Teaser and the Firecat

The fifth studio album, released in October 1971, was recorded between July 1970 and March 1971 and holds ten songs. It reached the top three in both the UK and the US, and spent fifteen weeks at the top of the Australian charts, becoming the biggest-selling album there in 1972. Rick Wakeman played piano on Morning Has Broken, Linda Lewis sang on How Can I Tell You, and two bouzouki players, Angelos Hatzipavli and Andreas Toumazis, appear alongside Alun Davies, Larry Steele, Harvey Burns and Gerry Conway.

Stevens wrote and illustrated a children's book in 1972 about the characters on the sleeve, the top-hatted Teaser and his pet Firecat, who try to put the moon back in the sky after it falls. A 1977 animated short narrated by Spike Milligan, set to Moonshadow, was a segment in Fantastic Animation Festival. In Rolling Stone, Timothy Crouse called Morning Has Broken a gorgeous hymn and Moonshadow a simple, unadorned song whose beauty lies in its mystery. AllMusic's William Ruhlmann wrote that the album gave more surface pleasures to more people than Tea for the Tillerman.