“It wasn’t the end of the world, was it?”: The 1970s hit Yusuf/Cat Stevens wrote to break up with his girlfriend
There is no easy way to break up with someone; no matter the drill, one of you is always going to be left heartbroken, with a million scattered pieces to pick up, and in 1970, Yusuf/Cat Stevens tried his hand at doing the whole thing via song.
At the beginning of a decade defined by economic turmoil, political upheaval, and the two sides of the coin of punk rock and Margaret Thatcher, Stevens was embracing change after signing a new contract with Island Records. As such, he knew that his third album, Mona Bone Jakon, would stray from the British pop and baroque folk of 1967’s Matthew & Son and 1967’s New Masters.
It wasn’t just the label that was new for Stevens. His new producer, Paul Samwell-Smith, was pushing him toward the nether region of folk-rock. Plus, the singer-songwriter was crawling out of a very dark hole after completing his second album with then-producer Mike Hurst, a hole that went by the name of tuberculosis.
Thanks to the natural overwork and exhaustion of his industry, from shmoozing, smoking, drinking, and partying to touring, recording, and media commitments as a teenager, Stevens caught the disease, alongside a collapsed lung, and was hospitalised for the rest of the year.
Tucked away in the off-white of a sterile, clinical, and cold world, Stevens somehow found it in him to write 40 songs. Near the end of his period of recuperation, he tested the waters with a party that he deemed unmissable, where the likes of Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood and other iconic household names gathered. If only non-nicotine vapes had existed back then, Stevens would’ve been set for the evening.
At the party, he met Patti D’Arbanville, a teenager and a hopeful model. Much later, D’Arbanville would gain prominence as an actor whose partnership with Andy Warhol led to many arty, underground flicks. For now, in Stevens’ orbit, she was a bright-eyed, wonder-struck model, and they soon began a romantic connection.
As the saying goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder; as modelling opportunities snowballed for D’Arbanville, the blonde left the ‘Big Smoke’ more and more for opportunities in Paris and New York City. Finally out of his cage, Stevens felt that the best way for her to hear his cries of abandonment was through his echoing vocals calling after a plane set for JFK.
In an interview with Warhol, D’Arbanville told all about how the breakup tune hit her squarely in the chest. She began, “Stevens wrote that song ‘Lady D’Arbanville’ when I left for New York. I left for a month; it wasn’t the end of the world, was it? But he wrote this whole song about ‘Lady D’Arbanville, why do you sleep so still’. It’s about me dead. So while I was in New York, for him it was like I was lying in a coffin.”
The image of her own cold corpse was a vehicle through which Stevens could say with complete certainty that there was nothing left between the pair that was worth pursuing. Their worlds were just too far apart to bear any fruitful relationality for one another.
D’Arbanville concluded, “He wrote that because he missed me, because he was down… It’s a sad song”. Indeed.
