If I met Cat Stevens (or Yusuf Islam if he prefers) and I asked him how he wanted to be remembered, I speculate that he would want to be remembered for his music and not his controversies. So let’s honor that and talk about his album Izitso, released in April 1977.
Is it a folk rock record, in the vein of songs like “Wild World” and “Peace Train”?
Is it something more jazzy, like what Joni Mitchell was doing around this time?
The answer to both questions is “no.” There is still some folk rock on it, but there’s also – no joke – synthpop. The penultimate track is an instrumental called “Was Dog A Doughnut?” and it sounds like Gary Numan could have made it. But it was not a single.
The first single, “(Remember The Days Of The) Old Schoolyard,” featured another British singer named Elkie Brooks. It was a top 20 hit in Australia, although it was Yusuf’s final top 40 hit in the U.S. and would be his last U.K. chart entry for 27 years. The song is effectively representative of the majority of Izitso. After the previous album flopped, Yusuf made this pop rock album as a comeback. It worked, but if I were alive and a Cat Stevens fan when it came out, I probably would have felt how Jewel’s fans felt about 0304.
I wouldn’t even call Izitso a bad album. On the contrary, I weirdly enjoy it. But I struggle to recommend it because while it has fans, I don’t know anyone personally who could be converted to one. Even at the time, there was precedent for incorporating synths and electronics into folk music. Buffy Sainte-Marie and I think Joan Baez had experimented with that combination in the late Sixties, but this isn’t anything like what they made. Strange as it sounds, I do kind of recommend Izitso if only because you ought to hear it for yourself.
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