"Who is The Foreigner? Is it a guru? A person?" (Image by William McElligott.)
Before religious conversion, a name change, disgraceful comments about the fatwa declaring death to Salman Rushdie, a no-fly list with his new name (Yusuf Islam) on it and a couple of libel lawsuits, Cat Stevens was a wildly popular yet skittish rock star whose work suggested a burgeoning spirituality but could not predict the many permutations ahead. In 1973, as he was releasing his album Foreigner, Stevens was profiled by Paul Gambaccini in Rolling Stone. An excerpt:
“Stevens is a person who obeys his instincts. He went to Jamaica to record Foreigner not so much for studio facilities as ‘for sunshine. I couldn’t get it in England, and I didn’t want to go to America.’ He didn’t work with longtime producer Paul Samwell-Smith because, ‘I wanted an immediate feel to it. He is a great producer, but he is very clean, if a note is wrong he wants to fix it up. This time I wanted to do a certain part, I wanted to just play it, and let it be.’
Veteran musician Phil Upchurch was selected to play because, ‘I was listening to the radio and this long track was playing and it was just getting better and better and I wanted it to end so I could see who it was by and yet it just kept getting better. They said it was Phil Upchurch and I went out and bought an album. I knew from that that he was right to work with.’
‘Foreigner Suite,’ he said, was not a pre-planned opus. ‘It happened. I wrote fragments that came together and as they did I said, what’s happening here? And it turned out to be what I now consider to be not the many parts, but one song.
The only thing left to do was to title the work. Although the word never appears in the suite, ‘foreigner’ was chosen, because: ‘We’re all foreigners. Say to a foreigner that he’s a foreigner and he’ll say you’re a foreigner! We’re all foreigners here, in a wider sense. One hundred years from now I won’t be here, there’ll be nothing left of me, but the earth will still exist. People ask me, ‘Who is The Foreigner? Is it a guru? A person?’ It’s wider than any single person.”
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The complete 18-minute “Foreigner Suite,” 1973:
“I’d try to phone Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is”: