“Such a genius”: The 1972 album so good it made Cat Stevens think about quitting
Your life can be ruined by the finer things. Pluck a cherry tomato straight from the vine in the Mezzogiorno and you’ll rue every shop-bought sham you ever dare to pick up in a rain-drenched Sainsbury’s thereafter.
However, it is not just lowly consumers who face this tricky predicament. Foolhardy folks in the creative industries can oft be haunted by the masterpieces they hope to match. This mindset is the locus where creativity becomes competitive. Standing in a fallow patch, looking up at a work of art towering 100 stories above you can be an intimidating precipice, and it almost forced Cat Stevens to pack it in.
The singer, now known as Yusuf Islam, has sold over 100million records. That is no mean feat, especially for a gentle folk musician, and it places him in royally illustrious company. But for a while, he figured he would be a background figure in music at best. The young Londoner might have toured with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Engelbert Humperdinck as a teen, but he was struggling to make enough money to pay the rent as he emerged into his 20s.
So, he made the disastrous decision to sell ‘The First Cut Is The Deepest’ for £30 in 1967. That fee amounts to around £500 six decades later. Today, that’s roughly 30 minutes rent in the Marylebone area of London where he resided at the time.
Sadly, bad business decisions weren’t the only thing threatening to derail his career. He contracted TB in 1969, spending three months in hospital and a further year recovering. Music was a constant companion during this period, but he also worried it might be a task too tough to return to it once he had recovered. Nevertheless, he did return in 1970, and when he did, the hits came in a flurry.
Was the early ‘70s upswing governed by a response to tragedy, and now that impetus had waned his output was set to suffer? Rather than search out another critical illness, he opted for a bit of soul music. With the fire of Motown now a tepid flicker, he turned to one of the label’s former stars who had decided to pursue something new.
Stevie Wonder had always displayed miraculous chops when he was a kid on Berry Gordy’s famed label, but in the ’70s, he began to bolster that technicality with a buoyant spirit hitherto unknown in music. The times were dark, but Wonder’s music was proclaiming, “Heaven help the roses if the bombs begin to fall”.
Poor old Stevens was sadly floored by it in every sense. “Talking Book blew me away when I was going through a dry period in my writing,” he recalled. “I heard Stevie Wonder and thought that I couldn’t improve on what he’s done, he’s such a genius! I just fell in love with it, it was black soul music from that era, but sounds totally, totally now.”
The searing innovation, grounded perfectly in the roots of what modern music is all about, was put forward so perfectly that Stevens was so humbled he seriously considered a career change.
In truth, Wonder made everyone feel like a novice. He was only 22 when Talking Book was released, yet it was his 15th studio album. Feeling the figurative sun of freedom on his back after departing the grip of his old iron-fisted label, now, he embarked on his artistic splurge. As he would recall in 2000: “It wasn’t so much that I wanted to say anything except where I wanted to just express various many things that I felt.”
Inspired by the Civil Rights movement and other just causes, his songs became rounded reconciliations. He endeavoured to reflect “the political point of view that I have, the social point of view that I have, the passions, emotion and love that I felt, compassion, the fun of love that I felt, the whole thing in the beginning with a joyful love and then the pain of love.”
Wonder came from a background of bleak prospects only worsened by his circumstances that he later elucidated with ‘Living for the City’ and other social-leaning songs. Now that he had achieved stardom, he wanted to create music that encapsulated the feeling of emancipation that it gave him. Stevens wanted to do the same, but he started to question whether he could. After all, nobody has ever attempted to make homemade ketchup since Heinz cracked the recipe.
Fortunately, he didn’t throw in the towel, but he did venture down a far more experimental route with his music, embracing synthetic sounds in a manner far beyond any of his peers. It put his soul period to rest and pushed towards something that sounds almost like proto-hip-hop at points, in a move that said, ‘If you can’t beat them, don’t just try to join them’.
“I think Stevie Wonder was the best thing after the Beatles,“ Stevens would later write. “He’s a very spiritual man and epitomises soul music for me, beautiful.” Stevens felt he had sampled the finer things in life, and he had a mantle to work towards.
