Yusuf / Cat Stevens Postpones Book Tour Due To Visa Processing Delays

Cat Stevens, who goes by Yusuf, postponed the North American leg of his book tour because of delays to visa approvals, the artist announced Monday.

The singer, who also uses the stage name Yusuf / Cat Stevens, was supposed to visit the States this month to promote his book “Cat on the Road to Findout,” which will be released in the U.S. on Oct. 7. The tour delay will not affect the release of the book because they “don’t need visas,” Stevens said.

The tour was set to feature Stevens talking about the memoir while performing an acoustic set. The artist released a statement saying that he waited months for visa approvals, holding out as long as he could, but they never came.

“However, at this point, the production logistics necessary for my show cannot be arranged in time,” he said. “I am really upset! Not least for my fans who have bought tickets and made travel plans to see me perform.”

See Rocking In The Free World? The U.S. Artist Visa Nightmare

Stevens went on to say that North American audiences may be able to see him in the future “if visa approvals eventually come through.”

“Those dates would be some time away because of other travel tour plans but, hopefully, fans will be able to hop on the Peace Train route at some time in the future.”

Fans who purchased tickets via Ticketmaster will receive a full refund.

Stevens isn’t the only musician to experience issues with getting visas approved. A number of artists have had to cancel performances and tours due to visa issues, and some have had their visas revoked by the government.

Regional Mexican star Julión Álvarez was one of those cases. He said he was informed that his visa was “canceled” one day prior to performing at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and the artist was forced to postpone his sold-out May 24^th concert. The production was mostly set and nearly ready to go when Álvarez got the call. The show’s promoter, Henry Cárdenas of Cárdenas Marketing Network, told Billboard that he lost about $2 million as a result of the postponement.

Pollstar reported on the visa issue in April, from high costs to processing times, and spoke to rocker-turned-lawyer Matthew Covey, who helped form a nonprofit called Tamizdat that aims to facilitate artist mobility and international and cultural exchange.

Covey said the problems aren’t exclusive to the current administration and that whatever progress there was with President Joseph Biden has since stalled. He added that processing times are longer than ever because they are now sent to one office in Texas, which are then distributed to offices in California, which is usually slower, or Vermont. The new procedure of having a centralized office dispersing requests to whichever location is capable sounds good on paper, but with the government workforce depleted during COVID and even more so with the current administration’s Department of Government Efficiency eliminating hundreds of thousands of positions, processing time can take as long as nine months, affecting how promoters and agents route a tour, unless an artist’s team pays thousands of dollars to expedite the request.

“No one that most of us work with is in a position to be filing a year in advance,” Covey said. “… The embassies haven’t really recovered from COVID and the de-staffing that happened under Trump — it’s a double whammy because Trump really deprioritized the foreign service. Almost all embassies around the world have been in a state of personnel crisis.”