greatest performance and a whacking great choir of
voices. For all this song’s brazen sounding confidence, though, the lyrics tell
a slightly different story: Cat feels the tug of love but he doesn’t feel it
was ‘fated’ in quite the way it was on ‘Lady D’arbanville’. He spends the song
looking for a sign that this is meant to be, constantly checking her horoscope
and ‘universal house’ against his and my impression is that he ends the song
having told us everything wonderful about her and why everyone loves her,
without the punchline ‘so why don’t I quite feel it the way I should?’ A full
band, including a five-person backing choir, kick up a great deal of noise but
it’s Cat’s own synthesiser playing (just a few months on from its first use, on
‘Who’s Next’) that’s the most memorable part of the song, conjuring up the idea
that ‘Angelsea’ has wondered out of a whole new dimension. Had Cat recorded
this song just an album earlier then he’d have probably been forced to use the
still-analogue mellotron, which has a much softer and psychedelic sound. Having
this much tougher digital feel (associated now with futuristic images,
machinery and robots thanks to the likes of Kraftwerk, The Human League and
Neil Young) really suits the song, keeping us at arms’ length as the cold
steely heart in the centre of what is otherwise the warmest song on the album.
Above this sound Cat doesn’t so much sing this song as shout it, overwhelmed
throughout by the visions around him as if his ears are filled with sound as
much as his eyes are filled with colour. The result is a hugely striking song
made even better thanks to easily the best performance on the album.
[81] ‘Silent Sunlight’ is a much quieter,
reflective ballad about change. Like ‘Sitting’ Cat’s narrator is impatient for
change and wants to get on with a new chapter in his life, echoing [70]
‘Morning Has Broken’ by embracing the morning light when it floods through his
room as a sign that he can get up and go back into the world. There are hints
that this song is not as hopeful and upbeat as it sounds – ‘All my dreams have
blown away’ is the song’s third line, in fact – and for all his talk of looking
only forwards Cat can’t resist getting nostalgic in the song’s third verse,
reflecting on a past when ‘all things were tall, our friends were small, and
the world was new’. As an adult, though, everything is repetitive and Cat
yearns to greet life with the same enthusiasm he did when he was able to go out
to play. The melody, however, is stately and grand – maybe even a little
pompous – adding a regal rigidness and artificial smile onto proceedings which
together with the genuinely happy opening couplet makes it sound a lot more
upbeat than it actually is. The real story in the song comes in the final
verse, where Cat returns to the theme of ‘Sitting’ and tells us ‘don’t ever
look behind at the work you’ve done, for your work has just begun’, suggesting
that this is another treaty about embracing spiritual changes and learning
without resting on your laurels. Cat tries hard with this song, including his
own playing of a tin whistle part that must have been quite tricky to learn,
but there’s something rather uninvolving about this song. The curious mix
doesn’t help much either: even more than the rest of the album it’s almost as
if Cat was deliberately hiding what he had to say by mixing it this low and
quietly, so that fans can only really get to know this song by reading the
lyric sheet or turning this recording up extra-loud (sorry neighbours!) In the
end, ‘Silent Sunlight’ is both pretty and pretty revealing – it’s just that,
like the sunlight that inspired it, the effect is only fleeting and this song
gets rather lost in between the two noisiest songs on the record either side of
it. It’s also not a patch on even the weakest ballads from the first three
post-TB albums, although that it is to be fair more a sign of how brilliant
they are.
[82] ‘Can’t Keep It In’ is like a warm bath after
all that reflectiveness on the first four tracks. An over-exuberant puppy of a
song, this one is all over the place and out of control but all the more
pleasing for that; Cat’s refusal to put a wrap on his feelings for public
consumption all the more unexpected and enticing after the last few songs.
Lyrically there’s not much going on here on what is, by Cat’s standards, quite
an empty pop song about how he feels so much love he can’t help but let it
spill over into his work, singing it as if he’s having a sugar rush after a
week long fast. He could of course be singing about both or any other part of
his love life, but I do wonder given the sea-change on the next few albums if
this is Cat opening his heart to God, desperate to tell us that he has sensed
someone out there, wanting to let us know without being comfortable with
letting on what for the world just yet. The words ‘why walk alone?’ and
passages about being ‘warmer’ with this knowledge do sound like more of a
spiritual conversion (unless of course his lover is clutching a hot water
bottle), while his pleas to ‘do anything if you let me know’ could be for
either. There are some interesting ideas, though, even if some of these are
sadly only brief: in one of the best couplets on the album Cat tells us ‘You’ve
got so much to say, say what you mean, mean what you’re thinking – and think
anything!’, summing up the lack of restrictions he longed for on this song’s
polar opposite ‘Sitting’. This time around Cat is free to move around and is
loving his freedom . Musically this song is like a merger of ‘Sitting’ and [71]
‘Moonshadow’ – it possesses the first song’s restless energy and the second’s
nursery-rhyme-like string of interlocking repetitions (‘And if I lose my
teeth/hands/eyes...’, compare the way this song too has the meaning of one line
leading directly to the next). Performance-wise, too, this is another of the
best recordings on the album, the players clearly much more at home with Cat’s
more commercial instincts and Cat himself is on great form, navigating this
song’s sudden violent key changes (perfect for a song about sudden unexpected
discovery) with consummate ease and an audible twinkle in his voice. There’s
even the last of Cat’s band’s final ‘comical’ write-offs (heard most frequently
on ‘Teaser’) when the band suddenly end up walking down the song’s spiralling
chord structure, only instead of flicking back upwards they simply fall down a
musical hole-in-the-floor, finally relinquishing control with a funny cymbal
crash. The hint is that Cat’s narrator is so blinded by love that he’s
inevitably heading for a fall and that he probably knows this himself but at
the moment doesn’t care. Again, it’s interesting that Cat – never really known
for his love songs – seems to have so many on this album. Clever, catchy and
confident, ‘Can’t Keep It In’ has a swagger that makes it stand out a mile on
this album and it deserved to do better when released as a single – indeed,
it’s the best of Cat’s singles not released later after becoming popular album
tracks. Why why why not indeed?
[83] ‘18th Avenue (Kansas City Nightmare)’ starts
off the much edgier second side of the record as it means to go on: the song is
timid and vulnerable, all the confidence and hope of the past song having
evaporated (in fact whoever mastered this album for CD got this badly wrong –
there should be a chasm of silence between the two sides, not a millisecond
pause which throws us far too awkwardly from one to another; remember any album
before about 1985 was written with the certain knowledge that under normal
circumstances listeners would take at least thirty seconds to get off their
chair and turn their vinyl records over). A deeply unsettling and uncomfortable
track, it’s hard to tell if this song is about a real incident or only an
imagined one. In truth, nothing really happens in this song, which is coy about
what exactly causes the narrator to ‘struggle inside’ so badly and wake up in a
cold sweat. It’s tempting to see this song as Cat rejecting the attention given
to his life (he was on the verge of becoming a ‘superstar’ in this period,
after three big albums on the trot), with ‘people I knew who all came there to
take a view’ (it speaks volumes that the next Cat record is ‘Foreigner’, the
one Cat made after leaving Britain supposedly for good). Cat too is a long way
from home, temporarily ensconced in America for a tour and as so often happens
in his work he is always happiest when at home discovering something than
feeling lost in an alien world. This is to some extent another one of those AAA
songs about feeling isolated and depressed in a character-less hotel a million
miles away from where you grew up, wondering how you got there, only it sounds
petrified rather than merely depressed. My guess is that this is Cat, suddenly
celebrated and in fashion again, being invited to lots of parties again and
risking the life he once had back in 1968. This path is ‘dark and borderless’,
stretching out before him with empty wasted boozy days and Cat knows he has to
resist their temptation or risk getting sick again. Something is making Cat’s
narrator tongue-tied and nervous anyway, where ‘repeating my words’ (at a
concert or press conference maybe?) causes the words to have ‘stung my tongue’
as he hates the attention and regrets explaining his songs when he could be
discovering something to go along with them. There’s yet another return to the
confinement of ‘Sitting’ as Cat finds his hands ‘tied’ and bitterly mourns ‘the
empty waste of another day’ where he isn’t free to do what he wants, a pop star
puppet again. Only a sudden turn of the car he’s driving back onto the ‘right’
path and the sign for an airport bring the matter to a close, Cat sounding on
the verge of tears, madness or both as he screams that he is at last going home
and that ‘boy, you’ve made it just in time!’ We’re used to hearing Cat cover a
variety of emotions by now if you’re listening to these albums in order (he
gets cross a lot more often than you might expect) but he’s always been in
charge before now – even when singing to a metaphorical demon on [42] ‘Trouble’
Cat never sounded this hopeless and out of control. This song clearly means
something then and it’s interesting that it’s at the ‘heart’ of this record
(track six out of ten) even though it doesn’t sound at all like a side-opener,
with its timid start and lack of any real hooks (and Cat is a songwriter who
knew about such things – ‘Tillerman’ is so successful in part because it’s a
record that’s so cleverly programmed, with every song in the perfect order in
relation to each other; of the other Cat Stevens albums only ‘Foreigner’ is
this out-of-kilter and that’s probably just a problem that resulted from having
merely five songs to juggle with). Is it
this moment when Cat really symbolically turns his back on ‘us’ and the fame
and career and concentrates on religion as his main goal, not later in 1976 as
so many people have assumed? Either way, ‘18th Avenue’ is an
admirable but uncomfortable song that stretches out into quite new directions
we’ve never gone to with Cat before and the middle instrumental (the musical
equivalent of a panic attack) is particularly striking, with its pounding piano
riff and haunting strings. I’m glad this sort of song didn’t become a mainstay
of Cat’s writing but I’m also glad it’s there as a one-off, a highly revealing
slab of nerves and hopelessness that adds a few more dimensions to the other,
more confident sounding songs around it.
[84] ‘Freezing Steel’ is
a more muscly, confident take on a similar subject that suffers badly for
coming straight after such an experimental song. Had this one come first, I might
well have been admiring its own courageous decisions to show frustration and
emptiness like never before – as it is, it sounds like Cat chickening out on
going all the way (as per ‘18th Avenue’) and writing his very real
and tragic feelings of confusion and panic as a comedy song. Like his younger
self after one too many parties Cat has fallen ill, his eyes ‘weak from the
light of the morning’ after another night without any proper sleep, but this
time Cat seems to be suffering from insomnia that leaves him awake remembering
how bad it was before when he did this. Another ambiguous song, the most
realistic reading seems to be that Cat’s narrator is in a mental asylum (‘The
House Of Freezing Steel’), where yet again he’s being restrained (‘they tied my
body up’) and seemingly fed against his will (just listen to the shock and
disdain with which Cat sings perhaps the oddest line of his career – ‘A cold
plate of lamb and cold potatoes too, now what’s soul to do?!’) My take is that
he’s accidentally wondered off the path of enlightenment and like many a former
addict is struggling with the idea that he might have to fight his demons all
over again, afraid of how insane it might drive him this time. For instance,
this adventure seems to be happening all in the narrator’s head – he hasn’t
walked or been carried to the ‘Freezing Steel’ House, he’s ‘flown’ there and
his body’s ‘back’ safely home before his brain is – his brain is still in this
world of drinks and parties. The last verse is even odder, a ‘freak without a
face’ from ‘Venus’ trying to abduct him before the narrator speaks up and
pleads to be taken home (unless, of course Cat means that this world feels
alien to him now even though he used to spend all his time there). Could it be
that this song is all a hallucination – and if it is, could it be a leftover
from the days when the drugs Cat was taking for TB did give him some kind of
hallucinatory experiences? (or, if a new song, is this a memory of some past
frightening experience or a lapse back into old drug ways?) In that case the
‘House of Freezing Steel’ is – what else? – a hospital (it would also explain
the lines about food – anyone whose ever stayed in a UK hospital will tell you
that, no matter how awful or life-threatening an illness you have, the hospital
food will always make you feel worse). Cat was, of course, wary of hospitals
after spending so much of his life in one – this track sounds like his
commitment to himself and us that he won’t ever go back there again as he cries
‘please take me home!’ Musically this is very much one of ‘Catch-Bull’s
turbulent songs, one which goes through more keys than a careless caretaker but
it also has a stronger, more hummable melody line over the top than any of the
album’s other, similar restless songs – if not quite as memorable as ‘18th
Avenue’ or the more traditional songs on this LP.
[85] ‘O’Caritas’ is a traditional sounding Greek
song – or ‘Laiko’ as it should properly be called (translated as ‘A song of the
people’ as opposed to one for religious or political causes). It’s the second
and last time Cat ever tried to address his Greek ancestry in music following
[65] ‘Rubylove’ (born in London to the son of a Greek restaurateur, Cat
probably heard a great deal of traditional Greek music in his youth, although
with the West End on his doorstep he’s admitted that his biggest pre-Beatles
influence was actually musicals). As a more serious song than its predecessor,
one that studies the form rather than just the instrumentation, the result is
fascinating and of huge historical importance, even if sticks out in Cat’s
catalogue like the Spice Girls at an awards ceremony. Naturally Cat sings in
Greek almost throughout (changing to English for the last verse), but
interestingly he uses this foreign language to talk not about something
personal or something particularly suitable to his Greek heritage as, say,
Stephen Stills would do but uses this chance to ‘hide’ from us by offering up one
of his most universal songs. A ‘cold war’ song about the threat of annihilation
at a moment’s notice and how mankind is not the best or most caring caretaker
for the planet he lives on, it’s as if Cat is trying to show how the threat
affects us all, not just the countries at the heart of the conflict. The song
would be translated into English as ‘Oh, Love’, but the song addresses love as
a universal concept rather than an individual, Cat pleading ‘love...be with us
always!’, while painting a vivid portrait of the end of the world (‘I see all
things burning, I hear men shouting, now is the light of the world and the
stars going out...’; thankfully there’s a full translation of the lyric in the
booklet for both vinyl and CD; very interesting reading it makes too!)
Curiously, too, you could claim that this Greek, foreign-language song is the
closest we ever get to hearing Cat sing a ‘Christian’ song in the same way he
sings ‘Buddhist’ and ‘Islamist’ ones elsewhere, a holdover perhaps of his youth
at a Greek Orthodox Primary School full of assemblies about vengeful Gods and
burning worlds. Cat plays the Spanish guitar himself but rather than making
long-suffering Alun Davies learn something else new he brings in expert session
musician Andreas Toumazis in to play the bouzouki, while what’s credited as the
‘Cat Stevens Choir’ (in reality lots of Cats overdubbed on top of each other)
provide the vocals. It’s great to hear Cat trying something so different and
the band do a great job of coming up with a performance worthy of a Nana
Mouskouri record, but despite it’s worth it’s hard for non-Greek listeners to
get inside this song; the end result is a little like watching a Eurovision
song in the days before subtitles allowed us to laugh at all the daft translations
and get to grips with each entry. Still, the lyric alone is fascinating and
worth a read.
[86] ‘Sweet Scarlet’ is Cat alone at his piano and
back to singing from personal experience again, not quite sure whether to be
pleased or embarrassed at being ‘so unguarded’ with a girl he fancies. For
years I assumed ‘Sweet Scarlet’ was the name of the person (this is another of
Catch-Bull’s songs that seem deliberately mixed to be muffled and hard to hear,
especially on vinyl), but no – now that I’ve belatedly studied the song
properly the ‘sweet scarlet’ turns out to be the drops of wine in the
narrator’s glass. Cat revealed after the album came out that he was thinking of
Carly Simon when he wrote this – the giveaway line is the one about her walking
into the room in her trademark ‘feathered hat’ - and I’m not sure whether she
should be flattered or not (on the one hand there’s the line ‘A gypsy with a
grin from an old country far away’ which isn’t altogether flattering– on the
other ‘deep beneath her curls...there was so much more to see’). Cat’s singing
the song in the past tense and the partnership is clearly over by the third
verse (‘All those days are frozen now and all those scars are gone’) but Cat makes
it clear that, being songwriters, the two of them will be drawing from this
well of memories for some time to come and admits to how touched he was by this
romance while it lasted (‘Ah but the song carries on...so holy’). By the end
the date is over, the bottle empty and ‘all those dreams are gone’, with both
lovers admitting that they can’t sustain this relationship for any longer. Cat
sounds sad, watching her return to a life he knows ‘she never really wanted’
but feeling powerless to stop her because he can’t offer her anything more
substantial. Listen out for the album’s upteempth astrological reference (the
pair are ‘looking for a way, Moons in an endless day’ – both Cat and Carly are
Cancerians). It’s interesting too that yet again Cat should stick in a
religious reference in a song where it doesn’t seem it should belong, using the
phrase ‘so holy’ as if the meeting and parting was meant to be, as if his
search for human companionship and his spiritual quest have become inextricably
linked. Lyrically, in fact, ‘Sweet Scarlet’ has enough material for writers
like me to keep them going a long, long time full of symbols and allusions to
what sound like real events whilst being ambiguous enough to hide the truth
behind a smokescreen. As a song its one of cat’s best quiet ballads; it’s
musically (and production-wise) this song suffers: the piano melody isn’t
anywhere near as strong as the accompaniments Cat played throughout ‘Tillerman’
and ‘Teaser’ and seems to be more to give the vocal something to sing along to
than exist in its own right. The curious mix, which puts everything into the
background once again, is also particular damaging here, making the song cold
and uninviting when it should be invested with more emotional warmth than
pretty much anything else on the album. A bit of variety wouldn’t have gone
amiss again, too, with three straight verses, a one-line, two-word chorus and a
frustratingly brief instrumental solo in the middle. Even so, it’s ever so
nearly a great track.
The album ends on a highpoint with [87] ‘Ruins’ though – if
the destruction of the world can be called a ‘highpoint!’ At first, Cat’s
revelation that he’s walking through the ‘ruins’ of a ‘quiet town’ suggests
some grand Roman excavation or some WW2-hit monument before it gradually dawns
on you that the time is the near-present and that the destruction could take
place at any moment without warning, although Cat is ambiguous whether the
destruction is natural or man-made (‘Winter turned on man when no one was
looking’). Cat once again mourns not for the loss of people in the quiet,
secluded neighbourhood but the sound, energy and hope that used to ring out and
give him hope for humanity (referring back to his lyrical favourite of a place
where [41] ‘children played’). Cat is at his poetic best in the song’s lyric,
which must be one of the bleakest he ever wrote and takes in ‘shadows of
falling sand’ ‘buildings standing like empty shells’ and ‘people always running
scared’. The melody, though, is one of Cat’s warmest and most beautiful, taking
a nervy rhythm guitar part that rocks back and forth between two notes and soothing
it, helping it resolve into the warm glow of where the chords naturally want to
go, as if cat is cooing a baby to sleep. Again the mix puts Cat in the
background, but this time the effect is a positive one, making Cat sound as if
he’s afraid of breaking the aching silence all around him, a lone voice in the
darkness who can see what’s going wrong with the world. The song only really
gets ‘loud’ for two sections – a curious repetitive chorus (‘So nice to see you
coming into this town again’) that doesn’t work too well (it sounds like it
belongs in a different song altogether and is never referred to in the verse’s
lyrics) and a much better middle eight, that builds and builds across nine
torturous lines, screamed at full volume (starting ‘You’d better know what
you’re going through now...’) Cat has been whispering so often throughout this
album that the moment is magical: you expect him to fall back into a whisper
again but he doesn’t, picking up power and speed thanks to another great Gerry
Conway drum lick as he mocks us for ignoring what’s happening down the street.
‘Well just keep on walking, just keep on talking, and you’d better close your
eyes to the people you meet!’ There’s a twist, though, like so many of the best
Cat Stevens songs: he means it kindly, warning us to keep away from the
destruction and to keep the stinging smoke out of our eyes. He’s also shouting
because it sounds as if another attack is taking place and it’s the only way to
be heard. By the end Cat is left regretting the change on an album that finds
him less sure about embracing it than usual. His wail ‘I want back!’ sums up
this album’s frazzled soul in a nutshell – only Cat Stevens has learnt too much
to ever go back. Cat then turns to us for a final reflective verse, returning
to the quiet opening of [41] ‘Where Do The Children Play?’ with his plea that
technological progression isn’t really progression if it sends the spiritual
course of man backwards resulting in one of the album’s best lyrics (‘Where’s
it leading to? Freedom at what cost? People are needing more and more and it’s
all getting lost’). Cat’s final plea for ecological sense and a return to the
days ‘when the Earth was green’ isn’t the first or last time he’s used this
tack, but it is one of his most effective, an environmental song that far from
being namby-pamby or a cosy singalong (like so many charity-driven
environmental protest songs) tells it like it is and the ghostly ghastliness of
what will happen if things don’t change. The fact that some of what Cat sang
about forty years ago has come true now only makes this gentle preach of a song
all the more powerful. Easily the best song on the album you can’t find on a
‘greatest hits’ LP, ‘Ruins’ is a song that too often gets overlooked in Cat’s
oeuvre, but is one of his most effective and by far his best attempt at working
on a song of two halves, with a noisy middle and quiet beginning and end
effectively controlled (this in itself may be a response to Rolling Stone
Magazine, who said ‘Tillerman’ and ‘teaser’ were great in every way except this
dynamic control, with every track starting with the same level of noise and
ending there – whether by coincidence or defence this one certainly doesn’t!)
Overall, then, ‘Catch-Bull At Four’ is an intriguing
album. Sometimes the toreador wins, sometimes the bull, with Cat clearly at a
crossroads point in his life wondering if everything he’s ever told us is right
and worried that he won’t live up to the demands he sings of, with two nightmare
songs about falling into old habits. Unlike a dog, though, you can teach a Cat
new tricks and Stevens finds a new way to embellish his usual songwriting
techniques with this extra level of doubt and worry. He does this musically as
well as lyrically for the first real time too: one reason this record sounds
less satisfying and rounded than its Island records predecessors is how so many
songs are ‘homeless’, dodging keys this way and that and seemingly lost in the
emptiness of space, unsure which way to turn. Cat does have the secret though,
if our reading of ‘Can’t Keep It In’ is to be believed – he knows that religion
is his destiny, but sounds as if he isn’t sure yet which religion to pick,
sticking to Buddhism for now on an album of karma but one with many Christian
songs on it and ideas from elsewhere. The Cat Stevens records get stranger and
stranger from this point on in and Cat is clearly casting around for a new
direction here, with a colder less welcoming sound than we’ve had before.
However this is also the last great Cat album of truly consistent songs before writing
becomes more of a chore and a career than a source of discovery, Cat’s mind now
on higher things. ‘Catch-Bull’, then, is a stepping-stone of a record from the
Cat whose finally sussed out how to talk directly to his audience and the Cat
who realises that he doesn’t really need an audience anyway, the bull now
spotted but not yet caught.
A NOW COMPLETE LIST
OF CAT STEVENS ARTICLES TO READ AT ALAN’S ALBUM ARCHIVES:
'Matthew and Son' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/cat-stevens-matthew-and-son-1967.html
'New Masters' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/news-views-and-music-issue-114-cat.html
'Mona Bone Jakon' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-35-cat-stevens-mona-bone-jakon.html
'Tea For The Tillerman' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-41-cat-stevens-tea-for-tillerman.html
'New Masters' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/news-views-and-music-issue-114-cat.html
'Mona Bone Jakon' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-35-cat-stevens-mona-bone-jakon.html
'Tea For The Tillerman' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-41-cat-stevens-tea-for-tillerman.html
‘Teaser and the Firecat’
(1971) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/cat-stevens-teaser-and-firecat-1971.html
'Catch-Bull At Four' (1972)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/cat-stevens-catch-bull-at-four-1972.html
‘Foreigner’ (1973) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/cat-stevens-foreigner-1973.html
'Buddha And The Chocolate Box' (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-62-cat-stevens-buddha-and.html
'Numbers' (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/news-views-and-music-issue-46-cat.html
'Izitso?' (1977) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/news-views-and-music-issue-140-cat.html
‘Foreigner’ (1973) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/cat-stevens-foreigner-1973.html
'Buddha And The Chocolate Box' (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-62-cat-stevens-buddha-and.html
'Numbers' (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/news-views-and-music-issue-46-cat.html
'Izitso?' (1977) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/news-views-and-music-issue-140-cat.html
'Back To Earth' (1978) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/cat-stevens-back-to-earth-1978.html
'An Other Cup' (2006) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/05/yusufcat-stevens-other-cup-2006.html
'Roadsinger' (2009) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/news-views-and-music-issue-31-yusuf-aka.html
'Tell 'Em I'm Gone' (2014) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/yusuf-cat-stevens-tell-em-im-gone-2014.html
'Roadsinger' (2009) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/news-views-and-music-issue-31-yusuf-aka.html
'Tell 'Em I'm Gone' (2014) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/yusuf-cat-stevens-tell-em-im-gone-2014.html
‘The Laughing Apple’
(2017) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/cat-stevens-laughing-apple-2017.html
Surviving TV Appearances
1967-2015 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/cat-stevensyusuf-surviving-tv.html
The Best Unreleased
Recordings 1969-2009 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/cat-stevensyusuf-best-unreleased.html
Non-Album Recordings
1966-2014 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/cat-stevensyusuf-non-album-recordings.html
Compilations, Box sets and
Alun Davies LPs Part One 1963-1990
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/cat-stevens-compilationslive-lps-part.html
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/cat-stevens-compilationslive-lps-part.html
Compilations, Box Sets and
Religious Works Part Two 1995-2012
Essay:
What Was On The Road To Find Out? https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/06/cat-stevens-essay-what-was-on-road-to.html
Landmark Concerts and Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/07/cat-stevens-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
Landmark Concerts and Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/07/cat-stevens-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
