ROD STEWART - “I Don’t Want To Talk About It”/”The First Cut Is The Deepest”
Rod at bay: both cuts of this double-A side find Stewart on the defensive, licking wounds inflicted in failed relationships. The subdued, pretty, “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” is much the more effective (even if its clumsy heart-heart rhyme grates), rambling effectively and reminding you that the lothario is at his most dangerous when cornered. It hardly sounds like a No.1, and would work better without the guitar solo or that odd tacked-on key change, but it’s grown on me and I could take another helping or three of that gentle acoustic picking.
“First Cut Is The Deepest” doesn’t work nearly so well. It relies on you buying Rod as a bruised ingénue on the rebound, which is tough going on impossible. The problem with Rod is always one of credibility – right from the start of his career he wrote himself into his songs so indelibly that I’m always prodding his tracks for believability in a way I’d never do for most of his peers. “First Cut” sounds weatherbeaten and cynical, rather than freshly hurt, and it doesn’t help that it’s such a middleweight plod of a song.
This is one of the last songs I didn’t know at all before starting the project: unlike the very last (and surprisingly late) one, it’s a little gem. There’s a YouTube clip with Tony Blackburn introducing Williams on Top Of The Pops, and bless him, he looks genuinely and thoroughly delighted that for once the Great British P have taken the classy option. As well he might: “Free” is not the kind of record we’ll often encounter - a langourous, confidently smoochy, cocktail-ready soul ballad. Atmospheric without being naff, high on technique without labouring any points, grown-up without being sleazy, and a terrifically teasing performance from Williams, slipping easily between contentment and caprice.
It does no real work in the song, that “a-ha” - it’s an afterthought, another little hooky Easter Egg from a band committed to packing as much as they could into their tracks. No fault of ABBA’s, honestly, that for British listeners of a certain age and background (mine) it dominates the song now, that tiny bridging sigh cueing up a Norfolk bellow in the head - “Knowing me, knowing you - AH-HAAAAA!”. 
Manhattan Transfer smooth out and slick up Art and Dottie Todd’s song to such a degree that it becomes a pastiche of imagined Frenchness - an accordion, bof alors! - as much as a fifties throwback: what’s sacrificed in the process is vigour as well as (perhaps imagined) innocence. This “Chanson” may make for a good WTF-bomb as a chart-topper, but it’s also as soupy as any of the ballads we’ve sat through. Part of the problem is the vocalising, just on the edge of enjoyably preposterous with its chawn-sawn and its joooo tadoor, but not quite making it. But the “rat-a-ra-ta-ra” hook is the Crazy Frog nim-nim of its day, so points given just for brazen persistence.
Another in the recent string of soft, sumptuously arranged ballads, and like the others this is something I can think myself into enjoying - the polished class of the instrumentation in particular - but find it hard to feel. Some of my reserve is down to Sayer’s voice, which is like a thinned-out version of Elton and comes across as a little too whiney. On the positive side, the dynamics of “When I Need You” stop it being pure sap: good pause-and-punch effects on “it’s cold out - but hold out” and the chorus’ return after the sax break, and when Sayer starts improvising a little at the end it works as a payoff.
This is the first entry in Popular that I’ve written about extensively for Freaky Trigger before, in 
Pretty much as soon as I finish one Popular entry, the next song earworms its way into my head as a memo to self - get thinking about this. With “Don’t Give Up On Us”, though, something odd’s been happening - I can’t keep the song in my brain and it keeps shifting back into “If You Leave Me Now”. There’s not a lot of melodic similarity but the tracks share a theme and a sappy intensity - unfortunately Soul’s tune, while pleasant enough, comes off the loser in this mental war and floats off into insignificance.
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Thought of as a Christmas single, because of when it charted, this of course is actually a rare Number One hit that takes as its theme the Second Coming, which will be marked, according to Mathis, by everyone feeling quite nice for a little bit. Reducing the eschatalogical theology of the Christian faith to “Superbaby is coming to save us” lessens the record’s evangelical power but probably makes it more bearable: this is inoffensive schlock which glides by easily without ever threatening to win me over. That’s the fault of the material, not Mathis, who puts in a creamy, kindly performance: a bad record, but a good advert for its singer.
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