54 Facts About Cat Stevens

Cat Stevens was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.

Cat Stevens earned ASCAP songwriting awards in 2005 and 2006 for "The First Cut Is the Deepest", which has been a hit for four artists.

Cat Stevens has since bought back at least one of these guitars as a result of the efforts of his son Yoriyos.

Cat Stevens was embroiled in a long-running controversy regarding comments he made in 1989, about the death fatwa placed on author Salman Rushdie in response to the publication of Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses.

Cat Stevens's parents divorced when he was about eight years old but continued to maintain the family restaurant and live above it.

Cat Stevens has a half-brother, George Georgiou, born in Greece, presumably from his father's first marriage in Greece.

Cat Stevens occasionally escaped his family responsibilities by going to the rooftop above their home and listening to the tunes of the musicals drifting from around the corner on Denmark Street, then the centre of the British music industry.

Cat Stevens said that West Side Story particularly affected him and gave him a "different view of life".

Cat Stevens attended other local West End schools, where he says he was constantly in trouble and did poorly in everything but art.

Cat Stevens was called 'the artist boy' and said, "I was beat up, but I was noticed".

Cat Stevens took a one-year course at Hammersmith School of Art, considering a career as a cartoonist.

Cat Stevens began performing under the name "Steve Adams" in 1965 while at Hammersmith.

Cat Stevens sought to emulate composers of musicals, such as Ira Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.

Cat Stevens was considered a fresh-faced teen star, placing several single releases in the British pop music charts.

Cat Stevens contracted tuberculosis in 1969 and was close to death at the time of his admission to the King Edward VII Hospital, Midhurst, Sussex.

Cat Stevens spent months recuperating in the hospital and a year of convalescence.

Cat Stevens took up meditation, yoga, and metaphysics, read about other religions and became a vegetarian.

Cat Stevens felt a growing resentment of producer Mike Hurst's attempts to re-create the style of his debut album, with heavy-handed orchestration and over-production, rather than the folk rock sound Stevens was attempting to produce.

Cat Stevens admits having purposely sabotaged his own contract with Hurst, by making outlandishly expensive orchestral demands and threatening legal action; this achieved his goal: to be released from his contract with Deram Records, a sub-label of Decca Records.

On regaining his health at home after his release from the hospital, Cat Stevens recorded some of his newly written songs on his tape recorder and played his changing sound for several new record executives.

Cat Stevens hired an agent, Barry Krost, who arranged an audition with Chris Blackwell of Island Records.

Davies, like Cat Stevens, was a perfectionist, appearing at all sound checks to be sure that all the equipment and sound were prepared for each concert.

The first single released from Mona Bone Jakon was "Lady D'Arbanville", which Cat Stevens wrote about his young American girlfriend Patti D'Arbanville.

When interviewed on a Boston radio station, Stevens said about Teaser and the Firecat:.

For seven months, in 1971 and 1972, Cat Stevens was romantically linked to popular singer Carly Simon, while both were being produced by Samwell-Smith.

Cat Stevens reciprocated with a song to her, written after their romance, entitled "Sweet Scarlet".

In July 1970, Cat Stevens recorded one of his songs, "But I Might Die Tonight", for the Jerzy Skolimowski film Deep End.

Cat Stevens contributed two songs to the 1971 film Harold and Maude, but was annoyed when director Hal Ashby decided to use the original demos instead of allowing Stevens to finish them.

Subsequent releases in the 1970s did well on the charts and in ongoing sales, although they did not touch the success Cat Stevens had from 1970 to 1973.

In 1973, Cat Stevens moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as a tax exile from the United Kingdom; however, he later donated the money to UNESCO.

In June 1974, while in Australia, Cat Stevens was presented with a plaque representing the sale of forty gold records, the largest number ever presented to an artist in Australia.

Cat Stevens had looked into "Buddhism, Zen, I Ching, numerology, tarot cards, and astrology".

Cat Stevens formally converted to the Muslim faith on 23 December 1977, taking the name Yusuf Islam in 1978.

Cat Stevens has said that there was "a combination of reasons, really", and that the continuing demands of the music business had been "becoming a chore, and not an inspiration anymore".

Cat Stevens is the founder and chairman of the Small Kindness charity, which initially assisted famine victims in Africa and now supports thousands of orphans and families in the Balkans, Indonesia, and Iraq.

Cat Stevens was chairman of the charity Muslim Aid from 1985 to 1993.

Cat Stevens appeared on videotape on a VH1 pre-show for the October 2001 Concert for New York City, condemning the attacks and singing his song "Peace Train" for the first time in public in more than 20 years, as an a cappella version.

Cat Stevens donated a portion of his box-set royalties to the fund for victims' families and the rest to orphans in underdeveloped countries.

Cat Stevens sued for libel and received an out-of-court financial settlement from the newspapers, which both published apology statements saying that he had never supported terrorism and mentioning that he had recently been given a Man of Peace award from the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates.

Cat Stevens wrote about the experience in a newspaper article entitled "A Cat in a Wild World".

Cat Stevens invested in building his own recording studio which he named Mountain of Light Studios in the late 1990s, and he was featured as a guest singer on "God Is the Light", a song on an album of nasheeds by the group Raihan.

Cat Stevens established his own record label, "Jamal Records", and Mountain of Light Productions, and he donates a percentage of his projects' proceeds to his Small Kindness charity, whose name is taken from the Qur'an.

Cat Stevens performed "Wild World" in Nelson Mandela's 46664 concert with his earlier collaborator, Peter Gabriel, the first time he had publicly performed in English in 25 years.

Cat Stevens noted that Muhammad was fond of celebrations, as in the case of the birth of a child, or a traveller arriving after a long journey.

Yoriyos created the art on Islam's album An Other Cup, something that Cat Stevens did for his own albums in the 1970s.

Cat Stevens gave a concert in New York City that month as a Jazz at Lincoln Center event, recorded and broadcast by KCRW-FM radio, along with an interview by Nic Harcourt.

That name is part of my history and a lot of the things I dreamt about as Cat Stevens have come true as Yusuf Islam.

Cat Stevens commented that the two worlds "then, and now, are very different".

Cat Stevens's answer was that this was actually an other cup; something different; a bridge between the East and West, which he explained was his own perceived role.

Cat Stevens later appeared as the final act in the German leg of Live Earth in Hamburg performing some classic Cat Stevens songs and more recent compositions reflecting his concern for peace and child welfare.

Cat Stevens performed at the Peace One Day concert at the Royal Albert Hall on 21 September 2007.

Cat Stevens was scheduled to perform at an invitation-only concert at New York City's Highline Ballroom on 3 May 2009 and to go on to Los Angeles, Chicago and Toronto, as well as some to-be-announced European venues.

Cat Stevens appeared in May 2009 at Island Records' 50th Anniversary concert in London.

Cat Stevens performed the song live for the first time in a special charity concert, his first show in more than a year, on 14 June 2016 at the Westminster Central Hall in London.