How a bad acid trip inspired the song Ricky Gervais calls the “most beautiful” ever written
“It’s just beautiful,” Ricky Gervais declared when selecting it as his Desert Island Disc favourite. There is, undoubtedly, a heavenly hue to Cat Stevens’ (Yusuf Islam) classic, ‘Lilywhite’. The song feels like the peaceful catharsis that comes from moving on from something ailing. That’s just as well given that stark darkness that spawned it.
The “white” in question for Stevens is a divine guide, a sort of healing blessing that pulls him from darkness. Throughout the album, Mona Bone Jakon, Stevens personifies this spiritual light as a woman who fleetingly appears to whisk away his woes, a sort of night nurse, if you will. As he sings: “And the Lilywhite, I never knew her name, But she’ll be passing my way sometime again.”
As it happens, in reality the lilywhite wasn’t personified and its presence was rather more literal in Stevens’ case but no less healing. As Stevens told Mojo, this beauteous tune ironically the result of “an amazingly bad trip.” The folk star explained: “I was at Noel Redding’s house, we were on tour and he introduced me to this substance,” he recalled. “That was the worst night of my life!”
As he continues: “It was in his flat in Clapham Common. By the time I got to dawn and I was able to get out of the door it had snowed and it was like looking at an angelic gift from heaven! It was beautiful. Now, the song represents a recapturing of that moment where after darkness comes light.”
Gervais’ fondness for the track proves that this healing notion within the song does not have to be interpreted as biblical to be beautiful despite the songwriter’s religious bent. Stevens’ situation is decidedly singular, but the sentiment of smelling the roses once more is something we can all relate to whether it is as simple as surviving a hangover from hell or moving on from grief and finding deliverance in the joys of the world again.
However, not everything was quite so spiritually tender about the whole thing for Stevens. He might have wrote the album after a two year hiatus recovering from TB, musical obscurity and a break-up with Warhol Factory actor Patti D’Arbanville, but the album name is a mere playful quip about his own spam javelin. “Mona Bone Jakon is another name for my penis,” Stevens has declared. “It’s the name I give it. It’s not some sort of secret vocabulary, it’s just something I made up.” Hopefully, that doesn’t put a dampener on the track that Gervais told Karl Pilkington is one of the most beautiful ever written.
