Released - March 1974
Genre - Folk
Producer - Cat Stevens & Paul Samwell-Smith
Selected Personnel - Cat Stevens (Vocals/Guitar/Keyboards/Synthesiser); Alun Davies (Guitar/Vocals); Gerry Conway (Drums/Vocals); Bruce Lynch (Bass)
Standout Track - Sun/C79
In 1973, having come close to exhausting the musical styles and approaches he had relied on so successfully from Mona Bone Jakon through to Catch Bull At Four, Cat Stevens had felt the need for a creative overhaul of sorts. The result had been Foreigner, an album that, by and large, abandoned the folk stylings of his earlier work and drew substantial inspiration from soul and funk music, and even included an eighteen-minute multi-part suite in place of the usual three-minute folk songs he had favoured previously. While Foreigner, at least in my opinion, had achieved really great musical heights and shown a creative resurgence of sorts for an artist who had more or less exhausted a particular formula, its radical difference from what he had done before put off listeners and buyers, and it didn't manage to be a particularly big hit. Buddha And The Chocolate Box, then, perhaps Stevens' final truly great album, is something of a retreat, a return to the tried-and-tested approaches of earlier years in the wake of the apparent failure of his attempt to do something different. In many ways, it's a rather sad thing that he felt the need to retrace his steps in order to regain a popular audience, as had he just stuck to his guns and continued forging into musical territory unknown to him, there is every evidence on Foreigner that he could have continued making really wonderful music. Thankfully, Buddha And The Chocolate Box, while doing nothing to surprise or truly astound long-standing fans, at least showed that he had a few good ideas within him still and, in a couple of places, even managed to deliver a couple of songs that rank among his best.
The album sees a more-or-less full reunion of Stevens' former creative team, with stalwart co-guitarist Alun Davies back alongside drummer Gerry Conway and bassist Bruce Lynch as well as, perhaps most significantly, producer Paul Samwell-Smith, who had helped to shape and direct all of Stevens' most successful albums prior to 1973. The mood and tone is once again one of gentle nostalgia, with catchy, folk-inflected pop songs that instantly hook themselves into the memory with their simple and memorable melodies and refrains. Thematically, Stevens again demonstrates his growing fascination with spirituality, something which first reared its head back on Mona Bone Jakon. Stevens would later explain that the album's title came after a long flight on which he suddenly noticed he was holding a Buddha in one hand and a box of chocolates in the other, and that if the plane crashed he would symbolically have died while caught between the material and the spiritual world. It's not an idea that's directly addressed in many of the songs, but certainly the pseudo-Buddhist ruminations on the impermanence of life on "Oh Very Young" or the paean to the teachings of Jesus on the imaginatively-titled "Jesus" do indicate an ever-increasing yearning for spirituality, and the idea of Buddha And The Chocolate Box as a kind of figurative bridge from the material world to the spiritual is one that would take on even more relevance with Stevens' conversion to Islam a few years later.
"Oh Very Young" was the album's big hit, proving that Stevens was at least correct in his assumption that going back to his folk roots would give him another hit single while Foreigner had failed. It's a pretty piano ballad that explores the universal desire for youth to last forever, and the gradual acclimatisation to the fact that it must give way to something else in order to cross over into Heaven. What follows it is undoubtedly one of the finest songs Stevens ever wrote and recorded, possibly even my very favourite of the lot - "Sun/C79." Lyrically, it's not the most profound or insightful song he ever wrote, being essentially the story of an ageing musician who sits down to tell his son how he met his mother on the road. Simple it may be, but its chorus is one of the most jubilant and triumphant musical moments of Stevens' career, and it still manages to find time for a few truly beautiful sentiments in its exploration of the musician's love for the mother of his child ("A thousand hours I've stared into her eyes, and I still don't know what colour they are.") For this song alone, Buddha And The Chocolate Box is an album that deserves attention.
After the euphoric highs of that song, the album struggles to ever repeat it, but it comes close a couple of times. "Ready" is a fun, upbeat pop song largely defined by the sunny urgency of its acoustic guitar riff, and "King Of Trees" is a lovely piano ballad lent a grand orchestral grandeur via its tubular bell and mellotron parts, that nostalgically retells the story of a mighty tree ultimately cut down in order to build a road, recalling the environmental concerns of some of Stevens' other earlier work like "Where Do The Children Play?" on Tea For The Tillerman. The final two tracks are fairly simple and forgettable fare and end the album on a fairly flat note, but it's impossible to deny that there are some incredible highs on this record. It might not do anything to surprise anyone already familiar with Cat Stevens' other work, but there are some choice moments (principally "Sun/C79" and "King Of Trees") that really jump out and feel unfairly neglected in the grand scheme of his discography.
Sadly, Buddha And The Chocolate Box would be the last album of any real merit that Stevens recorded. 1975's Numbers was an unwise attempt to create a concept album about a world populated by living numbers that struggles to find a single decent tune, while 1977's Izitso saw Stevens taking the bizarre decision to try and record a synthpop album. Other than the pop classic "(Remember The Days Of) The Old School Yard," his last hit single, it's a depressingly tedious album, and not long after that Stevens became a prominent convert to Islam and abandoned the music business in order to pursue his religious life. Many years later he would release his first album of music several decades' time under his new name, Yusuf Islam, entitled An Other Cup, an album I haven't gotten round to listening to yet, but it's something I'm deeply intrigued by and must get round to one of these days. Although the last few years of his work as Cat Stevens saw a decline of his undeniable talent, his collected discography boasts a significant number of truly brilliant albums that showcase him as one of the finest folk singer-songwriters of the early 70s, and that the long-standing quest for spiritual fulfilment that could be traced through all of his albums ultimately led him to a life of faith and devotion that fulfilled him as much as his music did is a fitting and touching ending to the story of his life as a musician.
Track Listing:
All songs written by Cat Stevens.
1. Music
2. Oh Very Young
3. Sun/C79
4. Ghost Town
5. Jesus
6. Ready
7. King Of Trees
8. A Bad Penny
9. Home In The Sky
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