Credit: Far Out / Protest Photos
Mon 31 August 2026 19:00, UK
It might just have been, indeed, another Saturday night, but Yusuf/Cat Stevens commanded something majestic in the oeuvre of Sam Cooke.
Back in 1963, Cooke had originally written the song ‘Another Saturday Night’ as a juxtaposing and perhaps blindsiding lamentation of loneliness, as he stalked the streets without anyone, in the form of a friend or a lover, to have for company. It was a classic croon, in a lot of respects, that saw the singer swing his way to capturing hearts in a sympathetically adoring way.
For his part, at this time Stevens was merely 15 years old, and likely didn’t know anything of what Cooke was possibly talking about. But sometimes, music transcends the meaning of the actual lyrics themselves. The sheer sound and presence can affect you in ways you can’t quite express. That’s exactly how the young musical maestro felt, and it never left him.
That was not least for the fact that Cooke’s version of the song arrived as a massive chart hit, reaching the top spot of the R&B charts in the US and number 23 on the UK charts. This was enough to make ‘Another Saturday Night’ anything but a song heard on a day ending in Y. Something about it, whether it was the sentiment or the singer’s sheer power, meant that Stevens had to have a taste for himself.
By this time, it was 1974, and on the face of it, the musical landscape had changed in ways so fundamentally that it was almost unrecognisable from how Cooke had found it some 11 years prior. In that time, the British invasion had exploded and left its mark, and glam rock was just having its brash and storming heyday.
In normal terms, that wouldn’t seem like there was much room for a quiet, introspective thing of pure beauty to grace the airwaves. But as with large swathes of his back catalogue, that was what Stevens did once more when it came to ‘Another Saturday Night’, making it feel as though loneliness was actually an opportunity to learn about oneself even more.
Yet it was no coincidence that the singer had a knack for turning even the saddest moments in song into the most precious gems, as it was something that he had replicated before with the likes of ‘Morning Has Broken’, which was released two years prior in 1972. What might have once felt biblical and banal became soaring and life-affirming under the care of his hand.
Further reading: From The Vault
In that sense, ‘Another Saturday Night’ was the epitome of the kind of sonic magic that Stevens spread around in this period, and has never stopped spreading since. He effectively saw it as his moral duty to take the ordinary to the extraordinary, and in this case, transform the isolated into the sublime.
It shrouded him in a godly aura and made him an unbridled force in music, but in reality, Stevens was only singing what he heard and loved. Whether it was Cooke or a hymn, all of it was sacred to him. It was his breath of new life that gave everything that iridescent, beautiful glow that no one could ever resist.
