Cat Stevens

British folk in its purest form (Shirley Collins and the like) never troubled the major charts. Yet between the Sixties and Seventies it heavily influenced local rock music: from the big names of progressive rock (Jethro Tull above all) to the acts most faithful to the old canons, albeit inflated by heavy doses of electricity (Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span), all the way to those able to blend the two tendencies (Strawbs, Pentangle and many others).

These are all names that, at least in England, enjoyed considerable commercial success - some of them even more than that, if you consider the huge American reception of Jethro Tull, whose primary language was nonetheless rock, and whose weapon of choice was the amplifier.

In such a rich context, one in which British folk essentially appeared subjugated to the violence of rock, this record emerged at a certain point. Not out of nowhere, in truth, since already in the Sixties Cat Stevens had crossed the British top 10 with some excellent psychedelic, baroque-pop songs. The turn towards a more stripped-down sound came - following a long illness that confined him to bed and led him to discover meditation and mysticism - at the start of 1970 with the album "Mona Bone Jakon", which contained the classic "Lady D'Arbanville" but went largely unnoticed as an LP. Finally, in November of that same year, the record that refined this new vision hit the shops: "Tea For The Tillerman".

It's an album on tiptoe, guitar-free, where Stevens's vocal tone can turn powerful and piercing when needed, but the songs never overreach into fervor; an enchanted gentleness and a sense of serenity pervade it from start to finish.

While all around him Roger Daltrey and Robert Plant sweated and hollered, showing off as consummate stage animals, the Rolling Stones were putting the finishing touches on a depraved blues rock made of hooky guitars and sneering attitude, Elp and Yes were erecting polyphonic, futuristic walls of sound, and Britain seemed to be becoming the nerve center of rock's aggressive potential - yet for some reason this album managed to find its own space by denying everything happening around it.

The more everyone else approached sex with ferocity, the more Stevens treated it with gentleness; the more everyone else seemed to want to shock the public, the more Stevens seemed to want to make them think; the more the surrounding sound seemed to want to stun, the more Stevens seemed to want to lull. It was by no means a given that this could work - Nick Drake knew something about that - but Stevens's music was more communicative, more luminous, less turned in on itself, and above all unafraid to answer back to the events upending society in the early Seventies.

The formula worked, even if the escalation toward success was gradual. The album peaked at number 20 in the UK, raising fears it might be just another record for the die-hard fans, but a few months later it surprisingly conquered America, climbing all the way to number 8 and staying on the charts for a year and a half. From then on, for roughly five years, few artists in the world would sell as much as Cat Stevens.

The song that changed the course of his career was "Wild World", also released as a single, but soon the entire tracklist took over FM radio, spawning at least one other universally famous song, "Father And Son", along with several minor classics ("Hard Headed Woman", "Where Do The Children Play?", "Sad Lisa", "Into White").

The lyrics deal with failed love, death, ecological issues and generational conflict - themes hardly absent from rock at the time - but they do so with a different, constructive approach: there was no will to attack "the other side", but rather to sit down and talk about it. That's why those songs are still seen today as a symbol of the great utopia envisioned by that generation. Cat Stevens's lyrics were so balanced, so convincing, so respectful of the human condition that, for a moment back then, they must have truly given many people the impression they could change the world.

There are lines that have entered the collective imagination, whether describing tangible scenes, like the son bursting into tears while discussing his future with his father at the end of "Father And Son" ("All the times that I've cried, keeping all the things I knew inside, it's hard, but it's harder to ignore it"), or dealing in symbols and metaphors, like the white light dominating the scene described in "Into White" ("I built my house from barley rice, green pepper walls and water ice, and everything emptying into white").

The sessions were overseen by Paul Samwell-Smith, a veteran member of the Yardbirds and founder of Renaissance, who managed - together with Stevens himself and his trusty guitarist Alun Davies - to craft a perfectly balanced sound, in which every instrument, without ever needing to plug in, enjoyed great depth and color. Many artists, especially those working in folk music, sought out Samwell-Smith as a producer during that period, likely seduced by the formal perfection of his sonic alchemy.

Every note of "Tea For The Tillerman" is a fresco of taste and restraint. The doubled vocal in the chorus of "Where Do The Children Play?", the interpretive ups and downs of "Hard Headed Woman" (with the guitar first gently arpeggiated, then abruptly muted), the muffled double bass and chamber violins of "Into White", the touching piano ballad "Sad Lisa" with its splendid finale of acid-tinged strings, the sticky, Latin-tinged refrain of "Wild World", the minimal fragment that gives the album its title, and the meticulous arrangement of "Father And Son", with Davies's backing vocals supporting Stevens's own singing, split between the son's high lines and the father's lower ones.

If the melodic sense of these gems is undoubtedly pop - and probably that's what made them so appealing - the arrangements represent the state of the art of British folk, and it's a fact that no other artist has ever managed to sell that sound to such a wide audience.

Having repeated the success the following year with its twin album "Teaser And The Firecat", and having realized that it would be hard to do better on that front, Stevens then tried other paths, eventually arriving in 1977 at the experimental and misunderstood "Izitso", where he tackled synthesizers, allowed himself to anticipate Peter Gabriel's electronic art pop, and even threw in a proto-house instrumental ("Was Dog A Doughnut?"). It was the last creative surge before his conversion to Islam and his withdrawal from the music world.

For film buffs, it's worth noting that several songs from "Tea For The Tillerman" feature in the cult film "Harold and Maude" (1971), a humorous and heartfelt masterpiece directed by the brilliant Hal Ashby.

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02/08/2015