If You Love Me Let Me Know Album Review

Olivia Newton-John If You Love Me, Let Me Know. Olivia Newton-John (vocals); orchestra. Country Girl Mary Skeffington, Free the People; Changes; God Only Knows; and five others. MCA MCA-411 $5.98, MCAT-4l1 $6.95, MCAC-4l1 $6.95.

Performance: Good. Recording: Good

Olivia Newton-John is the Seventies’ equivalent of the debutante singer of the Forties. She seems to be in the business as an amusing lark, and as she tripped her way though this collection of such things as Mary Skeffington (Mary is surely a distant cousin of dear old Eleanor Rigby) and Country Girl; I didn’t mind in the slightest. She’s a pretty girl singing pretty songs.

But when Free the People turned up, and the title explains the “importance” of the message, I balked. It unkindly reminded me of the part in Cobina Wright Sr.’s memoirs (you see, someone does actually read that sort of thing) in which she describes how, with her back to the financial wall, struggling to pay the rent on her Waldorf Towers apartment and the tuition for little Cobma Jr. at Foxcroft, she submitted to the ultimate indignity: singing for money in a New York cafe! She, who had been trained for Grand Opera!! (To emphasize the tragic irony of it all, Cobina decided to open her act with Why Was I Born.).

But Miss Newton-John is so much better in such things of her own composition as Changes or Home Ain’t Home Anymore (they probably filled in the moat) that one eventually tends to forgive her lapse at the barricades.

The cover photo is by Patrick Litchfield. That’s Patrick, the Earl of Litchfield, to you.