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Cat Stevens: Numbers - A Pythagorean Theory Tale

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Island Records
Released: 1975.11.30
Time:
 33:38
Category: Folk Rock
Producer(s): Cat Stevens
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.yusufislam.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Whistlestar (C.Stevens) - 3:46
[2] Novim's Nightmare (C.Stevens) - 3:50
[3] Majik of Majiks (C.Stevens) - 4:30
[4] Drywood (C.Stevens) - 4:53
[5] Banapple Gas (C.Stevens) - 3:07
[6] Land o' Freelove & Goodbye (C.Stevens) - 2:50
[7] Jzero (C.Stevens) - 3:44
[8] Home (C.Stevens) - 4:09
[9] Monad's Anthem (C.Stevens) - 2:43

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Cat Stevens - Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, Twelve String Guitar, Fender Stratocaster, Piano, Electric Piano, Synthesizer, Keyboards, Vocals, Producer

Jean Roussel - Piano, Organ, Electric Piano, Synthesizer, Harpsichord, Hammond Organ, Arp String Synthesizer, Keyboards, Vocals, Vibraphone
Alun Davies - Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, Twelve String Guitar, Fender Stratocaster, Bass, Vocals
Gerry Conway - Drums, Vocals
Bruce Lynch - Bass

Simon Nicol - Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, Twelve String Guitar, Fender Stratocaster
Chico Batera - Percussion
Gordie Fleming - Accordion
David Sanborn - Saxophone
Magic Children Of Ottawa - Vocals
Barbara Massey - Vocals
Carl Hall - Vocals
Tasha Thomas - Vocals
Art Garfunkel - Vocals
Lewis Furey - Vocals
Melba Joyce - Vocals
Carmen Twillie - Vocals
Brenda Russell - Vocals
Vennette Gloud - Vocals
Suzanne Lynch - Vocals
Anna Peacock - Vocals
Vincent Beck - Vocals

Nick Blagona - Engineer, Mixing
Leanne Ungar - Engineer
Gerald Block - Mixing
René Ameline - Mixing
Bart Chiate - Mixing
Gary Ulmer - Mixing
Ron Saint Germain - Mixing
Bernie Grundman - Original Mastering
Michael Diehl - Reissue Design
Bill Levenson - Reissue Supervisor
Vartan - Reissue Art Director

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Subtitled "A Pythagorean Theory Tale," Numbers was a concept album relating to a faraway galaxy, a planet called Polygor, a palace, and its people, the Polygons. So one learned from the album's accompanying booklet. The songs presumably told the tale, but as with so many concept albums, listening to Numbers was like hearing a Broadway cast album without having seen the show - something seemed to be going on, but it was hard to tell what. The setting did allow Cat Stevens to indulge his affection for Middle Ages madrigal music, and individual songs, notably the singles-chart entry "Banapple Gas," were appealing. The lyrics were full of references to home, God, and "the truth," which gave the whole a vaguely spiritual tone, though the key word here is "vague." Stevens fans may have been somewhat put off by the fear that Numbers was a kind of musical math class - though it went gold, the album was the first in his last seven to peak below the Top Ten.

William Ruhlmann - All Music Guide



Things aren't going well for Cat Stevens on the planet, ah, polyethylene. Critics keep asking: would you buy a used I Ching from this man? Since Tea for the Tillerman, affirmation has been doubtful. Never a deep thinker and rarely a master of words, Stevens has now turned to the "majik" of numerology, only to have the melodies disappear down the decimal point. In fact, "Call Me Zero" would have been a perfect title for Numbers, an album so breathtakingly stupid that even the most loyal fan could count its merits without using any of the fingers on either hand.

Sententiously subtitled "A Pythagorean Theory Tale," Numbers, ostensibly the story of some numerically named extraterrestrials, really isn't about anything at all — no minor flaw in what purports to be a concept LP. Instead, Stevens wastes his time and ours with enough quasi-mystical graffiti to decorate a dozen disasters. "Drywood," "Land o' Free Love & Goodbye" and "Home" are mere calendar art, touristy post cards from an arcane Utopia apparently badly in need of enough Rolaids to dispel forever the malodorous "Banapple Gas" that may cause severe attacks of dreadful Gibranian diarrhea.

When Cat Stevens waltzed into A&M, singing "Well, I ain't got nothing/But it don't worry me," he wasn't kidding. In all respects, Numbers is even more self-indulgent and insipid than Foreigner, the artist's only other attempt at self-production. Gone are the gorgeous instrumental textures and, more important, an intelligence capable of giving shape to the project. There would seem to be an equation here: Stevens minus the common sense and considerable technical skills of his regular producer, Paul Samwell-Smith, invariably equals nada. Perhaps this tribute to treacle is a joke, and Numb is the operative word. Spelled with a D.

Paul Nelson - February 26, 1976
RollingStone.com



There have been three quite distinct phases in the pop life of the man born Steven Georgiou of Greek antecedence in London in 1947. During the mid-1960s he emerged as a composer and singer of light, bright songs, paying a number of visits to the British and American charts with a string of witty, catchy items, including the autobiographical “Matthew and Son”, an account of the drudgery of everyday commercial life. More significantly, he penned a minor classic, “The First Cut Is the Deepest”, which became familiar in the hands of soul diva P.P. Arnold.

But it was in his second period that Cat Stevens gained his greatest acclaim, riding the singer-songwriter wave and establishing himself in that melancholy, reflective mode that so appealed to the post-hippie student audience in the UK—where the style gained the epithet bedsitter music, a reference to low budget, one-room living—and also in the US. Albums like Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat captured the moment: an appealing mixture of gentle mysticism and inner delving. Songs such as “Wild World” and “Moon Shadow” joined the growing canon of acoustic gentility.

But Stevens’ most significant career shift—a personal hejira quite evidently, but a commercial catastrophe—saw him adopt the Muslim faith, re-emerge as Yusuf Islam, and essentially draw a line under that string of popular and profitable releases. In the last two decades he has become something of a curiosity: a subject of occasional interest for the British press, usually as a somewhat eccentric example of a religious enigma, but sometimes as a consequence of his activism on behalf of humane causes.

His remarkably productive 1970s—ten collections of self-derived work—now seem a lifetime ago, but his label’s ongoing re-mastering project has drawn new attention to a substantial back catalogue. These three items are the final trio of recordings released at the end of that fertile decade.

Yet I can’t help feeling that by the time of Numbers (1975), Izitso (1977) and Back to Earth (1978), the Stevens muse had begun to tire. The clearest indication of that perhaps is the fact that only one hit single forced its way through during the period—“(Remember the Days of the) Old Schoolyard”, a cut from the middle CD in this sequence.

Numbers is a concept album of sorts, subtitled “A Pythagorean Theory Tale” and accompanied by an illustrated saga of science fantasy—as spaceships and sorcerors rub shoulders—and is very much of its time. Now, the Tolkien-esque notion appears embarrassingly dated and the songs, a mixture of wistful melody and rather overblown arrangement. A period piece is the kindest compliment.

“Old Schoolyard” kick-starts Izitso with a certain vigour, as early synthesiser trills add a likeable texture to Stevens’ slice of nostalgia, and it sets the tone for a fairly invigorating collection, with upbeat rockers like “Killin’ Time” and the Caribbean tinges of “Sweet Jamaica” creating quite a tasty melange. There’s nothing thrilling here but the players assembled—the Muscle Shoals masters Roger Hawkins, David Hood and Barry Beckett, for instance—lend their unquestionable skills, while Chick Corea’s nimble fingers bring colour with an electric piano work-out on “Bonfire”. Furthermore, the song “(I Never Wanted) to Be a Star” lends a prescient poignancy to the album, with its retro references to earlier Top 20 smashes.

Back to Earth switches focus once again, largely jettisoning star sidemen, and swinging from the light funk of the Brazil-inspired “Nascimento” to the anthemic “New York Time”, which could still be a Broadway rags-to-riches show closer, and revealing again Stevens’ composing range. Yet the variety cannot truly conceal the lack of gilt-edged material.

The bombshell decision, soon after, to leave all this behind was symptomatic of a spiritual disillusion but also reflected, perhaps, a creative drought. Nonetheless, even if Back to Earth represented the start of an extended and continuing artistic hiatus, it is also worth mentioning that Cat Stevens issued as many records in that concentrated era as many contemporary acts do in double the time. During a period when the US produced a surplus of introspective and lyrical tunesmiths, this artist was a rare British voice who managed to keep pace with his transatlantic cousins.

Simon Warner
© 1999-2015 PopMatters.com



Numbers is a concept album by singer/songwriter Cat Stevens released in November 1975. Subtitled "A Pythagorean Theory Tale" the album was based on a fictional planet in a far-off galaxy named Polygor. The album included a booklet with excerpts from a planned book of the same name written by Chris Bryant and Allan Scott. The booklet features pen-and-ink illustrations by Stevens.

The concept of the album is a fantastic spiritual musical which is set on the planet Polygor. In the story there is a castle with a number machine. This machine exists to fulfill the sole purpose of the planet - to disperse numbers to the rest of the universe: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (but notably not 0). The nine inhabitants of Polygor, the Polygons, are Monad, Dupey, Trezlar, Cubis, Qizlo, Hexidor, Septo, Octav, and Novim. As the last lines of the book say, they "followed a life of routine that had existed for as long as any could remember. ... It was, therefore, all the more shocking when on an ordinary day things first started to go wrong." The change takes the form of Jzero, who comes from nowhere as a slave and eventually confuses everybody with his simple truth.

Upon its initial release in late 1975 both fans and critics were confused by the concept and the lack of the sort of "catchy" music that they had been used to from Stevens and although the album eventually achieved gold status it sold far less than his previous four albums and was considered a critical failure. At one point his record label A&M Records contemplated terminating his contract but he still had two albums left to make for them. Stevens continued to be bitter about the process of fame and the pressures to make money for his label and distanced himself from participating in promotion for the album.

Confronted with an ultimatum from the label along the lines of 'make a pop record or else' he set out to make one of the more expensive records of his career, 1977's "Izitso", which yielded several hits. The success of "Izitso" showed the label that he was still hit-worthy but Stevens was now in process of embracing the faith of Islam and after supplying the album "Back to Earth" opted out from the music business.

In 1994 Numbers was released as a limited edition along with the albums "Izitso" and "Back to Earth" in a box set called "Three" from the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab label. This box is no longer available and is highly prized among collectors.

Wikipedia.org
 

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