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CAT STEVENS TEA FOR THE TILLERMAN
A Hi Fi News Vinyl Icon feature by Johnny Black.
Teenage singer-songwriter Cat Stevens (now known as Yusuf Islam) hit the ground running in 1966 with a string of memorably catchy hits, including I Love My Dog and Matthew And Son. For such a young pop songwriter, he was remarkably sophisticated, employing clever musical arrangements and choosing unusual subject matter for his lyrics.
Within a couple of years, though, Cat fell prey to the rock'n'roll lifestyle, drinking too much, working too hard and taking too many drugs. After spending months in hospital with a more or less self-inflicted tuberculosis, he emerged determined to re-build his life and his career.
A lifelong lover of stage musicals, he was working on his own musical, Revolussia, in 1969, when he composed Father And Son, which turned out to be the first song written for the album Tea For The Tillerman.
"I had a meeting one day with Chris Blackwell of Island Records to talk about the musical," he explains, "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."
In the event, Tillerman was not Stevens' first Island album. That honour fell to Mona Bone Jakon which stalled at No63, failing to provide the second breakthrough he so desired. The album did, however, deliver one hit single, Lady D'Arbanville, and more importantly, it brought Cat together with Paul Samwell-Smith, a former member of The Yardbirds who had found a second career as a highly respected producer, and Alun Davies, the gifted guitarist who would become Cat's right-hand man for years to come.
"After I left hospital I was on a writing spree," he remembers. "I wrote two albums-worth in a very short period, so some songs which could have been on Mona Bone Jakon ended up on Tea For The Tillerman, and vice versa."
Work on Tillerman started in the summer of 1970. Demos had been recorded at Advision and Island's Basing Street studio, but the bulk of the completed tracks were done at Morgan Studios in North London.
"We would run through the songs on the day of the recording," he recalls. "We wouldn't have learnt them beforehand. I'd be playing the chords, then we'd find a groove and get going on that. I remember when Alun first did his little guitar thing on Father And Son and it was perfect."
Alun Davies (who, like most of his close associates, refers to Cat as Steve) recalls those sessions fondly. "Tea for the Tillerman was my favourite album of Steve's. It was so spontaneous and quick in the making. I loved doing that album. I got very bored doing Catch Bull At Four because I think it took too long and we worked in three different studios on it."
Father And Son has, of course, gone on to become arguably Stevens' best-loved song, but it was also a breakthrough in his singing technique. "A big moment for me was finding my voice in Father And Son," he reveals. Lyrically, Father And Son begins with a father trying to convince his son not to leave home, before becoming a conversation between the pair, with Cat singing the verses in two distinctly different voices. "It was as if I could hear my own father within me. I'd done a lot of songs up to that time, but that was a special moment. Listen to Mona Bone Jakon, for example, and I'm not quite sure of my voice, Lady D'Arbanville was close but it wasn't yet that belting out."
Also among the first batch of songs Stevens wrote for Tillerman was Where Do The Children Play whose basic track, according to producer Paul Samwell-Smith, "was recorded with just guitars and voice. Steve played the basic guitar, Alun Davies the second guitar. Everything else was overdubbed later, individually, which is why the drums lurch a little. Steve played the electric piano and the vibraphone and we did the backing vocals together."
Asked about Samwell-Smith's contribution to the album, Stevens says, "Paul was the kind of producer who created a space in which I could work, and he was great at capturing the moment. If I wanted his vocal in there, he'd come down and do it, and he would express his feelings about the arrangements, but a lot of the time it was just the guys who were playing, we kind of did it ourselves."
Where Do The Children Play, one of Stevens' many examinations of the dilemmas of childhood, refers directly to his own schooldays. "In our little school in Macklin Street, just off Drury Lane, there was no space. Our playground was literally in the basement with just a little piece of it open to the air. Later, I read an article in Time Out about the disappearing of green spaces from towns, and the need to maintain a balance, and that's what prompted it."
The song is subtly enhanced towards the end with a lively string arrangement by Del Newman who has also contributed his gifts to tracks by Elton John, Paul McCartney and many others.
"I would give Del a brief," notes Stevens. "I would specify warm cellos and sing lines to him and things like that. Alan Tew (another arranger who worked with Stevens) always said he could hear all my arrangements in the songs already."
Tillerman also includes the powerful, Spanish guitar influenced Wild World, which had been a hit for Jimmy Cliff three months before Stevens released the album. In the course of my interview with Yusuf Islam, Wild World was the only song that seemed to give him pause, making him reflect for a few moments before replying, "It has mirrors of memories and my relationships, and parts of my relationships with certain people, one particular girl perhaps of that time, Patti D'Arbanville. Really, though, the song was about me. It was me leaving a comfortable zone for somewhere I didn't know. I'm the one that's going into the Wild World."
Another key Tillerman song which has gone on to establish itself as a fan favourite is On The Road To Find Out, of which Paul Samwell-Smith remembers, "Steve and Alun went to Scotland to do a gig, Aberdeen I think, and I went along for the ride. A long wait in the dressing room on a grey and rainy afternoon led to Steve putting this track together with Alun." That's no doubt why it opens with beautifully counterpointed fingerpicking and harmonics on their guitars, but the track is also interesting as one of the earliest clear indications that Stevens would go on to explore the world's religions to find his own personal salvation.
There isn't space, even in a feature of this length, to adequately detail every song on Tillerman, but new listeners should make sure to pay particular attention to the gorgeously moving Sad Lisa, the dynamic Hard Headed Woman and Into White which guitarist Alun Davies has called, "the palette that painted Tea For The Tillerman.
The album closes with the title track which, aside from its multi-tracked homage to Oh Happy Day by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, is one of the least memorable cuts. It did, however, inspire the charming cover painting. "I originally wanted to be an artist," points out Yusuf. "I studied at Hammersmith School Of Art, but then music took up most of my time. Even so, I still loved painting, so I'd written the song and just decided to illustrate it, and that became a style with me, to design and illustrate my own album covers."
Tea For The Tillerman was released on November 23, 1970 and, amazingly in retrospect, it stalled at No20 in the UK. Happily, spurred by an acclaimed American tour, it launched him in the USA, reaching No8 in the Billboard chart and going on to earn a triple-platinum certification. The follow-up, Teaser And The Firecat, was even more successful, soaring to No3 in the UK and No2 in America, but Tillerman remains in the hearts of many as the definitive Cat Stevens album.
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VINYL ICON – TEA FOR THE TILLERMAN
PRODUCTION NOTES
Tea For The Tillerman was recorded in Morgan Studios, Melrose Avenue, just off Willesden High Road in North London. Morgan was a highly rated studio, particularly in the 60s and 70s, when the facility was regularly in demand by major British rock acts including Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Supertramp, Blind Faith, Yes, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
"The studio was owned by a guy called Barry Morgan," remembers Yusuf Islam. "In those days, Morgan was quite unique because it had its own little café, a sitting area where you could hang out between takes and sessions. That was great. It was more like a club. I also remember we had to run up and down the stairs to hear what we'd recorded because the control room was up above the studio."
The album was recorded onto 16-track 3M and Studer machines, using two inch tapes running at 15 inches per second. "One important thing was that they had Dolbys," remembers Islam, "which gave great hiss reduction, and Paul (producer Paul Samwell-Smith) was into Dolbys. Hiss had always been a problem, especially with acoustic guitars, so we needed to find a way to keep the sound pure, clean, acoustic but with as little hiss as possible."
Samwell-Smith has some particularly vivid recollections of recording Wild World which he revealed in the sleeve notes to the 2008 DeLuxe Edition. "Steve's guitar was an Ovation, and I used the electric pickup signal on the left of the stereo and the acoustic microphone signal on the right, which gave it a very present and immediate sound." He also mentions that the double bass, played by John Ryan, "was held together with band-aids and duct tape, and you can hear it rattling."
Although Islam rarely interfered with Samwell-Smith's production chores, he admits, "I used to have my fingers on the knobs when it was mix time. Actually, we dreamt of having automation for that but it wasn't a possibility for us at that time."
This feature first appeared in Hi Fi News.
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A Hi Fi News Vinyl Icon feature by Johnny Black.
Teenage singer-songwriter Cat Stevens (now known as Yusuf Islam) hit the ground running in 1966 with a string of memorably catchy hits, including I Love My Dog and Matthew And Son. For such a young pop songwriter, he was remarkably sophisticated, employing clever musical arrangements and choosing unusual subject matter for his lyrics.
Within a couple of years, though, Cat fell prey to the rock'n'roll lifestyle, drinking too much, working too hard and taking too many drugs. After spending months in hospital with a more or less self-inflicted tuberculosis, he emerged determined to re-build his life and his career.
A lifelong lover of stage musicals, he was working on his own musical, Revolussia, in 1969, when he composed Father And Son, which turned out to be the first song written for the album Tea For The Tillerman.
"I had a meeting one day with Chris Blackwell of Island Records to talk about the musical," he explains, "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."
In the event, Tillerman was not Stevens' first Island album. That honour fell to Mona Bone Jakon which stalled at No63, failing to provide the second breakthrough he so desired. The album did, however, deliver one hit single, Lady D'Arbanville, and more importantly, it brought Cat together with Paul Samwell-Smith, a former member of The Yardbirds who had found a second career as a highly respected producer, and Alun Davies, the gifted guitarist who would become Cat's right-hand man for years to come.
"After I left hospital I was on a writing spree," he remembers. "I wrote two albums-worth in a very short period, so some songs which could have been on Mona Bone Jakon ended up on Tea For The Tillerman, and vice versa."
Work on Tillerman started in the summer of 1970. Demos had been recorded at Advision and Island's Basing Street studio, but the bulk of the completed tracks were done at Morgan Studios in North London.
"We would run through the songs on the day of the recording," he recalls. "We wouldn't have learnt them beforehand. I'd be playing the chords, then we'd find a groove and get going on that. I remember when Alun first did his little guitar thing on Father And Son and it was perfect."
Alun Davies (who, like most of his close associates, refers to Cat as Steve) recalls those sessions fondly. "Tea for the Tillerman was my favourite album of Steve's. It was so spontaneous and quick in the making. I loved doing that album. I got very bored doing Catch Bull At Four because I think it took too long and we worked in three different studios on it."
Father And Son has, of course, gone on to become arguably Stevens' best-loved song, but it was also a breakthrough in his singing technique. "A big moment for me was finding my voice in Father And Son," he reveals. Lyrically, Father And Son begins with a father trying to convince his son not to leave home, before becoming a conversation between the pair, with Cat singing the verses in two distinctly different voices. "It was as if I could hear my own father within me. I'd done a lot of songs up to that time, but that was a special moment. Listen to Mona Bone Jakon, for example, and I'm not quite sure of my voice, Lady D'Arbanville was close but it wasn't yet that belting out."
Also among the first batch of songs Stevens wrote for Tillerman was Where Do The Children Play whose basic track, according to producer Paul Samwell-Smith, "was recorded with just guitars and voice. Steve played the basic guitar, Alun Davies the second guitar. Everything else was overdubbed later, individually, which is why the drums lurch a little. Steve played the electric piano and the vibraphone and we did the backing vocals together."
Asked about Samwell-Smith's contribution to the album, Stevens says, "Paul was the kind of producer who created a space in which I could work, and he was great at capturing the moment. If I wanted his vocal in there, he'd come down and do it, and he would express his feelings about the arrangements, but a lot of the time it was just the guys who were playing, we kind of did it ourselves."
Where Do The Children Play, one of Stevens' many examinations of the dilemmas of childhood, refers directly to his own schooldays. "In our little school in Macklin Street, just off Drury Lane, there was no space. Our playground was literally in the basement with just a little piece of it open to the air. Later, I read an article in Time Out about the disappearing of green spaces from towns, and the need to maintain a balance, and that's what prompted it."
The song is subtly enhanced towards the end with a lively string arrangement by Del Newman who has also contributed his gifts to tracks by Elton John, Paul McCartney and many others.
"I would give Del a brief," notes Stevens. "I would specify warm cellos and sing lines to him and things like that. Alan Tew (another arranger who worked with Stevens) always said he could hear all my arrangements in the songs already."
Tillerman also includes the powerful, Spanish guitar influenced Wild World, which had been a hit for Jimmy Cliff three months before Stevens released the album. In the course of my interview with Yusuf Islam, Wild World was the only song that seemed to give him pause, making him reflect for a few moments before replying, "It has mirrors of memories and my relationships, and parts of my relationships with certain people, one particular girl perhaps of that time, Patti D'Arbanville. Really, though, the song was about me. It was me leaving a comfortable zone for somewhere I didn't know. I'm the one that's going into the Wild World."
Another key Tillerman song which has gone on to establish itself as a fan favourite is On The Road To Find Out, of which Paul Samwell-Smith remembers, "Steve and Alun went to Scotland to do a gig, Aberdeen I think, and I went along for the ride. A long wait in the dressing room on a grey and rainy afternoon led to Steve putting this track together with Alun." That's no doubt why it opens with beautifully counterpointed fingerpicking and harmonics on their guitars, but the track is also interesting as one of the earliest clear indications that Stevens would go on to explore the world's religions to find his own personal salvation.
There isn't space, even in a feature of this length, to adequately detail every song on Tillerman, but new listeners should make sure to pay particular attention to the gorgeously moving Sad Lisa, the dynamic Hard Headed Woman and Into White which guitarist Alun Davies has called, "the palette that painted Tea For The Tillerman.
The album closes with the title track which, aside from its multi-tracked homage to Oh Happy Day by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, is one of the least memorable cuts. It did, however, inspire the charming cover painting. "I originally wanted to be an artist," points out Yusuf. "I studied at Hammersmith School Of Art, but then music took up most of my time. Even so, I still loved painting, so I'd written the song and just decided to illustrate it, and that became a style with me, to design and illustrate my own album covers."
Tea For The Tillerman was released on November 23, 1970 and, amazingly in retrospect, it stalled at No20 in the UK. Happily, spurred by an acclaimed American tour, it launched him in the USA, reaching No8 in the Billboard chart and going on to earn a triple-platinum certification. The follow-up, Teaser And The Firecat, was even more successful, soaring to No3 in the UK and No2 in America, but Tillerman remains in the hearts of many as the definitive Cat Stevens album.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VINYL ICON – TEA FOR THE TILLERMAN
PRODUCTION NOTES
Tea For The Tillerman was recorded in Morgan Studios, Melrose Avenue, just off Willesden High Road in North London. Morgan was a highly rated studio, particularly in the 60s and 70s, when the facility was regularly in demand by major British rock acts including Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Supertramp, Blind Faith, Yes, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
"The studio was owned by a guy called Barry Morgan," remembers Yusuf Islam. "In those days, Morgan was quite unique because it had its own little café, a sitting area where you could hang out between takes and sessions. That was great. It was more like a club. I also remember we had to run up and down the stairs to hear what we'd recorded because the control room was up above the studio."
The album was recorded onto 16-track 3M and Studer machines, using two inch tapes running at 15 inches per second. "One important thing was that they had Dolbys," remembers Islam, "which gave great hiss reduction, and Paul (producer Paul Samwell-Smith) was into Dolbys. Hiss had always been a problem, especially with acoustic guitars, so we needed to find a way to keep the sound pure, clean, acoustic but with as little hiss as possible."
Samwell-Smith has some particularly vivid recollections of recording Wild World which he revealed in the sleeve notes to the 2008 DeLuxe Edition. "Steve's guitar was an Ovation, and I used the electric pickup signal on the left of the stereo and the acoustic microphone signal on the right, which gave it a very present and immediate sound." He also mentions that the double bass, played by John Ryan, "was held together with band-aids and duct tape, and you can hear it rattling."
Although Islam rarely interfered with Samwell-Smith's production chores, he admits, "I used to have my fingers on the knobs when it was mix time. Actually, we dreamt of having automation for that but it wasn't a possibility for us at that time."
This feature first appeared in Hi Fi News.