Majikat: Earth Tour 1976 [live]

Majikat演唱会专辑，是Cat Stevens在1976年这趟受人瞩目的北美巡迴演唱会中所现场录影的。这次的演唱会特殊之处是，演出中加入了魔术、同步影片播放技术及大型的创新舞台陈设。更令人不得不收藏这张专辑的原因是，这次的巡迴演出之后，Stevens便宣布离开演唱事业，并改名为Yusuf Islam，积极从事宗教与慈善事业。至今30馀年，舞台上不再有Cat Stevens。

During his popular heyday in the 1970s, Cat Stevens did not release a live album, so it was some surprise that, nearly 30 years later, a live recording turned up on both DVD and CD. The performance captures Stevens on his 1976 American tour, just past his commercial peak. (Numbers, the album he was promoting, broke a string of six consecutive Top Ten albums in the U.S. by peaking at number 13 in Billboard.) Supported by the same musicians who had played on his records, including guitarist Alun Davies and keyboard player Jean Roussel, he had a repertoire of hits and other favorites, and the audience can be heard cheering enthusiastically, not only for the chart singles, but also for tracks from albums like Mona Bone Jakon, Tea for the Tillerman, and Teaser and the Firecat. Stevens performs faithful versions of eight of the 11 hit singles he had scored in the U.S. up to this point (omitting "Morning Has Broken," "Sitting," and "Ready"), interspersing them with equally familiar songs such as "Where Do the Children Play," "Tuesday's Dead," and "Father & Son." ("How Can I Tell You," another audience favorite, is missing from the DVD version of this concert, while the DVD boasts performances of "Miles from Nowhere" and "Ruins" not found on the CD.) For most of the show, Stevens says practically nothing, but toward the end he becomes much more talkative, saying of "Sad Lisa" that he may have been writing about himself rather than the woman of the title; admitting that his recent single "Two Fine People" is musically a rewrite of his earlier hit "Wild World"; and revealing that he actually wrote "Peace Train" on a train, although he was thinking of Alfred Hitchcock (and presumably, of the film Strangers on a Train) at the time. More such revelations would have been welcome, but as it is the album constitutes an excellent Stevens best-of.