Cat Stevens rode the crest of the singer-songwriter wave through the early part of the 70s, alongside the likes of James Taylor and Carole King. He played to 15-20,000 people a night at arenas around America. He sold millions of records.
Hip cult heroes like Nick Drake, John Martyn and Richard Thompson (all of whom were signed to Cat’s record label, Island Records) may have been the darlings of the rock media, but their total combined sales came nowhere near one Cat Stevens album.
Here are the six albums you need to know.
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Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.
