Cat Stevens was a big name in his early days, as both singer and a songwriter. He is one of the central figures of David Hepworth's 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock’s Golden Year.
He even took Morning Has Broken from our school hymn book into the top 10.
My image of a male singer-songwriter of this era involves long hair and an acoustic guitar, and there are plenty of pictures like that of Cat Stevens. But here he is on a West German TV show in 1967 as a teenage dandy.
I have a couple of DVDs of performances from that show - Beat! Beat! Beat! Because its video tapes didn't get reused, its archives are a valuable record of this golden age of British pop and rock.
Cat Stevens was born Steven Demetre Georgiou to a Swedish mother and Greek Cypriot father in London. In the late Seventies he converted to Islam and left the music scene, returning 20 years later using the name Yusuf Islam.
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