I never wanted water once

Starting my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

26/12/71 : Teaser And The Firecat - Cat Stevens

Our fourth visit with Mr Islam and I've generally liked what we've heard from him (although Tea For The Tillerman didn't hold my interest as much as I was expecting) so I'm looking forward to this.

Yeah, this is all decent enough with some very nice guitar playing on it and a reasonable amount of variety across the album. I recognised "The Wind" but couldn't remember from where - a quick Google surprised me by telling me it features in several films including The Holdovers, Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, Sing, Almost Famous and Rushmore - all of which are pretty decent. I also recognised "Moonshadow" without knowing why, but at least that was a single so I don't need to Google film usage. But (of course) I did anyway and found it's most famous for not being used in An American Werewolf In London - John Carpenter wanted to but Cat had become Yusuf by this time and turned him down for religious reasons due to the film's themes.

Proving I'm not completely ignorant, I knew "Peace Train" from the 10,000 Maniacs version and obviously "Morning Has Broken" has stuck in there from countless school assemblies. I'm also going to call out "How Can I Tell You" not because I knew it in the slightest but because I really liked it. All in all, this was a very pleasant experience and a fine start to the year.

We're all the way down at #6 in the charts this week (which is a low place to start the year) on his fourteenth week of a 64 week run, with it peaking at #2 in its seventeenth week. It managed a further thirteen runs after this, spending 93 weeks in the chart in total with it last being seen in '74. The top five this week were T Rex (in the middle of a six week run at the top), Hot Hits 8 (one of those random albums of covers with a dolly bird on the front), a Jim Reeves Xmas album (he's wearing quite the cardigan on the cover), Led Zeppelin and Simon & Garfunkel - quite the mix there, but the good albums are very good. As we'd expect for Xmas time, there are no new entries in the chart (which goes down to #50 now) but having looked through it, I think I can confidently predict this year is going to be a mix of good albums and abso-fucking-lutely terrible ones.

Wikipedia informs us this is his fifth album, but tells us remarkably little else about it, whilst still giving me plenty to write about. We're told that Rick Wakeman plays on one of the tracks (he pops up a lot over the years) and also that Linda Lewis also sings on one of them - and I'd no idea who she was, so looked her up and learned she lead a very interesting life. She had a five octave vocal range and was the first British black female singer-songwriter to enter the singles chart with "Rock A Doodle Doo" in '73 (it's a much better track than the title suggests). She played Glastonbury twice (in '71 and '84) and she also was the opening artist at the Knebworth Festival in '75, which also featured Captain Beefheart, the Steve Miller Band and Pink Floyd! And Cat was a big fan, taking her as support on his world tour - so I was glad he gave me the opportunity to learn about her. 

Back to the album, the critical reception at the time was a bit "meh", but retrospectively people have been nicer about it, with AllMusic preferring it to Tea For The Tillerman, which certainly seems to be the case for me when I compare my posts. It did very well commercially, getting to #1 in Australia and #2 in the US - it also, for no obvious reason, was #33 in Germany's '72 year-end chart (despite never charting higher that #23 there) and got to #67 in Switzerland in '21!

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version of this for a couple of quid, but there's a Japanese version up there for £1,146.48 - which seems pretty pricey to me, so maybe I'll just settle for the 180gm repress from '21 for £182.30! There are also a lot of different colour sleeves out there - it feels like it would be more fun to try and pick up a rainbow collection. I liked this album a lot - it was a great way to start the year and I hope the quality bar remains this high (whilst seriously doubting that it will).

1971 - Over and out