It was late at night and Sammy was in a deep sleep beside me. `Sammy, is it OK if I sleep with Cat Stevens?` There was no reply, so I took his silence as approval and went ahead. Cat Stevens wasn`t his real name, of course - we all knew him as Steve Georgiou. He lived with his parents in a flat above their restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue. Cat used to sit in our front room playing the guitar. That`s where he wrote his beautiful song Moonshadow. Cat, a sensitive and caring man, used to be fun. He always liked to have a muse. His first inspiration was his girlfriend Patti D`Arbanville, for whom he wrote Lady D`Arbanville. His second was me. We`d talk about our childhood and he wrote Old School Yard for me. I continued with my music, too, sitting in the kitchen in Hampstead strumming my songs. That`s how a Warner Brothers executive, who was a dinner guest at the commune, discovered me in 1971. My on-off romance with Cat lasted several years. I was still seeing Sammy at the time, too. It was the Seventies, after all. But soon Cat began to change. To put it kindly, he was searching for greater meaning in life. To put it bluntly, he was becoming a pain. We went to an Islamic wedding before he converted and adopted the name Yusuf Islam in 1977. Cat was clearly impressed with the orderliness of the Muslim faith. At the reception, I didn`t like the way the women were sent to the kitchen, while the men smoked. If he didn`t exactly lose his sense of humour, Cat certainly mislaid it for a while. He started laying down the law when we toured the U.S., instructing us not to smoke joints or drink. He carried a small prayer mat with him, which we would mock lightheartedly. Cat responded by saying: `You are not here to have fun.` Strange - that`s exactly what we all thought we were there for.