“Genius”: The 1961 soundtrack that transformed Cat Stevens’ life
Cat Stevens: a thoughtful man, a spiritual singer, and as it turns out, a wannabe gangster.
Yes, you read that right. Aside from searching for world peace and hunting for a sense of religious serenity in his own life, Stevens was also wrapped up in the idea of fighting, violence, and ultimate betrayals. Well, at least in the confines of musical theatre. It seemed so unlike him, but there was one soundtrack which summed up just that.
It was, of course, West Side Story. The reality was that Stevens’ young life, and still even now, was a world away from the New York gangland of the Sharks and the Jets, but nevertheless, when the soundtrack for the show was first released with its Broadway premiere in 1957, it was something that few people could look away from.
For his own part, Stevens caught the bug pretty quickly, too. “West Side Story was probably the biggest thing in my life as a teenager walking along the streets of London, me and my friends were always trying to imitate the Jets’ dancing!”, he later reminisced. Of course, they also had the help of the 1961 film by that point to bring the vision to life, but it was naturally always the music that was the artist’s fixation.
The composer, Leonard Bernstein, subsequently took on an idolised status in his mind, “Leonard Bernstein was a genius, and I just thought if I could be anybody, I would be a composer like Bernstein because his music was just so powerful, and it also has a jazz tilt.”
“He was doing things with music that I discovered much later.”
Cat Stevens on Leonard Bernstein
In this regard, it was impossible for him to pick a favourite song from the soundtrack as they were all so equally influential, but it was the “jagged, staccato, kicking in the music with songs like ‘America’” that proved particularly captivating. It was not only a musical education, but a transportative muse which took him straight to the heart of that hotbed city.
Stevens recalled: “I thought, ‘Yeah, I wanted to be in America, although I wanted to avoid all the gang fights!’,” and even though he never managed to get there in the moment, the blistering arrival of that sound was so pivotal he could hardly escape it. West Side Story was the tale of one romance, but its impact on audiences the world over was untold.
That’s something reflected in the sense that Stevens is perhaps the last person you’d stereotypically expect to be drawn in by the bright lights and jazz hands of show business. But then again, everything he has ever done has centred on the concept of defying expectations – and if West Side Story was the bud that made the blossom grow, then he should be proud of that.
If the story is right, then the medium shouldn’t really matter, and that’s a mantra I’m sure the musician would subscribe to. In his own trajectory, which has taken him to a litany of varied places, but when he tries to find the root of it all, he will always be transported to the streets of London, pretending to be in New York, preparing to take on the theatrical gang fight of his life. Lights, camera, action.
