We had warm toast for tea and we laughed

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

15/05/77 : Izitso - Cat Stevens

I've not been overly impressed with anything I've seen from Mr Stevens so far - here's hoping for an improvement here.  I was also initially a bit perplexed by how to pronounce the album title - until I realised what he'd done!

Somewhat unexpectedly, we're not a million miles away from Mr Gabriel - it's surprisingly progg-y in places which I wasn't expecting at all.  And "Was Dog A Doughnut?" (interesting title!) is even more unexpected - it's very Herbie Hancocky and a very peculiar track indeed.  The album is an interesting enough listen because you can hear he's trying to do something a bit different.  I didn't hate it but I'm really not sure if I like it or not - I can imagine it caused a fair amount of discussion back in the day when people used to discuss albums.  And what a peculiar album cover it is.

We're at #18 in the charts this week on his second week of a fifteen week run - this was as high as it got, but it hung around for a longer than I would have expected.  The top five this week were ABBA, Eagles, 10cc, A Star Is Born and Leo Sayer and the highest new entry was The Beatles (#8) which I rejected because it's a live album but it's weird how little it gets mentioned these days so I'm kinda curious to listen to it.  It had a seventeen week run including one week at the top and it hasn't been seen in the chart since, but it's still their only live album (provided you ignore various "Live At The BBC" offerings, which aren't really the same). 

Wikipedia tells me it's his tenth album and the previous one didn't do so well, but this one did OK for him and it's his penultimate album as Cat Stevens - "(I Never Wanted) To Be A Star" drops several heavy hints as to where he was headed.  "(Remember the Days of the) Old Schoolyard" is a duet with Elkie Brooks, whose voice I really should have recognised but didn't and apparently Ringo Starr featured on several tracks recorded at the time that didn't make it on to the album.  The only word on critical reviews comes from Rolling Stone who quite liked the weirdness of it all and it did pretty well commercially, getting to the top twenty in a lot of European countries, #7 in the US and #2 in Canada.

"Customers also listened to" Art Garfunkel, Graham Nash, Neil Young and Fotheringay - I don't know about the last lot but none of the others surprise me.  In a lot of ways I preferred this to my previous visits with Cat because as opposed to delivering me slightly inferior versions of exactly what I was expecting, it came out of nowhere to deliver something most unexpected.  However, I think I'd have to listen to it quite a few more times before I was able to decide actually what it was giving me and whether I liked it.

08/05/77 - Surprisingly enjoyable
22/05/77 - An interesting album which needs a few more listens

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