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CAT STEVENS “FOREIGNER” (1973)
Foreigner Suite//The Hurt/How Many Times?/Later/100 I Dream
‘Come
on now it’s the taxman calling, come on over and find yourself…’
When Cat Stevens left the music business behind to
become Yusuf Islam I remember reading an interview with him that asked how
someone could possibly give up an and just walk away from not just a career but
art form that had been such a major part of their lives for so many decades
just like that. We know now, thanks to Yusuf re-starting his career in the mid
00s that Cat found it hard and for a long time wondered whether his music was
compatible with his new life (the Qur'an doesn’t forbid music as some suppose
say, only making money from it or singing ‘immoral’ songs, something you could
never accuse Cat Stevens of – well apart from [28] ‘I’m Gonna Get Me A Gun’ in
1967 anyway). However I found his answer at the time fascinating: Cat was
giving up music because he thought that an obsession with a simple art form
merely filled the gap until something more deeper and meaningful came along in
someone’s life – and in his case it was his gradual conversion to becoming a Muslim.
Ask him now and he’ll tell you that music is integral to life – that it can
help us to teach without preaching, that it helps us understand how the lives
of others differ from ourselves and can fill our hearts with hope and love (or
hopefully something less pretentious than the way I’ve just put it).
‘Foreigner’ though is when music changed from being
the saving of Cat to the obstacle that was getting in the way of his spiritual
quest. It’s not that the songs weren’t flowing or that the ideas weren’t there,
more that Cat was struggling to put his new discoveries in terms that his
audience would understand when they were just looking for another [70] ‘Morning
has Broken’ and [72] ‘Peace Train’. Cat has, in private, discovered religion.
He isn’t yet sure which religion but he knows that someone is calling him to a
higher power and he wants to find out more. He is also aware that his audience
don’t all want to go on this particular road to find out with him, that he is
better off for now keeping his songs ambiguous until he becomes sure of what
this path is. This is, however, a problem. Cat has, till now, made a career out
of writing from his heart and connecting with people, but now after that great
sequence of songs released between 1970 and 1971 about re-entering the world
Cat is finding humanity ugly and unfeeling. He no longer feels that connection
with his audience he once had or the optimism that things will get better. Just
to make him feel even more removed he is an actual exile from everyone – less
glamorously and morally as a tax exile in Brazil as it happens, because his
accountants have pointed out how much money he will lose to the Government, but
it amounts to the same thing: the Cat Stevens of 1972/1973 wasn’t spending a
lot of time around people. Suddenly he’s the foreigner in a land of locals,
feeling left out, abandoned, lost.
The reason Cat feels so removed from the world as
that this is the first categorical moment when he knows that there is a deeper
world out there. Ever since he nearly died in 1968 and arguably before that Cat
has been searching for something to make his life complete. So far Cat has
dabbled in lots of things – astrology, Buddhism, Christianity, romance –
without ever really finding something big enough to fill the hole he is looking
for. And then his brother David sends him for his birthday a copy of the
Qu’ran. This is not yet, however, the life-changing moment it would seem: the
Muslim text is merely one of many spiritual and religious hats Cat tries on for
size in this period and it won’t be for another couple of years yet that
Stevens truly makes the religion his life. However there’s evidence, from
interviews and song lyrics, that he starts to hear something calling to him in
this period, something bigger than he is, something he wants to explore further
even if he isn’t quite sure what direction it will take him yet. Cat feels the
tug of what he believes is God talking to him, but he isn’t yet speaking the
same language or convinced that he is hearing anything at all. Even so, it’s a
game-changer, the moment that making music becomes a distraction from his
‘true’ path rather than a duty to fulfil.
While every Cat Stevens album finds the singer ‘on
the road to find out’ to some extent, its ‘Foreigner’ where that spiritual
search becomes a crusade. Of all Cat Stevens’ record ‘Foreigner’ is the one
that finds Cat at his most confused and the album that is most clearly crying
out for some form of deliverance, a guide to help him overcome everything in
his life and one where even the music that he used to use to define him has
significantly altered. Cat found other sources in which to pour his spiritual
soul once he discovered Islam and arguably needed music less and less as he
became more and more sure of himself and the decision he made; ‘Foreigner’
however finds him dipping a first toe into these religious waters and trying to
work out the direction to take while lost in a new, bold, daring adventure of
his own making. ‘Foreigner’ is in essence an album that, from its title down,
is the start of Cat’s journey away from superstardom and ‘spokesperson for a
generation’ acoustic feel in search for something more spiritually fulfilling,
sitting on the sidelines and on the outside looking in.
It’s an album so different in style and substance to
the albums that came before it that it’s split fans right down the middle ever
since its release in 1973, arguably throwing out triplets along with the bath
water in its desire to be always going somewhere new and unknown. To some ‘Foreigner’
is a hard album to take, a very mid 1970s self-indulgent record full of
prog-rock suites, r and b posing and hardly anything in common with the Cat
Stevens sound of the past (until the last gorgeous song ‘100 I Dream’ at
least). To others its one of the bravest records ever made, with the chance to
hear a seemingly never-ending song where Cat really bears his soul and for the
most part shies away from trying to educate his audience about how to live
their lives and to talk more about himself. Certainly ‘Foreigner’ is not an
album built for easy listening, despite having even more of a crystal clear
sheen than normal, but an inner conversation that it feels like we fans have
accidentally overheard and certainly wouldn’t be my recommendation for a first
purchase if you’re new to the man’s work. The biggest difference musically is
that Cat’s growing realisation that religion is his way forward means that he
struggles to contain everything in a three minute pop song. Instead Cat changes
how he works, delivering tense lengthy epics, brief snippets that barely get
going and complex but compact wordy songs. My view, as ever, is straight down
the middle: I applaud this album greatly for taking Cat out of his comfort zone
and for the occasional development that really sounds as if Cat is going
somewhere exciting and new; but for the most part this is a ‘teasing’ album, a
stepping stone towards new directions because Cat knows he has to change – but
one where he doesn’t yet know what he’s changed to. In these pre-specific-religion
days music is still the closest thing Cat had found to a spiritual balm, even
if he’s already begun to doubt the worth of his own muse and is desperate to
find something if not better than at least new. Often this album is biting off
more than it can chew, without the bite-sized nuggets of previous LPs, but then
that’s also the point: Cat has just stared into the abyss and knows a bit more
now about the generals if not the specifics of where his life is heading – by
showing that he too is maybe biting off more than he can chew he can carry on
being honest in his music, even if it ends up overwhelming us as much as his
new situation is overwhelming him. At times, as on the title suite, it’s just
too much. On others, such as ‘Later’, Cat is barely trying. On songs like ‘The
Hurt’ and ‘How Many Times?’ Cat is just being grumpy but without the inherent
musicality to make even his bad moods interesting. And then there’s ‘100 I
Dream’, the moment when this album finally comes together and Cat delivers one
of his true masterpieces that no one else could possibly have written just at
the point when you are thinking of giving up on him.
This album will have big repercussions for the rest
of Cat’s career, scaring so many people away. ‘Tillerman’ and ‘Teaser’ were
albums that perfectly encapsulated the hopes and fears of their time and
generation, with this album’s predecessor ‘Catch-Bull At Four’ making the first
small moves away from this lucrative formula, but ‘Foreigner’ is arguably the
first Cat album that feels out of time with the period and sadly cat will never
again regain the audience he loses here. The sad fact is that Cat has written
himself out on the subjects of peace and kindness, he’s a while out of hospital
bed now with the thrill of simply being alive again wearing off and he is
quickly realising that if he doesn’t forcibly end repeating himself straight
away he’ll simply end up in a musical straight-jacket for the rest of this
life. Even Cat himself looks different, with a more subdued forked beard on the
album cover instead of the full-beard look he’d sported since 1970 (it doesn’t
last long as his ‘new look’ but it’s significant that it made the front cover).
The other key feature of the packaging which I love is the contrast between the
back cover (an exotic tropical beach, marked by a hammock and drinks table,
everything you would imagine) and the insert (a polar bear, sketched by Cat
himself, and clearly the opposite of everything else the record is trying to
tell us). Cat isn’t in exile so much as he’s lost, searching for a direction
and the polar bear’s difficulty in adjusting to tropical heat is surely a
metaphor for his Western, London-via-Greece upbringing and musical superstardom
that couldn’t have been more of a contrast with the life he wanted to swap it for:
a dedicated scholarly religious follower.
The biggest
change from a fan’s point of view, however, is the overall sound of the album,
which swaps the traditional acoustic guitar duets of Cat and Alun Davies for a
more R and B soul sound, all rattling power drums, female choirs and
synthesisers instead of pianos. In contrast to ‘Mona’ ‘Tillerman’ and ‘teaser’,
which are made to sound big by doing very little, ‘Foreigner’ somehow manages
to sound small despite doing lots and filling every available note with sound. Cat
admitted in interviews of the time that his first musical ‘love’ (away from
Leonard Bernstein) had been this sort of soul sound but that somehow he’d found
his writing going down a different path in order to please pop fans of the mid
1960s; looking for a new direction after becoming bored with the old one Cat
raided his record collection and realised that he’d never really had a go at
soul. To be honest he still hasn’t, as by the time this album made into the
record ing studio it has been diluted to an odd gospel-blues hybrid only no one
has told Cat this as he tries to have a go at soul hollering anyway. This is sa
shame because Cat’s always been an emotional performer and arguably he could
have gotten away with this had his even bigger batch of session musicians been
alongside him. Had Cat continued with the genre he might well have become a
soul singer of some note (he even looks like one on the front cover of the
record, where his face is in black and white and taken in the shadows), but you
can’t learn a new skill overnight and for the most part Cat is trying to sound
like, say, Stevie Wonder rather than becoming a Stevie Wonder-influenced Cat
Stevens. Sometimes it works though: parts of ‘Foreigner’ are genuinely exciting
if you come to it with no prior knowledge of what a ‘Cat Stevens’ album should
sound like and there are fleeting moments in the title suite where it sounds as
if it has all come together. However like the ‘foreigner’ of the album title Cat
hasn’t been in this ‘world’ long enough to let the genre infiltrate his writing
and so he ends up sounding like a skilled copyCat rather than an inventive
pioneer. Perhaps most curiously (given how similar much of the sound is to his
old records after all) Cat also dispenses with the services of producer Paul
Samwell-Smith for the first time since moving to Island and records the album
himself (Paul clearly didn’t take this personally as he rejoins Cat for every
other album until the end in 1978, making this the only ‘classic’ studio Cat
album he didn’t have a hand in). Perhaps it’s simply that Cat feels so much on
his mind that he doesn’t want a middle man to interpret for him – or perhaps
he’s afraid that a middle man would simply point out what we’ve just expressed
in the paragraph above? Or maybe Cat really was striving for a whole new sound
and lost out by the end. ‘Foreigner’, if nothing else, shows what a steady hand
Samwell-Smith had at the tiller: this album sounds as if it needs someone
certain to get that extra 10% out of it, whether in the editing suite or the
control booth as the performances aren’t quite as sharp as before. Maybe,
though, Cat might have been better getting a genuine soul producer to take
part?
It is easy to laugh at Cat calling himself an exile
when by and large that was self-made through money – what we would nowadays
refer to as being ‘so offshore’ and asave a few quid is hardly the most
spiritual thing to do. This isn’t your average tax exile though: Cat’s really
big point with the British Government was that he was being taxed even on money
that he had donated to charity and that had done a lot of good around the
world. Cat figured that rather than ‘waste’ money on the taxman going into the
pockets of such ‘important’ things as the upkeep of Queen Elizabeth II’s
forty-two palaces and fuelling the borderline legal antics of her dodgy
offspring he may as well live out in the world and spend his money more wisely
that way. He centred on Brazil for reasons of sunshine and because it had a
really cooking music scene, with Ginger Baker down the road from his adopted
house and a load of other musical tax exiles dotted around. However Cat perhaps
didn’t count on feeling quite as isolated as he became, cut off from what he
was used to for the first time since 1969. Home is a big deal on Cat’s albums:
his next two albums both have wistful songs with ‘Home’ in the title ([102]
‘Home In The Sky’ and [110] ‘Home’ itself) and past songs have made it clear
that homes are more than bricks-and-mortar: it is where Cat feels safe, able to
be himself, a place to think away from the glare of the spotlight. This I think
is why he feels quite so cut-off during this album: once the ‘holiday’ feel of
the move wore off it must have hit him hard and it won’t be long till he comes
back home (celebrated with a return to his old London pad with its ‘red
bedroom’ seen on the cover of ‘Izitso?’) For now though Cat is an outcast, an
outsider, a foreigner if you will and he’s to some extent ‘homeless’ and at the
time it must have seemed like the real end of a chapter for Cat. That is a real
problem – not just for Cat feeling lonely in 1972/73 but because, perhaps more
than any other writer, Cat needs to see people to write about them, to live
amongst them and see the world through their eyes. All he has for this album
are his own and for now he’s lost his confidence about telling us about his own
life, unable to work out quite what to make of it yet.
You’d expect that Cat would have recorded his album
in Brazil, absorbing the climate and capturing it on tape the same way that
Paul Simon did with ‘Rhythm Of The Saints’ in 1990, but this was in the days
before there was a studio in every country and instead Cat chose the nearest
one, which in 1973 was located as far away as Jamaica. Actually, in an
interesting twist, Cat took over the studios directly after the Rolling Stones
recorded ‘Goat’s Head Soup’ there and like that album the move seems odd to us
now: there’s almost no link between these two records and the music being
recorded there on a daily basis by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh and co. Reggae
wasn’t that well known to the Western world in 1973 but you’d still expect to
see some sign of it somewhere in these grooves after travelling all that way
and being surrounded by the people who worked on those albums for a living:
instead this album sounds like it was recorded in Motown-era America, with a
very English brass section overdubbed later for good measure. Equally the
Stones record an even more archetypically swamp rock Anglicised American record
there than normal – perhaps absence from a country makes the heart grow fonder
for it?
Cat also had to leave girlfriend Linda Lewis at
home. The singer had by now become more of a steady item with Cat after a brief
dalliance with Carly Simon and though she’s been in Cat’s periphery since 1970 this
is, I think, the first album properly written for her. ‘Foreigner Suite’ is one
of the oddest AAA love songs of them all though, without the passion of [38]
‘Lady D’arbanville’ or [80] ‘Angelsea’. Cat keeps changing his mind for one
thing, wrestling with his conscience as to whether he can morally leave his new
girlfriend halfway across the world and alternating between missing her and
getting used to life without her. If Cat’s career is, as we’ve had fun putting
together in our essay, a series of paths and ‘roads to find out’ then this is
the track that finds Cat changing his mind about which one to drive down,
committing and then removing himself. Though he ends the eighteen minute opus
with an outpouring of love, notably recycled in 2006 as a full-on love song
[139] ‘Heaven/Where True Love Goes’), he takes the long way round getting there
and doesn’t sound entirely sure even then (there’s an alternative reading that
Cat isn’t singing about a girl at all but God – more on that later). ‘The Hurt’
is a worry too: whether inspired by leaving Linda behind, still hurt by losing
Patti D’arbanville (or both) it is the most aggrieved we’ve heard Cat outside [71] ‘Bitterblue’, only realising too late
how much a person meant to him. ‘Later’ meanwhile is an oddly lusty track, Cat
dreaming of his lover’s body in her absence and winking at us at home about
what he’s going to do as soon as he gets off-mike (though not quite as naughty
as [43] ‘Mona Bone Jakon’, the fact we’re meant to be in on the joke this time
makes it so different to Cat’s usual style it feels it comes out of left-field,
like so much of this album). This isn’t, then, an album about God – not yet –
but an album about love in all its different facets, from someone so far away
from home that they are just waiting for a postcard or the phone to ring,
desperate for any crumb of affection in their lonely life.
Overall, then, ‘Foreigner’ is an album for fans who
want to understand what makes Cat Stevens tick and are particularly intrigued
about the life changes he went through circa 1972-73. It’s not an album for
casual fans or those who want to hear hit songs and empty repetitive rockers
and ballads and it’s not even particularly high on the list of ‘greatest Cat
Stevens albums’, although ‘Foreigner’ is not without its good points. Perhaps
the most frustrating aspect about this album is that Cat won’t make good on the
promises made on this album (especially on ‘Later’) to tell us about his new
life and the changes going on inside him; instead it’ll be kept a secret as Cat
distances himself from his music and quietly retires in 1978. Although Cat’s
albums after this all have their moments (and the next, ‘Buddha and the
Chocolate Box’ returns to his very best) you somehow get the impression that
this musical career is no longer the be all and end all of Cat’s life it once
was and only in 2006 (when Cat came out of retirement as ‘Yusuf’ on ‘An Other
Cup’) do we get the ‘end’ part of the story posed on ‘Foreigner’. Alas by then
it’s almost too late: by now the religious conversion is no longer an exciting
bold spiritual journey but a life that’s been lived for nearly thirty years and
is definitely the sound of an older man looking back alarmed on the folly of
his youth rather than an artist really getting to grips with the changes going
on inside him. Ultimately, perhaps, the demands made by this album weren’t
worth the struggle in the end; the fans got scared away, critics began to sneer
and the momentum built up over the past few years where Cat seemed to be the
perfect writer for his times began to fade away. By the next year (and
‘Buddha’) Cat is back with his old producer, his old backing band, his old
English studios and his ‘old’ style and it’s as if ‘Foreigner’ never happened;
which is a tragedy because for all its faults ‘Foreigner’ is clearly an album
from the heart and one that does a pretty good job at getting across the
feeling of major changes in Cat’s life, even if it doesn’t quite pin itself
down as to what changes those are. ‘Foreigner’ should have been the start of a
whole new lifestyle, Cat emigrating finally to a new land and embracing all of
the nuances of a new culture – in the end it turned out to be just an extended
holiday. But you know what they say, a change is as good as a rest and perhaps
its ‘Foreigner’ that we owe the next great run of albums to, for without this
album Cat might simply have repeated his successful formula to extinction. And
in the long run that would have been a far worse crime that releasing one
eccentric, genre-moulding, patchy album like ‘Foreigner’.
The
Songs:
[89] ‘The Foreigner Suite’ is undoubtedly a song
close to its author’s heart. The passion Cat puts into his vocal and the length
he went to record and re-record it in several complex edited sections shows how
badly he wanted to get it right and to boot Cat also personally asked that a
section of it (around 12-15 minutes in) was added to his first post-career
‘best of’ CD (not to mention Cat recycling one of the melodies for a song on
his 2006 comeback). However, the trouble with this epic rock suite is that this
song is so personal we listeners feel like ‘foreigners’ in this land, unable to
translate all the little messages in the work and unsure about the final
destination. On first glance it’s a love song: Cat is pouring his heart out to
someone (Linda Lewis?) that its taken him a long time to be sure but he is
ready now to pursue them after a series of nightmares and living through their
absence. This is bigger than just a love song though: there’s a whole middle
about what it means to be ‘free’ and how easy it is for man to get distracted
off his true path thanks to wealth. My guess is that this song is also Cat the
spiritual seeker finally realising that God is knocking on his door and
wondering whether to ignore it and hide the curtains or to embrace it and let
him in. This is why this song has to be so long and so epic: because it matters
so much, the decision on which the rest of cat’s life will depend. He awakens
from a nightmare and realises that his mind reaches out to someone ‘over to
that sunnyside road’ which is surely a metaphor for Heaven (a point made much
clearer on the re-make [134] actually called ‘heaven’). He is worried to ‘face
up to the light’ but has really turned in this direction, embracing the
‘freedom calling’ that allows him to ‘find myself’ while there’s ‘only one
freedom for you’. By the end of the song Cat has lost his doubts and gort his
gospel shouting out of his system: he doesn’t need to tell the world of his
conversion and he’s not even sure what that is yet; he just needs someone to
take his hand and lead him there. By the end the two strands of the song have
become one, Cat reaching out to a girl because ‘heaven must have programmed
you’ – he at last feels after much soul-searching that this was a path he was
fated to take. Even so, the genius of ‘Foreigner Suite’ and simultaneously the
most frustrating thing about it is that it is a song we’re not meant to understand, something
that makes it not just open to even more interpretation than usual but is also
about a discovery that cannot be put
into words just yet. On paper the idea
of cat bearing his soul across an entire side of vinyl without restriction should
be brilliant, but somehow the end result is cold and distant for all the
free-form shouting and passion.
All that said, there’s some lovely scenery here in
the moments between the realisations: despite the lengthy running time this is
the closest we get to hearing Cat at his most basic and raw, aping the r and b
sounds of his childhood. The way the music builds up layer by layer is classic
Cat too, the singer unsure of his journey ands the song unsure of its chords or
melody as it keeps switching gears before gradually getting to grips with where
he’s headed and why. The best part of this song are the points where cat shuts
up and lets his band play: the groovy jazz shuffle around the two minute mark
where Cat’s synth playing, Jean Roussel’s boogie piano and Gerry Conway’s
cymbal-heavy rocking hit each other head on; the moment 3:45 in when Cat has
built up to an emotional climax and the musicians all keep going, rattling into
an impressive improvised jam session is especially thrilling, the tempo building
up to a real climax before it slides sideways, the horns and strings superbly
arranged by Jean join in and fight the dark minor key piano chords that try to
drag them down while Phil Upchurch digs out a wah-wah pedal for his guitar; the
surprisingly funky six minute mark that features a riff being thrown between
synths and piano like a pass-the-parcel that’s radioactive; finally the rocking
groove across the lengthy fadeout that plays the main tune with a real groove
and which actually sounds better without the lyrics Throughout Gerry Conway
(later part of both Jethro Tull and Fairport Convention) is a heavy presence in
the mix and ‘sneezes’ his way all through the song, with a tricky hi-hat
shuffle that sounds more like jazz than rock and roll. Goodness only knows why
Cat replaces him for the second half of the song, where the drumming by Bernard
Purdie isn’t quite as alive or in-the-moment. Cat’s regular sideman Jean
Roussel is along for the ride too, adding some distinctive synthesised chirping
to go alongside Cat’s piano playing although intriguingly he also plays a bass
part. I’m less keen on the female choir who crop up near the end (turning this
song slightly too far into ‘gospel’, when it should be ‘soul’) and it’s sad
Alun davies couldn’t make the trip to Jamaica as the album badly misses him.
Overall, though, you only have to glance at the sheer amount of changes in
personnel in the vinyl or CD booklet to realise just how much effort has gone
into making this track – and how impressively joined together musically it all
is, each quarter of the track segueing effortlessly into the next. . If the
suite works at all – and it sort of does, without being the masterpiece it
tries to be – then it is because of this tight band who all play out of their skins
here on a track that must have been hell to record (and edit – let’s hear it
for the engineer John Middleton!)
The musician credits suggest that this is an eight
part suite but in reality it’s more like
four: we start off with the narrator struggling to work out what’s going
on in his life and trying to translate his ‘dreams’ before finally bursting
forth with joy at the realisation that he’s on the right path (‘over to that
sunnyside road’; I could write a whole essay on the metaphors inherent in that
sentence (Heaven? Facing North where the sun is?) but I’m willing to bet its
something more simple, like the name of Cat’s new address in Brazil taken as a
lucky metaphor. The second (approximately 5 minutes in) is more universal, a
surprise return to the ‘hippie dream’ that we can all be ‘free’ if we choose to
and the state of our health, bank balances and occupations can’t divide us if
we all come to spiritual enlightenment in our own way. The third (about nine
minutes in) is back to the personal and sounds more doubtful, the narrator
describing how beautiful the new ‘love’ in his life is although it’s
interesting that its sung not with conviction but with awe mixed with concern
(does the narrator deserve this good change in his life?) The fourth (which starts
around twelve minutes in) is probably the weakest and sounds a little forced to
me, as if Cat realised his epic song needed a better ending, so he simply tacks
on a slow torch ballad procession about how sure he is that this is the right
part. A sudden swirling musical flourish (‘Heaven must have programmed you!’)
then rounds things off, though too late for my taste (I’d rather have had this
brief finale as the complete last quarter of the song).
Alas the same can’t be said for the lyrics, which do
sound like four separate songs stapled together without that much to link them
really. The ‘foreigner’ idea of the title isn’t really explored – it comes and
goes as the narrator feels pulled towards or away from the new life opening up
in front of him. The first section is a little clumsy by Cat’s standards, the
words falling over themselves and struggling to develop any further than the
opening ‘there are no words I can use...’, an idea already used to better
effect on [68] ‘How Can I Tell You?’ Some of the rhymes are quite clumsy too:
‘choose’ and ‘you’, ‘night’ and ‘fright’ and ‘met’ and ‘respect’ aren’t as
inspired as Cat clearly wants to sound. He has just woken up from a nightmare
though so I guess he’s allowed to be a bit below par – I wonder if this is a
repeat of the nightmare heard on [83] ‘18th Avenue’ and whether Cat
has fallen back into his wild partying ways.
The second section is more intriguing, if only
because it’s so different compared to Cat’s ‘usual’ work. The song pauses too
often for my liking, raising and dropping the tempo before finally going full
throttle but when this part of the song finally kicks in (‘You can live in the
largest house...’) it’s probably the most satisfying part of the song as a
whole. It starts the way you’d expect, Cat mocking those who live their lives
greedily, reaching out for money and status symbols when they haven’t even
started their spiritual journey. ‘well you can live in the largest house, and
eleven apartments too!’ cackles Cat, but you can be more lost than, say, [10]
‘The Tramp’ if his spiritual house is in order. Cat is then playing hard-to-get
with either his new love or his new God, telling us ‘I love you and I think
about you sometimes’, but suddenly the song goes into overdrive when cat is
with them again and realises how powerful the feeling is, that ‘when you’re
with me boy it chokes my mind!’ Suddenly we’re moving off the personal into the
universal and into a call-to-arms is a dead ringer for John Lennon circa 1971 (with
the feel of ‘Give Peace A Chance’ ‘Instant Karma’ and especially ‘Power To The
People’), sounding like a marching band driving forward into ‘freedom’. It all
sounds so good that you half believe that freedom really is calling and cat
cuts this part short far too soon as his doubts creep back in again. This is a
different meaning of ‘freedom’ to overthrowing Government though, this is Cat
calling on the world to be free to be themselves, before re-thinking what this
means. People will always need someone to lead them, he supposes, but what
gives one person the right to think they need freedom more than anyone else? He
sees too many false leaders ready to lead people ‘away’ from the true path and
so has second thoughts about driving us on to be with them. So instead he goes
back to the standard Cat Stevens message that nobody can save us but ourselves,
reflecting [56] ‘But I Might Die Tonight’ as he argues, perhaps more to his
younger self than us, ‘why wait until it’s your time to die before you learn
what you were born to do?’ There’s only one freedom he realises, but instead of
confirming that it is to be true to ourselves he leaves us hanging with the
words ‘I can’t wait to be with you tomorrow night’. So man can’t save himself
them but needs other people?
Cat is desperate to break away from the rest of
humanity, living his life for a purpose rather than to fill in time before he
dies and he’s adamant that we should follow him – although he doesn’t actually
know which direction he’s turning to yet.
That comes (sort-of) in the third section which is pretty much a
standalone ballad. Cat sings alone to his own lovely piano accompaniment, with
a real tension that runs round and round in bursts of emotion before finally
landing flat and leaving us (briefly) in silence. A worried Cat is having
doubts about his spiritual quest and begs the listener ‘Won’t you give me your
word that you won’t laugh?’ as he bears his soul and admits that he is now
fully committed. Without his love or perhaps his God his life would be empty
and ‘my life would be without sound’ (a very scary thought for us AAA fans)
before adding that this love he feels is so wonderful that ‘heaven must have
made you on a Sunday’. In a sweet passage he feels the sky ‘glitter with Gold
when you’re talking to me’, an image that recalls cat’s last love song [80]
‘Angelsea’ (given the idea that this girl came from Heaven its interesting how
similar the two songs are). Cat gradually builds up both musical steam and
certainty in his quest, however, returning to the opening gambit that ‘there
are no words I can use’, but this time to describe the wonders of devotion
rather than confusion. He’s left us behind, unable to tell us in a simple song
what it means to have stepped into the world of being a believer – or singing
about the depths of real true love. Indeed he steps away and refuses to write
more, knowing that his worse would be an ‘abuse’ of what he feels now. Somehow
though cat keeps going, telling us that while he looks the same as he always
did the changes aren’t in his face but in his heart. ‘Will you?’ this section
ends over and over, a plea to both God/love to take him up on his offer of
commitment and to us for not laughing. As per the music, this is lyrically the
weakest part of the song, slowed down to a crawl and the section is just that
tiny bit too long.
The last section then rounds off the song with a
seemingly straightforward declaration of earthly love, adding that ‘I’ve seen
many girls before’ but only this one comes direct from ‘heaven’. After eighteen
minutes Cat finally feels certain and the song, which has been trying to find
its way to this central theme for so long but kept being interrupted, is now
free to play out on a rocky jazzy version of the tune that lasts for quite a
few minutes. Alas after such a build-up this simplest part of the song is not
enough to be the pay-off such a lengthy song needs and even after eighteen
minutes the ending seems premature, Cat fading off without having really
convinced us of his true emphatic joy, however many soul hollers he adds over
the fade-out.
However even Cat couldn’t escape the ‘material
world’ altogether. In 2009 Cat’s music publishers sued Coldplay (along with Joe
Satriani) over claims that they had ‘borrowed’ the melody line from the final
section of their song for their hit single ‘Viva La Vida’, one of many legal
wranglings Cat has been involved with down the years. To be fair Cat claimed to
keep his distance from the whole affair and claimed he’d like to meet the band
‘over lunch’ to discuss the claim rather than sue them, but he rather pointedly
re-used the melody himself for the song ‘Heaven/Where True Love Goes’ on ‘An
Other Cup’ as if to stake his claim to the track. That all seems a bit of a
petty come down for a song that really does sound as if it has the ability to
fix lives and offer ‘answers’. Unfortunately ‘Foreigner Suite’ inevitably ends
up trying to pull off more than it can and the end result is a mixed bag, with
a strong opening and middle section that simply goes on too long and runs out
of ideas by the third and fourth parts. However, you sense it’s a song that Cat
had to get out of his system: that there was simply so big a change in his life
at the time he couldn’t possibly contain it in a regular three minute pop song
and it’s for its sheer depth and complexity that many fans love this track. I
love the opening, with its darting soul and r and b dances and its sudden drive
forward at the five minute mark after building up to a climax (only Pink
Floyd’s superb ‘Echoes’ matches ‘Foreigner’ in the respect of a long tense
build-up), but the ending arguably needs more work or a good editor. Or at
least it does so here on the record – live versions of the song (in all its 18
minute glory!) are a little subtler and livelier I’ve found. There’s also something
slightly cold and unwelcoming about this song if you sit through it to the end,
a sense that we’ve gone through all the emotional weight of the start for
little return and that in this journey only Cat himself can progress – we
‘foreigners’ are left to find our own way through the spiritual maze...
Side two is at least a little more accessible than
side one, even if only one song is truly up to Cat’s highest standards. [90] ‘The Hurt’,
sadly, isn’t it despite being probably the best known song from the album (and
a minor hit single). The song is really just an extension of a less exciting
part (the third) of ‘Foreigner Suite’, dismissing those who sit at home
expecting spiritual enlightenment to come to them without effort or those who
turn to false prophets who don’t demand the same effort. Cat is at his most sarcastic here as he paints a
picture of someone who thinks they can learn the true ways of the world alone
without any help and then turn to ‘false prophets’ without any ability to see
through them, sipping wine at home and ‘waiting for a miracle to come along’. A
nasty song in many ways this feels like cat turning on ‘us’ for not following
him through the door that opened for him on the last track – although it also
sounds a little like cat laughing at his old agnostic and atheist self (what’s
the difference? I don’t know and I don’t care. That’s not me being rude, that
really is the difference between the two viewpoints). However Cat doesn’t
really tell us why we should listen to him any more than these other ‘spiritual
peddlers’ and the whole atmosphere is rather uncomfortable – as if our
favourite teacher is turning on ‘us’ simply because we haven’t had his
experience or a chance to prove ourselves yet. I liken this song to many of
George Harrison’s from the ‘Living In The Material World’ album – it would be
fair enough if a spiritually enlightened soul turned on ‘us’ for not even
trying, but turning on your audience (who by and large have proved their
interest in spiritual matters by listening to your records) for not ‘getting’
the answers to life as fast as you when they’ve only just got ‘it’ themselves seems
churlish and uncharitable. What are we meant to do? So many of Cat’s songs tell
us to work out the answers for ourselves that it seems doubly unfair to be
attacked for not taking ‘this’ journey with Cat (who for all know is another
‘phoney mouth selling pace and religion in between karma chewing gum’). What’s
weirder is that this lyric feels stapled onto a chorus out of another song entirely,
one where Cat tells us that he only knew the meaning of love after he got hurt
and lost it. That’s a shame because the wistful melody on this track is one of
Cat’s best with a lovely use of minor chords that are still too angry to become
full-on sad just yet and this is also probably the best performance on the
album to boot, with a superb use of pedal steel (you can even hear one of the
musicians let out a ‘whoop’ some three minutes in he’s enjoying it so much). A
rather lacklustre and patronising middle eight aside (‘Don’t let me down, young
son’) ‘The Hurt’ is at least rather ear-catching and is slightly less demanding
than the songs around it on this album, but the lyrics of this song do hurt
more than a little if you care enough about Cat to follow him to here on his
most heavy-going album.
Well done, you made it to the latest ‘halfway song
in the book’ moment – and on this of all albums you need an excuse to celebrate
something in all the misery, so well done! [91] ‘How Many Times’ is another strangely grumpy song that’s close
in spirit to Ray Davies’ songs about boredom and mundanity. Slowed to a crawl,
this ballad sports a really lovely melody line again but is swamped by a lyric
and vocal that are both stretched to breaking point (and repeat the title line
too many times for comfort). The narrator doesn’t sound spiritually enlightened
here: instead he sounds fed up, turning to spirituality only for something to
do in between eating, drinking, sleeping and ‘shining my shoes’. My guess is
that this is Cat, following his first religious awakenings, getting impatient
that after offering himself up to God nothing has happened yet. He tells that
every day he walks past ‘your place’ but that he doesn’t have an invitation to
enter yet; this will come. The chorus sounds downright peculiar, the song
finally breaking into a trot on the line ‘nothing could ever ease the pain’ –
even a belief in a greater power isn’t enough to overcome the daily grind of
routine and boredom. The result is a song that deliberately sounds apathetic,
with Cat becoming passive in his quest for answers, which may be clever but
doesn’t make for very exciting listening. The old days of Cat investing so much
effort into his songs, of giving them all strong hooks and middle eights that
other writers would have made into whole songs if not entire concept albums,
seems to be long gone. You think this song is at least getting somewhere by the
end, as Cat sings of how he will do anything because ‘I want your loving again’
but alas the recording just ends up fading onto a tinkly piano solo and one of
the longest fade-outs in AAA history (some forty seconds or so). The song has a
distinctive soul flavour and might have sounded powerful in the hands of a
Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye, but Cat isn’t that type of a singer and doesn’t
have the power to sustain a song that revolves so much around his voice. The
result is one of his weakest pieces of the 1970s, disinterested and boring. Had
the lovely melody been sped up a little and given a sort of ‘then and now’
between the two worlds it might have been a winner; as it is the listener is
left asking ‘how many times am I going to have to sit through this song every
time I play the album?’
[92] ‘Later’ is much better, with a catchy vibrant
feel that’s easily the best of the three ‘soul’ songs on the record even if
this a song where again the words never come close to matching the melody. The
song has a strut the equal of Mick Jagger and for once on this album the massive
production really suits the song, giving the ominous riff dark shadows that
fleet across its skies, thanks to a backing gospel choir that appear and
disappear in clouds of production magic and a swirling orchestra dubbed low in
the mix. One of the greatest grooves Cat ever wrote, it’s just a shame that he
didn’t come up with a song to match this initial idea. The whole song revolves
around the title phrase, which is a sort of double-edged joke, promising both
spiritual enlightenment and more earthly sexual needs ‘later’, mixing the heady
sexual urges and desire for change until they’ve become one indistinguishable
whole. My guess, though, is that this started off as a more spiritual song
pleading again for revelations before Cat changed into something his audience
would relate to more (I’m surprised it wasn’t the single actually, performing a
similar role to [78] ‘Sitting’ from the last album). Cat wants to talk, to get his message to
someone who isn’t listening before, erm, ripping all their clothes off (bearing
souls?) but knows he has to wait. The sound is an unusual one for Cat and loser
in style to the sort of funk style of a George Clinton or Isaac Hayes and some
fans dislike it for being so basic in both theme and lyric. Actually it’s a
logical step from [82] ‘Can’t Keep It In’s manic energy even if the song is
saying quite the opposite. The re-write though means that it is as if the more
spiritual Cat’s interests get the more he’s trying to work out why he should
have had to endure the earthly plain at all and thus pays more attention to his
bodily needs. ‘Later’ is a mixed bag then; it sounds great and certainly livens
up an occasionally sluggish album (especially this second side) but would have
been better still with more developed ideas and lyrics to match.
The album then closes with [93] ‘100 I Dream’, the
highlight of the album and a last return to Cat’s traditional style, as if to
prove to his fans that he was still capable of sounding like he’s old self, he
simply had bigger fish to fry. The warmth and humanity absent from the rest of
the record is back in spades, with Cat back to the role of a kindly elder
brother, putting his arm round our shoulder and telling us the best course to
take through life as he has found it. The opening even sounds like a Biblical
text (‘They brang us up with horns...’ , truly one of the strangest opening
lines for a song on this whole site even if its just an archaic word for ‘brung’
and mentions of ‘ ‘old leader’s bones’ and a land formed by a ‘bluebird on a
rock’), as if the whole song is a discovery passed down through epochs of time.
The title, indeed, may be a ‘mock homage’, as if it’s an extract from Cat’s
bible (but instead of ‘Deuteronomy Chapter I’ its ‘I Dream Chapter C’). Cat
seems to be addressing the 1960s/1970s generation as a whole, teaching them
that what came before them was based on ‘lives built before us’ that ‘we had no
choice’ in changing – and yet ‘when they’re gone we’ll be the voice’, able to
determine the next chapter in human living and (hopefully) one more cut out for
spiritual beliefs. It’s as if everything mankind has been through in the past
was to prepare us for the ‘now’ (or the 1973 version of ‘now’ at any rate),
with the creators of the universe whispering to one and all to ‘rise up and be
free – and in this way you will awake!’ Cat adds that the path is open to all
if we can throw off manmade shackles, embrace nature and can ‘silently soak up
the day’, seeing the world as it was meant to be seen before capitalism and
class and the like got in the way. By the end of this fourth verse Cat has been
sounding like a wise old scholar, passing on wisdom with the fumes of library
dust and studies still in his voice and he indeed sounds a lot older than he
does on his comeback albums as Yusuf. However, hard as Cat tries to be a
distant omnipotent narrator, he fails – his real discoveries didn’t come
through books but from the pain of living and suffering and struggling.
Suddenly the tune which has been gently rolling along runs off a cliff, the
song turns sharply on a chord change and Cat drops his scholarly voice to
scream. The result is one of his greatest verses as he tells us that even in ‘exile’
and as a ‘foreigner’ we are still responsible for our actions and have to treat
each other with care. ‘Pick up the pieces you see before you, don’t let your
weaknesses destroy you, you know wherever you go the world will follow, so let
your reasons be true to you’. Cat then urges us to be kind to our friends, to
keep them close and nurture them. Only then, after passing on the wisdom we’ve received
from life and helping other people is our mission truly accomplished and we can
die ‘happily’, without the need to be re-incarnated for work we did not do in
this life. This is the central idea Cat’s been trying to pass on since starting
his writing career and it comes out in one unexpected rush of energy and
passion that turns the whole song on its head and brings out of the classroom
and into real life. Cat then brings things to a close with a last angry snap of
‘come on, come on and awake!’, the song now turned into a chugging funky
riff-based number as he urges us out of our slumber, not to follow him down his
religious path but to pass on kindness wherever we go. The brilliance of this
song for me is that it starts like a Biblical text and ends up like a hippie
manifesto, the lines between the two blurred as if mankind was always building
to this point of freedom in the mid-1970s, but that Cat still needs his
audience to grow for the song to work, leaving it in our hands for a change
instead of telling us what to do. There’s also no one point where we fail
(well, until we elect a baboon called Donald Trump and follow Brexit anyway);
if cat gets to a hundred he can still dream that it will happen because the
urge to be better is there and has always been. Only then, after dwelling on
his funky tune a little while, does the song ends suddenly, the last paving
slab of our spiritual journey stretching out ahead of us like a question mark,
waiting for us to walk on it and follow. So ends one of the greatest Cat
Stevens songs of them all on one of the strangest albums of them all, one last
great message of wisdom and power.
Having finally given his message to the world, Cat
Stevens’ musical career wound down after 1973 as his own religious beliefs took
over (mind you, Cat still wasn’t entirely sure about Islam in this period –
hence the fact that the next album is named after Buddhism and has a
Christian-themed song named [98] ‘Jesus’ as one of its songs). That leaves
‘Foreigner’ out on a limb – it’s the last place where we ‘travelled’ with Cat
on his journey with him ‘on the road to find out’ that properly got started in
1970 with ‘Mona Bone Jakon’ and hereafter Cat will spend his songs looking over
his shoulder from the heavens, trying to see he can get us to follow him there.
This road is often painful, full of traps and snares and maya (illusions) and
none of its stretches are more treacherous than this last road in a ‘foreign’
climate, but the journey is all the more reading when you are there. To be
honest ‘Foreigner’ is a step too far for most fans – me included – and arguably
changes one too many things in the traditional Cat Stevens sound (the r and b
flavour together with the harsher, more distant lyrics, the longer running
times and the bigger production values makes for an uneasy, uncomfortable ride
into the unknown). The eighteen minute opening suite is all but designed to put
off fans who aren’t committed and I know several casual Cat Stevens fans who
don’t understand this record at all – and even if you pass that first hurdle
many of the side two songs are equally harsh and uncompromising in their world
view. However, this album is far from the ‘failure’ it is often pointed out to
be. The truth is this album is hard to judge compared to another record – the whole
point is that Cat is both more sure of his spiritual path and less sure about
his musical one compared to his past albums and on those terms it is a success
at reflecting his confused mindset. It’s as a listening experience the album
falls down, but if any artist’s work was about being more than a mere listening
experience then it’s Cat’s. If you are a fan interested and invested in his
work as a whole then you need this album to hear when so much changed for him;
it won’t however be the album you play to your new neighbour to show how much
you like Cat Stevens (well, not unless you want them to never come round for
tea again). There is much to love about ‘Foreigner’ (‘100 I Dream’ especially)
and even more to admire, with points on for ambition if points off for
musicality. There are people out there who love this album for its slightly
edgier feel, its more soulful tones and its cold detached air (it’s certainly
less schmaltzy than other Cat Stevens records about peace and love) and who
knows you might be one of them; for me, though, this record is a fine place to
visit, a trip to foreign lands that broadens the mind and reveals the sights
(and sounds) of an entirely new culture; I just wouldn’t want to live there and
I’m rather thankful ‘Foreigner’ proved to be a one-off experiment rather than
the start of a whole new sound.
A NOW COMPLETE LIST
OF CAT STEVENS ARTICLES TO READ AT ALAN’S ALBUM ARCHIVES:
‘Teaser and the Firecat’
(1971) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/cat-stevens-teaser-and-firecat-1971.html
'Back To Earth' (1978) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/cat-stevens-back-to-earth-1978.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
Compilations, Box Sets and
Religious Works Part Two 1995-2012
