Here is a transaction to make any music publisher weep. In 1965, a seventeen-year-old Londoner named Steven Georgiou — the future Cat Stevens — wrote a song about the difficulty of loving again after your first love has wrecked you, demoed it to advertise himself as a songwriter, and sold it for £30. The song was “The First Cut Is the Deepest.” It went on to become a hit single for six different artists across four decades: P.P. Arnold, Stevens himself, Keith Hampshire, Rod Stewart, Papa Dee and Sheryl Crow. It topped charts in Britain and Canada, spent 36 weeks on the American Hot 100 in the 2000s, earned its writer consecutive ASCAP Songwriter of the Year awards forty years after he wrote it — and the man who composed it at seventeen is the one artist on that list for whom it was never really a hit at all.
The paradox is the story. “The First Cut Is the Deepest” may be the most successful song Cat Stevens ever wrote, and it built that success almost entirely in other people’s voices. Each singer who took it on found something different in it — soul defiance, country-rock regret, arena heartbreak, radio comfort — which suggests the teenager had accidentally written something close to a standard: a lyric plain enough to belong to anyone who has ever been left.
A Teenager’s Demo
Stevens wrote the song in 1965, before he had a recording career. At that point he hoped to make his way as a songwriter for hire, and he made a demo recording of “The First Cut Is the Deepest” to promote his work to other artists — a calling card, not a confession. In his own later telling, as American Songwriter recounts, he imagined the song as a kind of homage to Otis Redding. The lyric’s premise is as old as love itself: the narrator has been wounded by a first romance and is asking whether a new lover can possibly reach the place the first one occupied. “The first cut,” as the song frames it, is the first disappointment of love — and it is the deepest because nothing defends against it.
In 1965 Stevens sold the song to P.P. Arnold for £30 (equivalent to roughly £510 in 2025 money). He was seventeen. What he could not know was that the buyer — an American soul singer newly arrived in London and building a solo career on the Immediate label — was about to give his calling card a life far beyond the demo circuit. Consider the confidence the song required of its first interpreter. Arnold had to sing, in the first person, a lyric about a lover who cannot stop measuring every new embrace against the first one — and to sell it not as self-pity but as honesty. That is the song’s trick, and it is why singers keep volunteering for it: the narrator is not begging to be taken back, and not boasting about moving on. He is confessing a limitation. Songs that confess tend to outlive songs that posture, and this one has now outlived most of the era that produced it.
P.P. Arnold Cuts First
Arnold released “The First Cut Is the Deepest” as a single on 21 April 1967, ahead of her album The First Lady of Immediate. Produced by Mike Hurst — who would also produce Stevens’ own early records — her version is no fragile folk ballad: it is up-tempo soul, the vocal set against harpsichord, horns and strings, the singer attacking the lyric like someone determined to survive it. Record World caught the performance exactly, writing that “this gal shouts it out and then caresses it on a big beat rocker.” The record reached No. 18 on the UK Singles Chart in May 1967 — a genuine hit, and the first proof that the teenager’s song worked.
It worked so well that it immediately crowded out competition. In 1968 the Liverpool band the Koobas cut their own version and were, as the record books politely put it, overshadowed by Arnold’s. Her recording never entirely went away, either; it turned up decades later in the 2012 film Seven Psychopaths, still sounding like the definitive reading of the song’s defiant side.
Stevens Records His Own — and the World Shrugs
Stevens finally recorded the song himself on 5 October 1967 at Decca’s studios in West Hampstead, London, with an A-list session band behind him: Big Jim Sullivan, then Britain’s most in-demand guitarist, on electric guitar; Herbie Flowers on bass; Chris Hunt on drums; Stevens himself on lead and backing vocals, acoustic guitar and piano, with Mike Hurst again producing. The recording appeared on his second album, New Masters, released on 15 December 1967.
And almost nothing happened. New Masters came and went without establishing him, and his own “First Cut” sat on an overlooked album while Arnold’s single was the version Britain knew. Stevens’ record company did not even issue his performance as a single until 18 May 1972 — and then only in Australia, on Deram with “Where Are You” on the B-side, as a belated promotional tie-in for the compilation The World of Cat Stevens, by which time “Wild World” and “Father and Son” had made him a star on entirely different songs. There is something fitting about the obscurity of the original. The New Masters performance is a young singer still working in the idiom of the British pop-soul he had grown up selling: accomplished, professional, and not yet the hushed confessional voice of Tea for the Tillerman. The song’s greatness did not depend on his interpretation of it. It was already complete on the page, which is precisely what a seventeen-year-old trying to prove he was a songwriter needed it to be. (In a late footnote, his version has since been certified Gold in New Zealand.) The songwriter had been outrun by his own song.
Canada, Then Muscle Shoals
The song’s second life began in Canada. Keith Hampshire’s 1973 recording, from his album The First Cut, became the song’s first chart-topper anywhere, reaching No. 1 on Canada’s RPM 100 on 12 May 1973, topping the Canadian adult contemporary chart as well and reaching No. 70 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Then came the version that fixed the song in the British imagination. Rod Stewart recorded it at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, with producer Tom Dowd, for his 1976 album A Night on the Town. Issued in Britain as a double A-side with “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” in April 1977, it spent four weeks at No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart that May, reached No. 11 in Canada and No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100. Stewart’s rasp turned the teenager’s question into a veteran’s admission — though sharp-eared Stevens fans noticed one quiet edit: Stewart drops the refrain’s closing line, “But when it comes to being loved, she’s first,” trimming the song’s one moment of praise for the new lover. He kept returning to the song anyway, recording a live version for Unplugged…and Seated in 1993.
The Cut That Wouldn’t Heal
Most standards would rest there. This one kept moving. In 1995 the Swedish musician Papa Dee recast it as pop-reggae and scored across Europe — No. 5 in Sweden, No. 9 in Denmark and Norway, No. 20 in Austria. And in 2003, Sheryl Crow made it the first single from her compilation The Very Best of Sheryl Crow, openly modelling her reading on Stewart’s. “Cat Stevens originally wrote it and then Rod Stewart put it out in 1977, which was kind of my era,” Crow said. “I think nobody thought that a cover would do as well as it did. I was surprised.”
It did extraordinarily well. Crow’s version peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, remained on the chart for 36 weeks, and reached No. 1 on three separate Billboard listings — Adult Contemporary, Adult Top 40 and Triple-A. It became her first solo Top 40 hit on the country chart, and earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 47th Grammy Awards, where she lost to Norah Jones’ “Sunrise.” Even the video underlined the song’s portability: directed by Wayne Isham and filmed among the rocks and horses of southern Utah, it dressed a 1965 London songwriter’s demo in full Americana, and nothing about the song resisted. Soul, folk-rock, arena balladry, reggae, country-tinged pop — the melody and the wound survive every costume change. The royalties and honours flowed back to the songwriter: the song won Stevens ASCAP awards in consecutive years, taking Songwriter of the Year honours in 2005 and 2006, on the strength of a composition he had sold outright in his teens for the price of a good night out.
Six hit versions, four decades, three continents’ worth of charts. What explains the durability is there in the writing: Stevens built the song on a single, universally understood wound and refused to overdress it. Arnold could shout it, Stewart could rasp it, Crow could soften it into comfort for the drive home, because the seventeen-year-old who wrote it understood the one thing all their audiences shared. Everybody remembers the first cut. Stevens just got there first — at seventeen, for £30, before he was famous for anything at all.