4
Fire and rain. The flames of Jimi Hendrix’s immolated guitar, and the tears of the Walker Brothers’ heartbroken fan club. A tour that crisscrossed the British Isles like the spidery veins of an old man’s ankle, and in the heart of it all, a young man, barely twenty years of age, sensitive enough to be hating almost every moment of the outing, but young enough to know that life did not get much better than this. This was the hottest tour of spring 1967, the Walker Brothers’ farewell tour after two long years of teen stardom and Hendrix’s hello to an eternity of fame, and Cat Stevens was a part of it. A big part.
“Cat Stevens,” mused Noel Redding, the bassist with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. “To be truthful, we really didn’t pay attention to any of the other acts on the tour, but I remember him on the bus, sitting quietly and reading, not really saying or doing much. He just seemed shy, but I know he says he talked with Jimi a lot. They used to hang out together after shows, go to discos and talk about girls.…”
The shy boy agreed. They’d already met, the half-Greek singer from the West End of London, and the half-deified guitarist from the West Coast of America, a few weeks earlier, on Top of the Pops. British television’s flagship pop show ruled the musical airwaves in those days, a happy hunting ground for every aspiring hit maker of the age, and Hendrix was riding his first hit that night in January 1967, a wired reinvention of the murder ballad “Hey Joe.” Stevens, on the other hand, was an old hand at the game—“Matthew and Son” was his second smash in a row, and he did not expect his status to let him down on tour. Instead, everybody, even the headliners, wound up playing second fiddle to the Jimi Hendrix Experience, just as Hendrix had warned they would. “The Walker Brothers, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Cat Stevens, all the sweet people follow us on the bill, so we have to make it hot for them,” he said in an interview on the eve of the tour, and he proved his intentions from the outset.
With ticket sales through the roof as a nation poured out to say good-bye to the Walkers, the tour opened at the Astoria in London’s Finsbury Park on March 31, 1967. That was the night Hendrix set fire to his guitar, crouching onstage with a can of lighter fluid, squirting the liquid over his axe and then striking a match.
Stevens was backstage at the time, preparing for his appearance, when somebody shouted out a warning, something about a fire onstage. Everybody rushed to the wings to see Hendrix crouched over his blazing axe, his hands conjuring the flames higher, while the theater management fussed with the fire extinguishers. Stevens ran back to his dressing room and changed his shoes. His legs were trembling so badly that he did not trust himself to venture out in the Anello and Davide high heels that he’d bought for the occasion. He slipped on a pair of plimsolls instead.
The nature of the tour allowed each of the opening performers time to play just a handful of numbers. Clad in a green Edwardian frock coat, the retro-hip badge of the year’s grooviest souls, Stevens performed four songs: “I Love My Dog” (his first hit), “Matthew and Son” (his second), “Here Comes My Baby” (which he wrote for someone else), and “I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun,” his latest release. Some nights for variation, he would throw “If I Were a Carpenter” into the set, and the New Musical Express wasn’t simply being kind when it described him as the surprise packet on the show. Gentle and reserved he may have seemed, but he threw a lot of energy into his performance.
The surprise packet was frequently in for a surprise of his own, however, particularly when he introduced “I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun.” For that was the cue for Hendrix’s mischievous rhythm section of Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell to appear from behind the amplifiers on either side of the stage and squirt the boy with water pistols.
And the angrier Stevens became, the more his tormentors would try to provoke him, as one water pistol apiece became two and other props were introduced to the proceedings. Including, on the final night (at the Granada in Tooting, London, on April 29), a toy mechanical robot that rumbled noisily across the stage as a panel in its chest opened up and a bank of machine guns sprang into life. Stevens kicked out at the intruder, dealing it a number of hefty blows. “But that robot would not die,” Redding chortled.
Six months earlier, of course, Stevens would never have believed that such a joke could even be played. Not on him, anyway.
He never saw himself as a cat. Steven Georgiou was born on July 21, 1948, in the Middlesex Hospital in London, the son of a café-owning Greek father, and a Swedish mother. An inner-city kid, he grew up in a world that revolved around the city’s theatrical West End.
He went to school in Drury Lane in the heart of London’s theater-land; he gravitated toward the stage doors and front doors of the tangled web of agencies, publishers, promoters and the like that comprised the showbiz scene of late 1950s London. He hung out in Covent Garden, where London’s fruit and vegetables arrived from around the country; Denmark Street, where the music publishers and recording studios congregated; and Soho, where the late-night bars and coffeehouses flourished an area that, in the mid-1950s, was only just beginning to pick up the reputation that would eventually establish it as the red-lit heart of the London sex trade.
Right now, it was simply down-at-heel, as rapacious landlords preferred to allow the old brick buildings to simply crumble, rather than fix them up into something halfway habitable, as though they knew that soon, the only people who could stand it would be those whose customers wouldn’t care about the damp stains on the walls, or the fuzz of mold round the window frames, because their attention would be focused upon more intimate sights and sensations than those. These were the playgrounds of Stevens’s youth, and those were the theaters where his imagination flourished.
Vacations were usually spent in Sweden, where a sprawling family tree had planted an army of relatives, including a movie director, an artist, and even the man who designed the brass work for the royal palace. Stevens’s parents had parted, and the only time he spent with the Greek side of the clan was at the café, where his mother continued to work. The boy spent the bulk of his own time on the streets, a raw, rough upbringing, but an inspiring one for everyone who shared in it, and the source of so many subsequent paeans to the birth of Swinging London.
The self-confessed weird kid who grew to be Cat Stevens allowed his surroundings full rein in his imagination. An avid artist, a boy who thought nothing of staying up till five in the morning drawing and sketching, he absorbed everything he saw on the streets and let it out in his artwork, and the more twisted and morbid it seemed, the happier he was. At school, he could always be relied upon to turn out a cruel, crooked caricature of another pupil or, more often, one of the masters, and when he showed one of his efforts to his Swedish uncle Hugh Wickham, himself a well-known Swedish artist, the older man was so full of praise for Stevens’s little painting that he had it framed and hung on a wall in his home.
A few years later another admirer, Stevens boasted, was Gerald Scarfe, as he launched his cartooning career via the satirical magazine Private Eye. Stevens used to mail his work to Scarfe and could always bank on receiving a polite, even encouraging, letter in response. Nothing that the boy submitted, however, was ever published; in fact, most of the magazines and papers he contacted would promptly return the drawings to him with a note describing them as too grotesque.
A stoic boy who spent his time in his room drawing dark, wicked caricatures of his family and friends, Stevens later confessed that he frequently “nose-dive[d] into dark depressions, which are just a part of me,” and found that solitude was his best friend in such situations. Yet such resilience in one so young did not mean that he was a happy youth. He wallowed in self-pity, imagining that nobody else could conceive of his suffering, and, again by his own standards, was forced to grow up quickly.
Yet it was Stevens’s half-brother David, not his surroundings or upbringing, who turned his head toward music. Shortly before Stevens’s tenth birthday, one of his elder sibling’s school friends, thirteen-year-old Laurie London, scored a hit with a version of the gospel song “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”
The first British child star of the pop era, London would prove the role model for a host of similarly youthful aspirants over the next couple of years, and brother David was adamant. If Laurie London could do it, anybody could. And Stevens realized he agreed with him. Weeks later, he bought his first ever 45, a copy of Buddy Holly’s first British hit, “Peggy Sue.”
It is difficult from this distance to imagine just what an impact records like “Peggy Sue,” or any of the other rock ’n’ roll hits that arrived between 1956 and 1958 had on the youth of their era. Even more so than in America, where R&B and other forms of what was then called race music were at least available, British entertainment was locked in a bubble of almost Victorian morality.
Looking back on his childhood, former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman spoke for an entire generation, the likes of Cat Stevens, and a host of other war and postwar babies too, when he recalled what passed for light entertainment. “Rock ’n’ roll just wasn’t around…there weren’t bands. Rock ’n’ roll hadn’t been invented, skiffle wasn’t even around. It was dance bands, dance music by Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and all that lot.
“There wasn’t pop music; pop music was sung by very ordinary, horrible people in evening clothes, that copied American hits…and it was bloody awful.”
Britain, in the years before rock ’n’ roll came along, was often regarded as a wasteland, and anyone who lived through it seems more than happy to perpetuate that belief. The first record Wyman ever bought was Les Paul and Mary Ford’s “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise,” and he still remembers rushing home to play it on the family’s windup record player.
“Johnny Ray was the first singer I saw who had a bit of balls. I saw him at the London Palladium on my grandmother’s television; the kids tore his trousers off, and that was the first time I ever saw fans attack someone on stage.
“But all the rest of it was dance bands, from my first memories of music, what I heard on my aunt’s radio, or my gran’s radio. There was no scene.” What there was, was a sense of futility. For Wyman, and for the generation born immediately after him, life was simply something that was laid out before you, cold, gray, and immutable.
You accepted what you were offered because there was no alternative. Adolescence stretched out like a looming no-man’s land, the final rite of passage before you stepped into your father’s shoes and followed him to the office…to the shop…but first, two years serving in the armed forces.
National Service, the compulsory induction of every able-bodied school-leaver into one of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, was introduced in 1948, in part to halt a massive upsurge in juvenile crime in the immediate postwar period; in part to ensure that Britain, so unprepared for Hitler in 1939, would never be caught napping again.
When the United Nations waded into Korea in 1951, national servicemen supplied nearly 60 percent of Britain’s infantry force; when Britain marched into Egypt in 1956, the conscripts were on the front lines again. Everywhere that Britannia was perceived to be under threat, a fresh crop of eighteen-year-old boys was draped in green, and dispatched to duty, to serve their nation—with their blood, if they had to. And, like the rest of their impending adult existence, there was very little they could do to prevent or even postpone it.
Maybe that’s why rock ’n’ roll would become so important. Encountered fourteen, fifteen years into a life that had been mapped out before it had even begun, rock ’n’ roll had an unpredictability that wasn’t simply exciting, it was liberating. No one had ever heard anything like it—no one had ever sung anything like it; and how satisfying it was, after a hard day’s obeisance to a crinkled adult world, to simply let rip with the feelings that you really felt meant something: “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, and awop-bop-a-loo-bop to the whole damned lot of you.” But until that happened, it was a matter of just gritting your teeth and waiting.
The British New Music Express published its first pop chart on November 15, 1952—#1 was Al Martino’s “Here in My Heart.” Jo Stafford, Kay Starr, Eddie Fisher, Perry Como, Guy Mitchell, the Stargazers…over the next six months, and for the next three years, the best-selling 78s (there were very few 45s being released in Britain at that time) were show tunes, ballads, movie themes, and novelty numbers.
Occasionally, a local star rose to joust with the Americans and at least insert a hint of unpredictability into the brew. Emerging in 1954, the legendary Alma Cogan so shrugged off the drab austerity of the day that, at first glance you’d have sworn she was another Hollywood starlet. But her accent was pure London and her homegrown style so captivated the country that a decade later Paul McCartney was writing songs for her, and Andrew Loog Oldham was producing a projected next single. But she was an—maybe even the—exception.
Wyman again. “You had David Whitfield and Lita Roza and Dickie Valentine, doing all these songs like ‘Green Door,’ ‘How Much Is That Doggy in the Window,’ all the Doris Day songs, all the Connie Francis songs, they were all covered by these quite ordinary, middle-aged people.”
But just because it looks like a wasteland and sounds like a wasteland, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a wasteland. The state-owned BBC held the monopoly on broadcasting in Britain; but, though the family wireless was perpetually tuned to the Beeb’s brand of entertainment—light orchestral music and live dancing contests, prewar comedians and mind-broadening lectures—there were alternatives.
Radio Luxembourg, beaming out of the European principality of the same name, was powerful enough to be picked up across much of Britain and though the reception was invariably lousy, the R&B and blues records that filtered through the crackling ether at least hinted at a life beyond Sam Costa and Dorothy Carless.
Specialist record shops in the bigger city centers, too, splashed the edges of gray Britain with a dash of welcome color, namely the blues and folk that crept in on expensive imports to be treasured by the youths who would one day comprise the forces of the British Invasion.
And if you waited a few decades, one day you’d realize that the BBC itself wasn’t so bad, as Deep Purple’s Roger Glover explained. “Growing up in the fifties in England, the BBC…played every kind of music there was. And, though we complained about it, in retrospect that was a great education. Without the BBC we’d not have heard gospel music and classical music, folk, blues, and jazz. They’d dip into everything and it wasn’t done with any style or anything. But in retrospect it wasn’t so bad, because you look at kids growing up now, they get force-fed a particular subgenre of music, and that’s it. They don’t have the wide overview. They’re very channeled. We heard everything, and we could take what we wanted.’
This was Stevens’s musical background, then, and the sounds that would filter into his child mind were those that he would later be spitting out in his own songs and imagery.
He wrote his first song in his early teens. It was titled either “Darling Mary” or “Darling Nell,” dedicated to the sister of one of his friends, whose name also was Mary (or Nell). They had enjoyed a short-lived but, in the way that is common to all young adolescents, intense relationship, and when it ended, Stevens was heartbroken. Mary (or Nell) had turned him away from her front door, and he raced home and, again, did what all heartbroken adolescents do. He wrote a song.
His first efforts fed from his other great love of the age, the musicals that sprang up all around his childhood home. He saw as many of them as he could, devoured the original cast albums that accompanied them, learned the lyrics to every song that appealed. West Side Story rarely left his turntable from the time it was released in 1960, when he was twelve, and he whiled away his nights reimagining its jagged New York grit in the heart of London, and conjuring scenarios that he could place in song, lyrical vignettes that he conjured from the same centers as his cartoons, the essence of a person caught in as few lines as possible.
During his first flood of fame at the end of his teens, Stevens regularly muddled through a litany of the other things that he would describe as influences. Few of them were singers; most of them were individual songs or their writers: Burt Bacharach, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. He toyed with the notion of combining classical music and jazz. He dreamed of writing a theatrical play, and of conducting his own self-penned concerto. He worshipped Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music. And he admired simplicity, especially if it was arrived at from a starting point that was complex. That, he took to saying, was how he wrote his best songs, by starting them out at the most complex place they could be, and then slowly stripping everything back.
So a musical muddle, a hodgepodge that hopped between vaudeville and squares-ville; with lyrics and melodies that were pinned down by nothing so much as the fact that they could not be pinned. And yet his songs were also fiercely in tune with another movement that was percolating, the English folk scene that may or may not have been invigorated by the emergence of Bob Dylan in 1962–63, but which had certainly grasped its own destiny now.
No less than its American counterpart, all across London the folk movement was responsible for a massive insurgence of new venues, new dreams. Folk clubs sprang up in the bowels of any business that could accommodate them, from the lowliest pubs to the swankiest restaurants, and the young aspirant threw himself into that whirl, there to discover that the purer one’s musical ideals, the more impure the fate that awaited.
Most of the places were holes in the wall, and most of the audience was there to get laid. Young men in the first flourish of “look ma, I can grow a beard,” wearing clothes that gave them a studious air, with patches on their elbows and severe black-framed spectacles that flashed when they looked toward the stage; young women with spots, buck teeth, and stringy hair, dressed in strange, shapeless combos that could have been made from old potato sacks.
Not everybody was convinced by the earnest doings of these so-studious denizens. Like Tom Rush bemoaning the Harvard grad’s search for the flavor of the chain gang, Karl Dallas, the doyen of British folk journalists, wrote wearily of the “bearded [men] in jeans [who] would bash out three chords on an acoustic guitar and sing a ballad about the Oklahoma dust bowl, oblivious to its lack of direct relevance to South Croydon.”
But that was a bugbear that had haunted British music since the turn of the twentieth century; the manner in which songs about America and American life always sounded better than tales of hard times in old England. Perhaps it was the resonance of the very names; regardless of the fact that half of America’s towns and cities were christened for places in the Old Country itself, a song about New York had a resonance that an ode to old York could never aspire to. Washington, D.C., sounded far more impressive than Washington, County Durham, and don’t even think of comparing the A 36 to Route 128.
The first British blues bands, struggling out of the country’s mid-1950s jazz boom, met the dichotomy head-on, by imbibing their musical journeys into the soul of Americana with the wide-open fascination of tourists visiting these places for the first time.
Bobby Troupe’s original version of the rip-roaring “Route 66” is a sedate stroll down a highway that links one place to another. The Rolling Stones’ journey down that same stretch of tarmac is delivered in a storm of delirious postcards—St. Louis! Oklahoma!! Amarillo!!! Gallup!!!! By the time they hit San Bernardino, the song is positively an orgasm of summer vacation memories, and that is why the blues translated so well—more than that, that is how the British Invasion was then able to sell the blues back to America. Because the Brits made the New World sound magical again.
Folk didn’t work like that. In the mid-1950s, when a jocular banjo player named Lonnie Donegan first stepped out of the confines of Chris Barber’s Jazz Band to regale the audience with a short set of folk songs, nobody saw anything more than humor and enthusiasm in his renditions of the Leadbelly songbook, and when his first LP was released in the United States, its title said everything you needed to know—An Englishman Sings American Folk Songs.
He sold the songs back to their country of origin, too. His rendition of “Rock Island Line” reached #8, one of the most successful British imports in pre-Beatles Billboard history, and earned Donegan the nickname “the Irish hillbilly”…which must have felt strange, considering he was Scottish.
The hillbilly tag stuck, however, and Donegan’s first U.S. album overflows with hillbilly anthems. “Wabash Cannonball,” “The Wreck of the Old 97,” and “Railroad Bill” all hailed from those parts, and if Donegan’s native tones twisted the songs’ expected sound into totally unexpected corners, the album’s own liner notes have an answer for that. “Why can’t a Britisher faithfully sing an American folk song with the same credentials that an American balladeer can sing ‘Greensleeves’ or ‘Foggy Foggy Dew’?”
At home, of course, Donegan represented another musical force altogether, the father of what swiftly became known as skiffle. The dominant domestic musical form in Britain through the late 1950s, the simplistic vision of skiffle depicts a handful of reformed folkies bashing out borrowed dust bowl epics on an array of household implements—broomstick bass, washboard percussion, granny’s elasticized corset, whatever.
But it went beyond that, then and now. In 1955, rock ’n’ roll was still a distinctly American phenomenon, and one that the Brits simply couldn’t compete with. Guitars were expensive; amps weren’t cheap, and neither were drum kits. Like the protopunks of two decades later, young musicians took one look at the technological arsenals of their idols and then fled for the hills. The punks returned with used budget guitars and loudly buzzing amps; the skifflers came out with whatever they could find in the cupboard under the stairs. And though the means were different, the ends were very much the same: the creation, through muddle and mutation, of a uniquely British musical genre.
That, perhaps, is why the transatlantic traffic had slowed since Donegan’s peak, as Britain returned to her insular musical ways. But the next wave of British Invaders, led by the Beatles, the Stones, and so forth, co-opted the blues by pushing even indigenous folksingers out of the American mainstream and back into the underground; while at home, the movement that skiffle had scoured for inspiration retired behind the young Donovan’s collection of psychedelic cloaks and whimsy, to pursue its own peculiar vision. Bob Dylan experienced that vision when he popped over to make a TV show in 1962, and Paul Simon devoured it during the gap year he spent in the British capital on either side of Simon and Garfunkel’s first album.
So much of the music Simon wrote at that time was influenced by the sights and sounds of the city, from the lonely musician waiting for a late-night train who laments his way through “Homeward Bound,” to the idiosyncratic co-opting of the traditional “Scarborough Fayre,” with its increasingly shrill and demanding requests for further gifts to satisfy the song’s narrator’s bloodlust for material wealth.
Simon cut an album in London too, one man with a single microphone and guitar, and a sixty-pound recording budget that was dwarfed by the magnitude of the songs that he recorded. Slip-sliding in and out of print during the 1960s and early 1970s, The Paul Simon Songbook was fated, equally slipperily, to fade in and out of favor too. Its maker himself has seldom been overkind about it, while the vast majority of listeners usually write it off as little more than a set of demos for songs that Simon and Garfunkel would soon be rerecording to far greater effect (and acclaim).
That may be true, but the sheer strength of the songwriting, and the vision that its (comparatively) unaccompanied rendering leaves intact, have both been dented by the songs’ own subsequent popularity and arrangements. A stark “I Am a Rock” has a desolate urgency that the later revision could never re-create, while “The Sounds of Silence” packs a bare loneliness that is worth a new verse or two on its own. Indeed, it is remarkable just what a difference shedding Garfunkel’s (admittedly much better) vocal in favor of the half-formed Simon’s makes. “A Most Peculiar Man” boasts a dingy air that lines it up alongside any of the London scene’s indigenous observations, while “Kathy’s Song” (written by Paul in New York for Kathy in London) reminds us, perhaps, why love songs always sound better when sung by one of the lovers.
In fact, if any criticism can be leveled at the album, it is simply that it was recorded so quickly. But Simon was busy. He befriended guitarist Davy Graham, and included his instrumental “Anji” on the Sounds of Silence album; and made friends with another expat American, Jackson Frank, whose “Blues Run the Game” would also be recorded by Simon and Garfunkel.
He cowrote songs with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers, an Australian folk band that was topping the UK charts at the time; and by the time he left the city to resume Simon and Garfunkel’s American career, both Simon and London knew they would never see the world in the same way again.
That was the world in which Stevens felt immediately comfortable. He discovered Dylan and Leadbelly and added them to his pantheon of heroes, admiring the discordance that was so often a crucial part of their delivery; Dylan’s inability to “sing” correctly, Leadbelly’s ham-fisted guitar and out-of-tune vocals. He started hanging out at folk clubs where he learned other people had adopted those same attributes for themselves, and another piece of the jigsaw fell into place. A bad singer is okay if he can write good songs and get the music’s message across regardless. But most bad singers are just that: bad. There was a lot of bad going around the folk clubs.
Stevens was a student at Hammersmith Art School by now, and his love of folk music endured; he skipped class so he could hang out on the fire escape, strumming his guitar. Evenings were the time for his education: Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Davy Graham, Paul Simon.
He even tried his hand at the circuit himself, forming a duo with his friend Peter James in 1963, and playing his own songs at a few none-too-memorable shows around whichever folk clubs would allow them the time. A year later, he tried again on his own, undertaking a handful of shows that kicked off at the Black Horse pub in Rathbone Street, but didn’t travel much further afield than that. But he was a familiar sight at Bunjies Coffee Bar, alongside future legends like Roy Harper and Ralph McTell, but also a clutch of utter unknowns; Meg, the toothless old lady in plimsolls and headscarf, whose repertoire seemed to stretch no further than “Danny Boy”; an Armenian named Hrath Garabedian, who broke hearts with his version of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportees”; and the visiting Americans Jackson Frank and Paul Simon.
Stevens made little impression on any of them. Cliff Wedgbury, an early friend and fan of Al Stewart, recalled “Sandy Denny…nursing Cat Stevens, whose dad owned an Italian [sic] restaurant around the corner,” but any relationship the pair may have had was fleeting, and had ended by the time Stevens moved onto his next project, a trio formed with friends Andrew Koritsas and the singularly named (or at least recalled) Jimmy. The unit—the JAS Time—took its name from its membership’s initials.
Stevens didn’t fit. He could not get his head around the traditional songs that so many of his audiences demanded all performers be versed in; and his own compositions slipped far from that milieu, back into the theatrical streams that had ignited his pen in the first place. He loved folk, but the songs he was writing just didn’t fit. They sounded, people complained, too commercial, but whereas other young aspirants might have taken that as an insult, for Stevens it was a compliment. Because commercial music was hit-record music, and that discovery came along at precisely the right time. He was studying to become a professional cartoonist, but he was losing faith in that dream. What if he became a musician instead?
His mother sighed; his father groaned. Nobody, it seemed, believed he could do it and that, Stevens later said, was the impetus he’d been searching for. The more people who doubted him, the greater his need to prove them wrong. In the past he had simply had an idea. Now he had ambition as well.
By early 1966, that ambition had pushed him back onto the circuit, this time under the name Steve Adams; and now it was pushing him through the office door of producer Mike Hurst.
It was late summer 1966 when the pair first met. Hurst was still trying to establish himself as something other than a former member of the Springfields, the band he’d formed with singer Dusty Springfield and who blazed brightly over a string of hit singles earlier in the decade. More recently, he had been performing with a new band, the Methods, but they, too, were on their way out, and Hurst recalled, “In 1965, when I finished with…the Methods because we couldn’t get anywhere, I became a record producer and I went to work for a mad Californian called Jim Economides, who’d set up in London. He’d been a recording engineer at Capitol in Los Angeles, and came over. And Jim said he’d found this kid called Marc Bolan.
“Well, Jim the recording engineer was really not Jim the producer, so he asked if I would go into the studio with Marc and cut a couple of tracks. We went to Decca in Broadhurst Gardens, and we did [a song called] ‘The Wizard.’ And Marc was so spaced out. I asked him to explain what ‘The Wizard’ was all about, and he says, ‘Man, he’s there,’ and I said, ‘Where?’ and he said, ‘Outside the window in that tree.’ I hadn’t realized he’d read Tolkien, he loved it, whereas me, I hadn’t read Tolkien, so I thought he was on another planet.”
Stevens, on the other hand, was very much a part of a world that Hurst could understand. “I was working for Jim and there was a knock on the office door when there was nobody else in there one day, and there was a guy standing there with a guitar case and he asked could he play me some songs? I wasn’t doing anything else; it was lunchtime, so I said, ”Sure, play me some songs.’ So he sat down and played me ‘I Love My Dog’ and I said, ‘That’s great. What’s your name?’
“And he said, ‘Well, it’s Steven Georgiou, but I changed it to Steven Adams, and now I’ve changed it again but it’s a really stupid name so I’m going to change it again.’ I was now totally confused, so I asked, ‘What is your stupid name.… He looked at me, he looked so shy, and he said, ‘It’s Cat Stevens,’ and I said, ‘Seriously, that’s a great name. Keep the name.’ And that’s how we first met.”
It could also have been the last time. Hurst continued, “I then introduced him to Jim because I thought he was great. And in typical fashion, Jim just said to me, ‘The kid’s crap.’ I said, ‘You gotta be joking, he’s fantastic,’ but Jim said, ‘No, we don’t wanna know, Boob’…he called everybody Boob. So that was that.”
A second meeting with Economides went just as poorly. Invited over to Hurst’s home in Kensington, Stevens was astonished to find both the American and Marc Bolan waiting for him, and listening politely through “I Love My Dog.” They weren’t impressed; according to Stevens, Economides was still barking Bolan’s praise. They parted company soon after. At least for a short time.
Hurst: “Cat had a manager at that time called Bert Shalit, and Bert was a wallpaper manufacturer and very rich. Anyway, he came back to me and said he’d like to do a session with Cat, and would I produce it? And I thought, ‘What the hell? Economides isn’t interested in doing anything with it, so I will.’”
Booking into Pye Studios in Marble Arch, London, the pair cut four songs, including “I Love My Dog” and another song that Hurst “just knew” was a hit, “Here Comes My Baby”—“and I left it to Bert to hawk them round the place. And, as it turned out, nothing happened at all.”
Visits to every record company in London, it seemed, were rewarded with nothing more than blank stares and a vehement shake of the head. Independent producers, the maverick breed that short-circuited the record companies by signing artists directly to their own companies and then leasing the tapes to the labels, proved equally disinterested. Daily, it seemed, the list of rejections piled up.
There was the occasional bright spot. Stevens had succeeded in landing himself a song publishing deal with Dick James Music, a company whose entire raison d’être appeared to be to sign up anybody who even looked like they might have song inside them, and then wait to see what happened. But he was not alone in that boat: Mark Wirtz, soon to find fame as the author of “Excerpt from a Teenaged Opera”; a young and completely unknown Elton John (still laboring under his given name of Reg Dwight); and American producer Kim Fowley were also on the company books, and, visiting the offices one afternoon, Stevens came face-to-face with the beanstalk maverick.
They fell into conversation and Fowley, as was his wont, handed Stevens a few sheets of paper. It was a lyric for a song that may or may not already have been called “Portobello Road,” but that is what Stevens returned to him, a paean to the West London market whose secondhand-clothing stores and shops selling antique paraphernalia had established it as young London hipsters’ most favored shopping destination.
Yet even topicality and a songwriting link to the man who discovered the Hollywood Argyles, Sandy Nelson and B. Bumble and the Stingers could not pull Stevens out of the doldrums. So time passed, and even Mike Hurst, the only industry player who had even showed an interest, had all but forgotten about Cat Stevens.
Hurst could be forgiven his forgetfulness, however. Despite his continued failure to get off the blocks as a producer in the UK, the Springfields’ fame had not died with the band’s demise. Indeed, in the United States they had ascended to something approaching legendary status as the first and only English folk act to even briefly impinge on the early-1960s scene.
“Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” a song they had not even issued as a 45 at home, had been a Top 20 smash in America and was now a staple of so many homegrown folkies’ acts. So when Vanguard Records (alongside Elektra, the royal family of the U.S. folk scene) found themselves seeking a new A&R man, it made sense to offer the job to someone who had already proven himself to have a keen set of ears.
Hurst accepted the job. “I was fed up with everything. I’d left Jim [Economides] and I was going to leave the country. I was going to immigrate to California with my family; I’d got the job with Vanguard Records. Literally my whole life was about to change. Then what happened was, the doorbell at my flat rang on a Saturday morning and there’s Cat standing there with his guitar case, and he said, ‘I’ve been to every record company in London and nobody wants me. Are you still interested?’
“So I said, ‘Tell you what, the first song you ever played me, “I Love My Dog,” I think it’s a hit. There’s only one thing missing, it needs a bridge.’ And because I’d found out by that time that he was part Greek, I did that very Greek-restaurant-type thing: I suggested we put that in, that he ‘na-na-na’ it, which he did, and I said I’d take him into Decca Studios.”
There was just one problem. Second only to EMI’s Abbey Road mansions, Decca Records’ West Hampstead studio was the best in Britain, with prices that matched its magnificence. With the best will in the world, Hurst could not afford to book the band on a whim. So he applied a little subterfuge, making an appointment to see Dick Rowe, the head of A&R at Decca Records, and laying it on the line. Or not.
“I told him a lie. I told him, ‘I’m leaving the country to go to America, so for old times’ sake, will you do me a favor?’”
He explained that he wanted to cut a farewell single, a Mike D’Abo composition called “Going Going Gone.” All he needed was three hours in the studio. “Dick ummed and ahhed and eventually he said, ‘For old times’ sake, you’ve got three hours in [studio] number two.’ So he gave me the time and I borrowed the rest of the money to pay for the musicians; then we went in to do ‘I Love My Dog.’”
The next day, armed with an acetate he had cut at the studio, Hurst returned to Decca’s massive headquarters on the Albert Embankment and prepared to tell Dick Rowe the truth. “He asked, ‘How did it go?’ and I said, ‘I told you a lie. I didn’t go into record my song, I went into record this new singer…’ and he went absolutely apeshit. But I said, ‘Before you say anything more, would you at least just listen to the record?’
“So he put the record on and it was like something from a bad Hollywood movie. He got halfway through the record, and he looked at me.… He didn’t say a word, he just picked up the phone, and he went straight through to Sir Edward Lewis, the head of the whole company, who was upstairs in his eyrie at the top of the building, and he said, ‘Sir Edward, would you come down here please?’”
Hurst froze. “I thought, ‘Oh God, they’re going to throw everything at me. It’s a good job I’m leaving the country.…” Neither did Sir Edward’s arrival set his mind at rest. Slowly, almost sadistically, Rowe returned the needle to the revolving acetate and, in silence, he and Sir Edward listened to the record.
It finished and there was a moment’s silence. Then Sir Edward turned to Hurst, “and he uttered the immortal words: ‘My boy, you’re a genius.’ And I just stared at him and went, ‘Mmmm.’”
Outside on the embankment, Cat Stevens sat impatiently in Hurst’s car, too nervous to even venture inside the lion’s den. Hurst could see him staring out of the window as he left the Decca offices, his eyes growing wider and more fearful as he tried to deduce the fate of his song from the look on Hurst’s face.
Hurst, however, remained impassive. Finally, he got to the car and climbed inside, slumping down into the driver’s seat.
“What happened?” Stevens’s voice was as nervous as his expression.
“You’re not going to believe it.”
“Oh God, they hated it, didn’t they? They don’t want to know, either.”
Finally Hurst could not hold his excitement in any longer. He repeated the final words Sir Edward had said to him before the meeting ended. “We’re starting a new label, the Deram label. Would you like to launch it with this record?”
Forty-five years on, Hurst still laughs at the memory. “I was a mess. I just looked at Sir Edward and went, ‘Yes, please.’”