​Death plays a vital role in the life of Cat Stevens. As a teenager living above his parents’ café in the West End of London, he almost plummeted from the top of the Prince’s Theatre during a nocturnal roof-jumping adventure with his best friend. Then, as his first bruising run-in with pop stardom faded out in the late 1960s, the 19-year-old was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent three months in the West Sussex sanatorium where Boris Karloff died. There, he unhooked from his failing career and transformed into the bearded artist who, with Wild World and Peace Train, would so effectively fulfil the Me Generation’s desire for sensitive, soul-searching singer-songwriters.

That second burst of fame was cresting when he went swimming alone in the treacherously cold waters off Malibu and was nearly dragged under: terrified, he bargained with a higher power that he would devote his life to God if he were spared. Two years later, in 1977, Stevens became a Muslim. He changed his name to Yusuf Islam and stepped away from music to devote himself to family, faith and charity — a quieter path, if not an uncontroversial one.

Cat on the Road to Findout (the title comes from a track on his 1970 hit album Tea for the Tillerman) needs its sprawling pages to fit in all these chapters in his life, each illustrated with the former art student’s whimsical ink drawings.

Steven Demetre Georgiou was born “on the full moon of July 1948”, the third child of a Greek-Cypriot father, Stavros, and a Swedish mother, Ingrid. In his sometimes grating wandering-troubadour style, he describes his unusual childhood in London’s buzzing centre, all grown-up pleasures and lurking predators. His trajectory was ineluctably set by this potent urban upbringing: his closeness to Theatreland inspired a love of musicals, especially West Side Story, while even at his Catholic primary school off Drury Lane he was intrigued by the spiritual world, asking nuns at what age angels would start to note his sins (eight, apparently).

It’s an appealing account of an unusual childhood, teetering between urchin-like Dickensian grime and rock’n’roll modernity. Stevens — he took his stage name after a girlfriend commented on his feline looks — was perfectly placed to benefit from the 1960s youth culture explosion: he attended art school in Hammersmith, played such foundational Soho folk clubs as Les Cousins, smoked pot with Marc Bolan and even wangled an invitation to a party at Brian Epstein’s flat.

His progress to pop stardom was slow, but when it arrived, with his 1966 single I Love My Dog, he sped towards ego-bloat at a precocious rate. There’s a terrible story where, on a peculiar package tour in Gothenburg with the Walker Brothers and Jimi Hendrix, he sent his brother-manager, David, to argue that he should headline over Hendrix because he had had more hits.

“Life on the road was becoming intolerable and so was I,” he writes. It’s not quite the year’s bleakest portrayal of pop star life — Kevin Rowland’s joy-free Bless Me Fathershould win that award — but it’s close.

His post-TB second wind chimed with the post-hippie, Jonathan Livingston Seagull-era songwriter boom. His 1970 breakthroughs Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman turned him into a commercial proposition in the US. He sets himself firmly alongside James Taylor, Paul Simon, Elton John and even — audaciously, maybe — Joni Mitchell, claiming “we were all probably listening to one another’s records from behind private walls”. Even then, he felt out of step: his on-tour alias was, Greta Garbo-style, Mr Ivon Toby Allon.

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To his credit, Stevens does not let his religion stop him from being honest about his youthful excesses — not least a nightmarish LSD trip with Hendrix’s bass player Noel Redding during which he tried to stab himself with a coal shovel. Yet for somebody who has clearly spent so much time reflecting on the universe and its meaning, he can lack self-awareness. After more than 100 million record sales, he has good reason to blow his own trumpet; even his initially outlandish claim that his track Was Dog a Doughnut? (from his 1977 album Izitso) was a herald of modern electronic music holds up.

Statements such as “Behold: instant history!” as he describes playing record company executives the Mona Bone Jakon acetates are, however, less endearing. The narrative often sinks into bathos too. Stevens scuppered an encounter with John Lennon and George Harrison at David Bailey’s photo studio simply by talking about himself; when he met Elton John, his main memory is how the Rocket Man beat him at ping pong. He shares his thoughts on the parking arrangements at his various residences; he’s amazed by the trick candles on his 30th birthday cake. At times, it’s pop superstardom filtered through Mr Pooter, the road to findout leading to Alan Partridge’s Linton Travel Tavern.

• Yusuf, formerly Cat Stevens, on his album Tea for the Tillerman 2

Once he is committed to his spiritual quest, his musical drive is quickly diverted into his religious life and his family, the main subject of the book’s second half. In 1979 he married Fawziah, the mother of his six children (they tragically lost one son in infancy). He was instrumental in founding the Islamia Primary School in London — Prince Charles visited it in 2000 — and the charity Muslim Aid, although there are still-raw controversies on his spiritual path.

His contemporaneous comments on the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie were widely interpreted to mean he supported the death sentence: he claims here he was merely outlining the Quranic position, and argues that he was unfairly edited on a TV discussion panel by people who didn’t understand sarcasm. After 9/11 he was placed on a no-fly list, an edict he suspects came from an earlier refusal to meet George W Bush. “A vendetta? No! Don’t be silly, Yusuf.”

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In recent years he has reconciled his faith with his musical vocation, passing through the stages of next-generation respect: new records, including An Other Cup in 2006; a Glastonbury legends slot in 2023; this autobiography. Cat on the Road to Findout goes a long way to explaining how the handsome pop star on the front cover became the white-haired elder statesman on the back. At 77, Yusuf/Cat Stevens hasn’t finished writing new chapters in a life that — even in the wild world of pop — remains utterly distinctive.

Cat on the Road to Findout by Yusuf/Cat Stevens (Constable £25 pp568). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members