Now, of course, I’m in more of a reflective mood, so I could write about what I’ve done. I think my life has been a play out of my lyrics, whether I wrote them before I did it or not.
Is that broadly true? Could you tell me a little bit more about that? You mentioned that it is more of an allegorical song than an autobiographical one and that your father was largely supportive of your career and your life decisions. Even though I look much closer to his persona now, with the grey beard and everything. And let’s see if we’re in the right place now if we’re not, let’s move.ĭo you have more sympathy for the father now? Or do you still identify with the son?Ībsolutely. People are saying, “Why are we continuing to go down this route? It’s not leading towards anything positive, so why can’t we all look at our ideals and revisit them?” And that’s great. It’s interesting, that one.įor instance, on the racist issue. I call that my “black and white” arrangement: it goes back to black-and-white films and Casablanca and smoky bars. On “Wild World”, I just freaked out a little bit and did something totally different. And it was great! “Miles From Nowhere”, I think, is quite a classic and we’ve taken it to another level. I stopped at a certain point, after a certain bar, and I ripped into a James Brown, funky approach. I talk about, “Raise your mind up / look around / you can see them / they’re looking down on a lonely asteroid / in a vacant void / dying, but not destroyed.” That’s to do with aliens looking down on us and going, “What the heck is going on? What are these creatures doing? What’s their objective? What are they doing to the earth?” Anyway, I changed that radically. I couldn’t live with the lyrics of the original any more, and, in fact, I had another verse which I never recorded in 1970. What I did play around with was a song called “Longer Boats”. While the younger Stevens – who now records under the name Yusuf – chose the first option, deeply questioning his fame and lifestyle before largely withdrawing from the world of pop music, at 71 he is settled: he lives in Dubai, where he continues to record music and coordinate a charitable initiative called Peace Train.
Its best-known track, “Father And Son”, takes the form of a conversation between a young man and his father, debating both sides of the age-old question as to whether a person should seek to change the world around them or try to carve out a place within it and live contentedly. Tillerman was a statement of intent from Stevens, as pertinent today as it was when it came out in 1970, with strong themes of environmentalism, generational divides and personal change and growth in a sense, some of the questions on the album pre-empted Steven’s own search for fulfilment and his subsequent high-profile conversion to Islam in 1977. Of all the politically and socially charged music to arise from the late 1960s, the album that has demonstrated perhaps the most longevity and continued appeal is Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman.
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