On the surface, Yusuf/Cat Stevens might seem an unlikely booking for the Sunday ‘legends’ slot. He’s an artist who changed his name and stopped making mainstream music entirely in 1979 as a result of his conversion to Islam, and didn’t resume performing secular material until 2006. His profile in the intervening years was confined to the news, where he regularly appeared as a spokesperson on matters pertaining to the Muslim community. In the interim, his vast-selling 70s albums receded a little into history and now, bafflingly for anyone who remembers their respective profiles in the early 70s, the work of Nick Drake is probably better known and certainly more regularly referenced as an influence today than Yusuf’s oeuvre.
But that simply means his legends slot is an opportunity for Yusuf to remind the audience of just how many remarkable songs he was responsible for – not only the singer-songwriter material that made him a global superstar as the decades turned, but the smart, occasionally slightly strange pop that was his stock in trade prior to that. I Love My Dog – which he performs as a medley with Here Comes My Baby – remains a deeply odd song, one that compares his affections for his inamorata unfavourably with those he feels for his faithful hound. He seems slightly taken aback by the reaction – “Wow, thank you! Incredible. Woah!” – but perhaps he shouldn’t be. It’s followed by The First Cut Is the Deepest, which is as indelible and beautiful a song as anyone wrote in the 60s. And as if to prove the point, he subsequently covers the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun: The First Cut Is the Deepest sounds just as good.
And the later singer-songwriter material – Moonshadow; Oh Very Young; Remember the Days of the Old Schoolyard; a closing double-punch of Wild World and Father and Son – fits the moment perfectly. It floats through the thick afternoon air, constantly on the precipice of a thunderstorm – a perfectly soothing balm for Sunday’s sore heads and exhaustion. Even Morning Has Broken, the old hymn that his 1971 reworking managed to turn into a ubiquitous part of 70s children’s lives (no assembly was complete without one of the trendier, slightly longer-haired teachers strapping on an acoustic guitar and favouring the pupils with a shaky rendition), has long since shaken off its associations with musty school halls. At Glastonbury it feels sweet and moving, cutting through your hangover fog with its wide-eyed innocence.
The audience lap it all up, as they lapped up Dolly Parton or Barry Gibb in previous years – albeit with more of them in a recumbent position than there were when Jive Talkin’ or 9 to Five were blaring out from the stage. Yusuf leaves with a humble “God bless you” to huge cheers: an understated kind of triumph, but a triumph nonetheless.
