Yusuf/Cat Stevens opens up about near-death experience: “The dark abyss”
Yusuf Islam, known often by his first musician name Cat Stevens, has newly opened up about his religious reaction to several near-death experiences.
The musician, who performed before Neil Young at one of the instalments in this year’s BST Hyde Park, is set to release a new autobiography in October. The book will be titled Cat On The Road to Findout.
Ahead of the memoir’s publication, Stevens opened up to The Sun about some experiences that massively informed the book. Though he has faced death multiple times, his first run-in with his own mortality was arguably the most formative.
In his early teenage years in the early 1960s, the star was hanging out with a friend on the rooftops on Shaftesbury Avenue. All of a sudden, Stevens lost his footing. He was forced to cling “by his fingertips” to a ledge and face “the dark abyss”.
Eventually, his friend hoisted him up, saving his life. But the star admitted that it “was the moment I first faced up to mortality.”
He added, “I already considered myself as a thinker by then and, as such, you can’t help thinking that one day you won’t be here. Whether it’s through an accident or illness or by dying in your sleep, it’s all one thing. You leave this world.”
That idea left him reeling. He admitted, “That to me was a problem. I just had to understand more about it.” Over the years, he’d have plenty of chances to look death in the eye, including a bout of TB. He almost drowned in Malibu in 1976.
After his survival in Malibu, Stevens realised the message he had been working to uncover in his music. “I was like, ‘This is actually it’,” he recalled. “Everything I’d been writing in my songs was converging into this one new message. It overtook everything.”
Stevens will be taking the book on tour. The Cat On The Road To Findout – An Evening Of Tales, Tunes And Other Mysteries tour will take in stops across the UK and North America in September and October this year, giving fans an intimate look into the heart and mind of one of music’s most eclectic figures.
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