A&M 4365
Producer: Paul Samwell-Smith
Track listing: Sitting / Boy with a Moon & Star on His Head / Angelsea / Silent Sunlight / Can’t Keep It In / 18th Avenue / Freezing Steel / O Caritas / Sweet Scarlet / Ruins
November 18, 1972
3 weeks
Thanks in part to the top 10 hit single “Peace Train,” Cat Stevens’s fifth album, 1971’s Teaser and the Firecat, climbed all the way to number two. Yet Stevens’s popularity was so widespread that he didn’t need a hit single to fuel his greatest chart triumph, which occurred a year later with the release of Catch Bull at Four.
Born Steven Georgiou, Stevens (later known as Yusef) began his career in 1967 and scored several British hits on the Deram imprint. Some of his early material, including “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” would become hits for other performers, including Rod Stewart. A bout with tuberculosis in 1968 led the singer to rethink his musical direction, and he ultimately abandoned his initial heavily produced pop style in favor of more straightforward and stripped-down folk music.
“When I first met him, he basically played me three albums of material,” says guitarist Alun Davies. “We all met at [producer] Paul Samwell-Smith’s apartment and Steve proceeded to play about 50 songs, most of which would appear on the first three [A&M] albums.”
Yet following release of Teaser and the Firecat, Stevens’s backlog of material was depleted. “He was then forced to write on the road,” says Davies, “because he was a heavily touring musician by then.” The fact that much of Catch Bull at Four was written on the road is reflected in some of the music, particularly in “18th Avenue (Kansas City Nightmare).” Says Davies, “That had something to do with getting wasted in Kansas one night. He went on the missing list for 12 hours.” To this day, Davies isn’t sure if Stevens ingested some sort of drug or just had “a few too many brandies.”
Catch Bull at Four marked a turning point musically for Stevens. “It’s quite a piano-dominated album, where the first three were led by guitar,” Davies says. “It moved away from the folkier side of things.”
The album was recorded at Richard Branson’s Manor Studio in Oxfordshire and Chateau d’Herouville in France in a fairly business-like manner. “With a number two album, we were touring a lot,” Davies says. “It had to be done between touring schedules, so the sessions were pretty efficient and pretty happy.”
Although he didn’t play on the track, Davies calls “Sweet Scarlet,” a song featuring Stevens’s singing backed only by his own piano playing, “the gem of the album. That shines head and shoulders above everything else on there. It was an amazing one-off performance.”
“Sitting,” the only charting single from Catch Bull at Four, stalled at number 16, but at that point in his career, Stevens didn’t need a top 10 single to drive his album sales. In its sixth week on the chart, Catch Bull at Four became Stevens’s first and only Number One album.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of November 18, 1972
1. Catch Bull at Four, Cat Stevens
2. Superfly, Curtis Mayfield/Soundtrack
3. Days of Future Passed, Moody Blues
4. All Directions, The Temptations
5. Ben, Michael Jackson