Rod or Renoir? The cover art of the art cover, part 2. Includes snogging.

I had my first, proper tongues-included kiss to Rod Stewart’s ‘First Cut Is The Deepest’.  It was with an identical twin and it was awful. Not that those two things are connected.  But they were both slobbery.

It  was Spring 1977, I was thirteen, liberally doused in Charlie perfume and wearing a cheesecloth blouse in pale blue to match my eyeshadow, unaware that my little white padded bra beneath it was illuminated like a neon sign in the ultraviolet lights of the local disco.  The twins – who seemed really old, I mean they must’ve been about fifteen -  flirted clumsily with my friend and me and then when Rod’s ballad came on one of them grabbed me and the next thing I knew we were doing that weird, awkward, rotating thing they call a slow dance. Halfway through he asked me if I’d ever kissed anyone before.  I told him I hadn’t.  What followed was a lot of mangling of lips, teeth and tongues and some unpleasant exchanges of dribble.  I’m just glad I'd taken both my dental braces out earlier that night or there could've been some serious injury involving wire and tonsils.  But I was off the starting blocks.

So whenever I hear that track I’m there again, uncomfortable and naïve, French kissing a boy I didn’t fancy one iota but feeling strangely proud for trying it, even if it left me slightly traumatised and in need of water, a bit like taking part in a chili eating contest.  I’d been practising it on the back of my hand for months, after all, so it was about time I tried it on something that moved and, mainly due to her 'beef chunks in jelly' halitosis, the cat was not really an option.

What I didn’t know about that song at the time was that before being released as a double A side with ’I Don’t Want To Talk About It’ and reaching No. 1 in the singles chart, it had appeared on Rod’s 1976 album ‘A Night On The Town’.

What I also didn’t realise at that time because my familiarity with impressionists did not extend beyond Mike Yarwood, was that the sleeve art for ‘A Night On The Town’ was a pastiche of a famous piece of art from 100 years earlier: ‘Bal du Moulin de la Galette’ by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.  Just like identical twins (oh the connections keep coming!), they were superficially alike but not exactly the same.

Now which one do you prefer?

Renoir’s beautiful depiction of Parisians dancing and feasting on a Sunday afternoon, an Impressionist masterpiece full of life and joy, with its richness of colour and the incredible sense of light, dappled through the trees, almost flickering off the canvas, and all those shapes and forms fitting together so well, so organically?

Or the same scene as painted by Mike Bryan, so self-consciously copied that the lines and brush strokes look rigid, that lovely fluid quality that Renoir achieved is sadly missing, the softness of the faces hardened, the figures flat, the illuminated hues of a balmy afternoon now duller and more like a morning in February?

And its pièce de résistance - grinning out at us from underneath an ill-advised straw boater (I know he just wants to fit in with 19th century Paris but the mullet is a giveaway, he’d make a crap time-traveller) is Rod himself - looking more like a schoolgirl from St Trinians than a raspy-voiced ladies' man.  

I'm not saying that I could have painted a copy any better, I couldn't - just that, like Morris Dancing and incest, some things in life are best left untried.

It's a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned.

Still, it gives me an excuse to include a far superior version and great live performance of ‘First Cut Is The Deepest’ (written by Cat Stevens), sung by PP Arnold in 1967.  I do like this rendition and the good thing about it is that it helps me to disassociate the song from the snog.  Let's just say, the first kiss was not the deepest…