(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover / Penni Gladstone / UCLA Library)
Thu 18 September 2025 5:00, UK
Folk singer Cat Stevens’ life and career have been defined by a dogged pursuit of evolution, be it music or spirituality.
When first landing on the pop charts in 1966, Stevens was a teen heartthrob crafting stirring numbers coated in orchestral baroque arrangements, touring with Jimi Hendrix just as easily as Engelbert Humperdinck. Yet, stardom was struck in its tracks by a nasty bout of tuberculosis in 1969. Close to death and recuperating in London’s King Edward VII Hospital, the young Stevens was faced with the ruminative pause that comes with convalescence, reconsidering his personal priorities as well as his musical direction.
Stevens also listened to a lot of records. With serious time to kill, Stevens would devour the latest albums from The Band, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell, all formative in further pushing his path toward purer folk stylings. Stevens would also look further afield, dusting off old soul LPs from Nina Simone, indulging in recordings of Armenian choirs, and perhaps most surprisingly, immersing himself in early experiments in electronic music.
Before Kraftwerk, German Kosmiche, or even the prog noodlers such as Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, it was composer Wendy Carlos who would stand as the most instrumental in ushering the emerging synthesiser technology away from the avant-garde or university academia and into the pop consciousness. Working with a custom-built, modular Moog, and in close partnership with its namesake inventor, Carlos would drop her debut album Switched-On Bach in 1968, reinterpreting the German classical composer’s most famous work with the new and novel electronic tonalities emitting from Dr Robert Moog’s strange invention.
While quaint and slightly twee by today’s standards, Carlos’ intricate Moog pieces were a revolutionary work in the field of electronic music, serving many as the first introduction to the sonic possibilities of the synthesiser. Before long, The Beatles would deploy a Moog on select Abbey Road cuts, and a wave of Moog compilation records was released, including Switched-On Rock’s take on the contemporary artists of the day.
Carlos would cement her place in electronic history three years later with her icy theme to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, lifting Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary as the chilling theme to Alex DeLarge’s appetite for ‘Ultraviolence’.
“If I were stuck on a desert island, I’d find it hard to let go of this record!” Yusuf Islam told The Quietus in 2017, Stevens’ name since converting to the Islamic faith in 1977. “It encapsulates every part of the perfect beauty of classical music, particularly Bach, yet it uses that with electronic synthesiser. It’s a totally new world, bringing the future and I think it’s fantastic.”
Switched-On Bach’s pioneering influence wouldn’t just leave repercussions in rock and pop, but even Stevens’ intimate songcraft. During his developing path toward Islam, Stevens cut 1977’s Izitso, a synth-soaked experiment in folk rock which saw Stevens deploy everything from the ARP 2600, Yamaha CS-80, sequencers, and the trusty Moog for his first foray into the world of electronic music.
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