{"id":812746,"date":"2026-10-24T20:20:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T20:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/812746\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T20:20:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T20:20:13","slug":"the-1968-album-cat-stevens-hailed-as-a-thing-of-perfect-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/812746\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1968 album Cat Stevens hailed as a thing of \u201cperfect beauty\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cat<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ Protest Photos<\/p>\n

October 24th, 2026 \u00b7 3:00pm BST <\/p>\n

Cat Stevens<\/a>\u2019 personal and artistic evolution can be defined by his unrelenting pursuit of enlightenment, whether that\u2019s discovering the real meaning of belonging, or what \u2018success\u2019 looks like when you\u2019re not chasing commercialism.<\/p>\n

From growing up as an artistic outlier and becoming a major musical name in his own right, to experiencing a handful of near-death experiences and embarking on a new path with religion and spirituality, Stevens has given a lot of thought to such deep-rooted existential musings, eventually realising that all of it \u2013 music and spirituality \u2013 more often than not exists in tandem.<\/p>\n

When Stevens first converted to Islam in 1977<\/a>, a lot of interview questions centred around this very possibility. How could someone so deeply embedded in the rock-folk scene suddenly ditch his roots and embark on an entirely new venture, away from music? Surely the two were mutually exclusive?<\/p>\n

For a long while, Stevens likely thought the same, that he had to pick one over the other, until, years later, he realised that the basic approach to both was pretty much one and the same.\u00a0Both concepts tap into the same sorts of emotional connection, making us feel seen, heard, and with a clear sense of direction.<\/p>\n

As he later told The Guardian, once he rediscovered his love for music, \u201cIt is a mystical thing still. It is something that permeates our emotion, our soul, sometimes our intellect. Our body moves to it. I didn\u2019t know where I was going but music helped me to get there.\u201d<\/p>\n

This has been Stevens\u2019 mantra his entire life. No matter where he found a source of inspiration, whether through rock \u2018n\u2019 roll legends or classical virtuosos, if it gave him the same sense of eye-opening motivation, it was worth incorporating into his own sound and style. Even better when worlds collided, which is also why Wendy Carlos\u2019 Switched-On Bach will always sit atop Stevens\u2019 favourite-ever collections of masterpieces.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I were stuck on a desert island, I\u2019d find it hard to let go of this record,\u201d he told The Quietus<\/a> in 2017. \u201cIt encapsulates every part of the perfect beauty of classical music, particularly Bach, yet it uses that with electronic synthesiser. It\u2019s a totally new world, bringing the future and I think it\u2019s fantastic.\u201d <\/p>\n

Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n

Stevens is also a major fan of Carlos\u2019 work on Stanley Kubrick\u2019s A Clockwork Orange<\/a>, particularly Beethoven\u2019s \u2018Symphony No 9\u2019, and more broadly the way she effectively reimagined the intricate workings of classical music\u2019s greatest composers with a freshly refined, electronic edge. To someone constantly looking for bigger and better, the entire discovery was Stevens\u2019 kryptonite.<\/p>\n

As evidenced by his own efforts to cross-pollinate different genres of music, some of which emerged during a time when he was going through the biggest change of his entire life, converting to Islam. After all, you needn\u2019t look any further than his work on 1977\u2019s Izitso to understand that, even during a time when he felt he had no answers, his experimentalism set an entirely new standard for synth-inspired pop-rock.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ Protest Photos October 24th, 2026 \u00b7 3:00pm BST Cat Stevens\u2019 personal and artistic evolution…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":812747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[19405,137400,42201,163190,66903,86844,96,36374,128,135581,56,54,55,66905],"class_list":["post-812746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-1960s","tag-137400","tag-1970s","tag-a-clockwork-orange","tag-cat-stevens","tag-classical-music","tag-entertainment","tag-folk-rock","tag-music","tag-synth-pop","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wendy-carlos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/812747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}