Imagine: you’re stuck in a bad relationship that’s so bad you can’t get out. A relationship where the field tilt is towards abusive. The Beloved is cheating on you. It feels like there’s no way out, or certainly not one that doesn’t involve destroying a huge part of yourself. Not only do you feel cornered, but you feel utterly alone. Well, that’s the precise emotional location for Anyone who had a Heart. In the song, the speaker – faced with a cheating partner – is angry. But she’s angry because she’s so hurt. Dusty Springfield’s epic version of the song brings out both things at one and the same time. Soulful, but shimmering. She sings it in that breathy style of hers with a haunted and throbbing sense of pain. It’s a song sung from inside a prison.
The song starts with the speaker pleading with the partner to show some common or garden compassion, the sort you could pick up on the middle aisle at Aldi. The speaker’s chosen strategy – rather than open conflict – involves trying to shame the partner into changing his behaviour. To that end, the song is structured around a quite devastating contrast:
Anyone who ever loved
Could look at me
And know that I love you
Anyone who ever dreamed
Could look at me
And know I dream of you
The implicit contrast here is between anyone – any ordinary person with feelings – and the Beloved. Specifically, the contrast is between expected standards of caring relationship behaviour and the partner’s. The use of the modal could does so much work here – implying the ease with which most people would be able to see how much she loves him. The contrast implies he doesn’t see.
The contrast becomes even more pointed in the chorus:
Knowing I love you so
Anyone who had a heart
Would take me in his arms and love me, too
You couldn't really have a heart
And hurt me like you hurt me
And be so untrue
What am I to do?
The Beloved is now explicitly contrasted with Anyone who had a heart. That he ‘couldn’t really have a heart’ is the logical conclusion to be drawn from his infidelity: his behaviour is incompatible with normal range decency, in the speaker’s view. The clear implication, never said in so many words, is: he’s a monster. But the song at this moment performs the equivalent of a handbrake turn, realised beautifully by the singing, suddenly switching focus from him to her, as victim. The question What am I to do? sung in really high pitch (Dusty’s voice was mezzo soprano) is so plaintive and haunting. There’s an agonised helplessness here. On one level, because of how much she loves him, the speaker knows she is trapped.
It's in the second verse that the song most powerfully dramatizes inner conflict:
Every time you go away
I always say
"This time it's goodbye, dear"
Loving you the way I do
I take you back
Without you I'd die, dear
This time the contrast relates poignantly to behaviours of hers, between her good intentions (outlined in the first half of the verse) and her actual behaviour (outlined in the second half of the verse). This is brought home by the parallelism of this time it’s goodbye, dear and without you I’d die dear. The contrast highlights the difference between self-assertion and self-betrayal. This is someone who knows she is acting against her best interests. Paradoxically, she knows she shouldn’t take him back, but she does. She is merely flirting with the possibility of ending it. The uncertainty is matched by the rhythmic tentativeness, the way the verse alternates between three-beat and two-beat lines, hovering between different rhythmic templates, something vividly realised by the singing.
The song climaxes with three blazing (and increasingly dramatic) repetitions of the chorus. But this is repetition with variation. The question What am I to do? is replaced by another:
Anyone who had a heart would love me too
Anyone who had a heart would simply
Take me in his arms and always love me
Why won't you? Yeah
The restraint shown at the beginning of the song, putting the hurt on display, is replaced here, as Dusty sings Why won’t you? yeeah at full power, by withering accusation and angry defiance. OK, it’s not PJ Harvey, but, within sixties parameters, it’s something close. This is what internet trolls today would term a takedown. This is a song of female rage, all the more powerful for being so understated.
CROON FM - PUTTING THE SWOON BACK INTO CROON
Fantastic song, but might not have picked up on this version so another opportunity for a compare and contrast exercise ensued for me. Dionne Warwick, Cilla Black, Petula Clark (in French) and as I found out, Atomic Kitten no less (I don't pretend to have paid any atention to pop since about the 20th century!). I reckon the Ds have it by a mile, with Dusty's being the more emphatically expressed although judging from the comments on YouTube opinions on the preferred version can be quite partisan.