This small article appeared in the July 1974 issue of Circus
Magazine in a section called ' Londons Backpages'.
LONDON BACKPAGES
by Laurence
Marks
When everyone learned that
Cat Stevens was returning to the stage, after such a long lay-off in Britain, the box
office at the Drury Lane Theatre was besieged by all of Cat’s fans waving money. In
next to no time the concert was a sell-out, and it was revealed that although Cat had been
away some time, he had lost none of his pulling power.
After the, concerts, Cat
slammed all the ticket touts and pirate programme sellers who plagued his concerts. They
were selling £2 tickets for anything between £8 and 15. "I was so angry," Cat
said, "that at one point I seriously considered buying the tickets off of the touts
and re-distributing them to my loyal fans." After his anger at the ticket fiasco had
died down, Cat started conducting interviews at his home in Fulham, London. Upon listening
to his new album, one notices just how much he has returned to the style he adopted on
albums like Tea For The Tillerman and Teaser And The Firecat. Can we, therefore, assume
that he is returning to the simple form of arrangements that were prominent on the latter
two albums?
"I think it’s the
same as going away for a while and people want to hear from you. The thing is I’m not
going too far out of reach—I don’t want to ever do that. I want to be here for
everyone who wants to relate to me. So Foreigner was enough for one time, but I had to
come back and say I’m here and you don’t have to worry about it. I don’t
think Foreigner was a mistake, as some people have suggested. The good thing about that
album was that it was done completely subconsciously. It’s an album that you can
listen to without listening to it, if you see what I mean."
The Foreigner album was produced by Cat
alone. Buddah And The Chocolate Box, on the other hand, sees the ~ reunion of Cat
and Paul Samwell- Smith. Did Cat, Circus asked, feel the need to work with Paul again?
"Well with Foreigner, we had reached the stage where we were getting alittle too
familiar with each other he knew too much about me and how I worked and I knew too much
about the way that he worked, there was no spark. So it was good to have a break from each
other, because when we did -get together once again, it created excitement."
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