Cat Stevens – The Very Best of Cat Stevens

This was one of six CDs my two brothers, me and my dad had in the car when we drove to Algeria from Scotland when I was 11 years old. Cat Stevens’ face didn’t appear on the cover. This was pre-internet, so I had to imagine the face of this dude we were listening to. I imagined Jesus. The classic Jesus. The Angela’s Ashes Jesus. The definitely not from the middle east Jesus with the long flowing golden locks and the rose complexion. They sounded hymnal, these songs. At age eleven, I hadn’t yet developed a bitter distrust of human life, hadn’t yet developed a sexual impulse. I was short of the requisite cynicism to offer up any kind of rebuff to Cat and his broad moral brush strokes, his ham-fisted fables about coming of age had me hook line and sinker. They hit me at that time in my life where whatever happened next was irrelevant, they would follow me around for the rest of my days. A kind of childhood trauma. I’m still Cat dependent, I still walk around London with my headphones on from time to time, listening to ‘Peace Train’ on the sly, trying to fill the howling void.