Cat Stevens — The First Cut Is The Deepest

JUL 01 1967 · 12:00

Cat Stevens — The First Cut Is The Deepest (1967) Era: British Baroque Pop / Late-60s Singer-Songwriter Dawn (1967) - Pre-folk-rock Cat Stevens performing live for French television at 'Le 1er Festival'; an early-career document predating his commercial breakthrough and Island Records reinvention. Exceptionally high. This is among the earliest filmed records of Cat Stevens performing 'The First Cut Is the Deepest' — a song that would go on to become one of the most commercially and critically significant compositions of the late 20th century. As a live French television capture from 1967, it predates the modern promotional music video format entirely, giving it dual value as both a musicological primary source and a document of pre-MTV audiovisual pop culture infrastructure. Its austere, static visual language and warm broadcast palette serve as a measurable aesthetic baseline for the era. Context: Recorded in 1967, this performance captures Cat Stevens at the hinge-point between his orchestrated Decca/Deram baroque-pop debut era and the acoustic singer-songwriter reinvention that would follow his 1969 tuberculosis recovery. The song itself — written in 1965 and sold to P.P. Arnold for £30 before Stevens recorded his own version — embodies the Tin Pan Alley-to-personal-expression transition underway in British pop. French television pop festivals of 1967 served as key distribution nodes for UK artists seeking European audiences outside the BBC, and this footage represents a rare primary document of Stevens performing his own composition live in that international circuit, predating his canonical Island Records output by three years. Director notes: The YouTube upload (ID: aBccr-aLu4I) is documented by Playback.fm as a 1967 French performance filmed for television at 'Le 1er Festival.' This is a live television capture, not a purpose-produced promotional music video. Stevens' version of the song did not appear as a single until a 1972 Australia-only release; this 1967 TV appearance therefore predates any formal promotional video commission. The footage exhibits characteristics consistent with late-1960s European broadcast television: 4:3 aspect ratio, warm tungsten lighting, limited camera coverage, and near-monochromatic saturation.