Fact #158733
When:
Short story:
Cat Stevens is admitted to a nursing home in London, England, UK, Europe, suffering from bronchial pneumonia. He is expected to remain in hospital for at least one week, but the illness will later be diagnosed as tuberculosis, requiring many months of treatment and rest.Full article:
Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) : If you see pictures of me from around that time I was doing three gigs a night, working men's clubs, social clubs up and down the country, and over-exerting myself, drinking too much just to get on stage, to keep working at that pace, and I was getting weaker and weaker and smoking too much.
The first sign was that I developed a cough, which the doctors said was just a cold symptom, and then I started spitting blood, so they realized it was TB and I had to go into hospital.
I remember the press came in to see me. There's a photograph where I'm in bed in my Chinese pajamas in hospital with a guitar, so I was still writing songs.
That turned out to be a new awakening for me. It was one of my spiritual turning points, but I couldn't see the benefit of it at the time. It was just something I had to get through.
I just wanted to get out and get back to creating music. And that was really where I started looking again at the musical genre. It wasn't that I wanted to go back and start making singles again, and anyway the concept album was pretty much established by then, and that's the way I was thinking.
All I knew was that I wanted to stay around a bit longer. What was this dreadful threat of death? What did it actually mean? How should I prepare for it in the long term?
Paul Ryan, a friend of mine, gave me a book, The Secret Path, and that got me on the road.
That's when I started studying eastern meditation, looking for the life which is sustained through knowledge and enlightenment, instead of the frivolous material stuff which we pick up along the way.
Then I met an interesting manager, Barry Krost, who was connected to Theatre world, so I told him I was interested in writing a musical and we came up with this idea for a musical about the Russian Revolution called Revolussia. Barry got me connected with Nigel Hawthorne and we started writing the script together. Out of that story came songs like Father And Son, Maybe You're Right and a whole lot of others.
Then we had a meeting one day with Chris Blackwell of Island Records to talk about the musical but when he heard Father And Son he got more interested in me than in the musical and asked if I'd like to sign to Island.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, October 2009)
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The first sign was that I developed a cough, which the doctors said was just a cold symptom, and then I started spitting blood, so they realized it was TB and I had to go into hospital.
I remember the press came in to see me. There's a photograph where I'm in bed in my Chinese pajamas in hospital with a guitar, so I was still writing songs.
That turned out to be a new awakening for me. It was one of my spiritual turning points, but I couldn't see the benefit of it at the time. It was just something I had to get through.
I just wanted to get out and get back to creating music. And that was really where I started looking again at the musical genre. It wasn't that I wanted to go back and start making singles again, and anyway the concept album was pretty much established by then, and that's the way I was thinking.
All I knew was that I wanted to stay around a bit longer. What was this dreadful threat of death? What did it actually mean? How should I prepare for it in the long term?
Paul Ryan, a friend of mine, gave me a book, The Secret Path, and that got me on the road.
That's when I started studying eastern meditation, looking for the life which is sustained through knowledge and enlightenment, instead of the frivolous material stuff which we pick up along the way.
Then I met an interesting manager, Barry Krost, who was connected to Theatre world, so I told him I was interested in writing a musical and we came up with this idea for a musical about the Russian Revolution called Revolussia. Barry got me connected with Nigel Hawthorne and we started writing the script together. Out of that story came songs like Father And Son, Maybe You're Right and a whole lot of others.
Then we had a meeting one day with Chris Blackwell of Island Records to talk about the musical but when he heard Father And Son he got more interested in me than in the musical and asked if I'd like to sign to Island.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, October 2009)