Cat Stevens - BBC Sessions, Volume 4: In Concert, Radio Theatre, London, Britain, 6-3-2009

This is kind of a new album, and kind of something I posted previously. Let me explain. Back in 2009, I posted a Cat Stevens (a.k.a. Yusuf Islam or Yusuf) album which I called "Two Radio Shows." It contained music from two radio shows he did in 2009, each of them being about half an hour long. Since then, I've really gotten into posting BBC material. So I've deleted that album and replaced it with this one. It still contains material from those two 2009 shows, but I've included the full BBC concert, which is nearly an hour long, and then just three songs from the other concert, done for the Morning Becomes Eclectic radio show. It turns out those were the only three songs that weren't also played in the BBC concert.

I'm redoing this because Stevens recently did another concert for the BBC (the 2023 Glastonbury Festival). So this becomes Volume 4, and that one, which I will post very soon, will become Volume 5.

In 2006, Stevens returned to secular music with the album "An Other Cup." In 2009, he followed that up with a second album, "Roadsinger." To promote "Roadsinger," he did a lot of live appearances. Two radio shows stand out for their exceptional sound, one on "Morning Becomes Eclectic" in California on May 12th, and one for the BBC in Britain on June 3rd. The shows were very similar, with the same small, mostly acoustic band. Both these shows are from bootlegs, but they were played on TV and/or the radio, and were professionally recorded. So this is as good as if they had been recorded for an official album.

I stated in my last Cat Stevens post that I wasn't impressed with his first couple of albums after his return to secular music. I still feel that way, and I also feel they've gotten better with each new album, with his 2017 album "The Laughing Apple" the best (comeback) one yet. But only six out of 18 songs here are from his 2006 or 2009 comeback albums, and he generally played the strongest ones. Mostly, he did his classics from the early 1970s, but with some nice unexpected choices, such as "Portobello Road" and "Blackness of the Night" from his 1960s pop era, or "Ruins," one of his better songs from later in the 1970s.

This album is an hour and six minutes long.

01 talk by Johnnie Walker (Cat Stevens)
02 Oh Very Young (Cat Stevens)
03 Where Do the Children Play (Cat Stevens)
04 talk (Cat Stevens)
05 Thinking about You (Cat Stevens)
06 talk (Cat Stevens)
07 Miles from Nowhere (Cat Stevens)
08 Wild World [Zulu Version] (Cat Stevens)
09 talk (Cat Stevens)
10 Portobello Road (Cat Stevens)
11 talk (Cat Stevens)
12 Blackness of the Night (Cat Stevens)
13 Into White (Cat Stevens)
14 talk (Cat Stevens)
15 Roadsinger (Cat Stevens)
16 talk (Cat Stevens)
17 Boots and Sand (Cat Stevens)
18 talk (Cat Stevens)
19 Father and Son (Cat Stevens)
20 All Kinds of Roses (Cat Stevens)
21 Don't Be Shy (Cat Stevens)
22 talk (Cat Stevens)
23 To Be What You Must (Cat Stevens)
24 Welcome Home (Cat Stevens)
25 Lilywhite (Cat Stevens)
26 Ruins (Cat Stevens)
27 Maybe You're Right (Cat Stevens)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15431057/CatSvns_2009_BBSessions_olum4InConcrtRdioTheatreLondnBrtain__6-3-2009_atse.zip.html

The photo I used for the cover art comes from a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London in December 2009. I stuck with the same photo I used for the "Two Radio Shows" version of this album, except I completely redid the text, using the same font color and type as earlier albums in this BBC series.