Love Will Tear Us Apart: “Neither One Of Us (Wants To Be The First To Say Goodbye)” by Gladys Knight And The Pips

This cuts deeper than “Hurting Each Other” because its story of a loveless sham of a relationship bore a very palpable subtext. “Neither One Of Us” was Gladys and the Pips’ penultimate single, and last big hit, on Motown, and it is hard to listen to Knight’s woe without thinking about Berry Gordy. On the label – or at least its “Soul” subsidiary – for some six-and-a-half years, Knight was bored and angry at being a very distant second to Diana Ross in the female singer pecking order and of her group being tossed the leftovers that the Temptations or Jacksons didn’t or wouldn’t want.

Knight invests the song – written by the Nashville-trained Jim Weatherly, with help from Michael Omartian and our old friend from the sixties, Artie Butler – with the right quantity of suppressed pain, concentrating all the hurt in her ululant punctuations, in combination with the increasingly raging despondency of her two “Every time I find the nerve”s and the prematurely exhausted frustration of her “those old memories,” not to mention the moment when she bursts out of her reluctant shell – the double “There can be no way” balanced out by the “no, no.” Meanwhile the Pips, as ever, provide the most droll and deadpan Greek chorus of a backing vocal.

Finally, after one climactic whoop, where Knight sounds like she’s swallowed her Adam’s apple as decisively and irreversibly as John Cazale’s Fredo does when Michael asks him if he knows anything more about those Senate hearings, knowing that his answer will condemn him to death, she sounds released – free, and the words “farewell” and “goodbye” just come out, as they had always been waiting to do. The group, and Weatherly, went to Buddah Records, and later that year, their second Buddah single, “Midnight Train To Georgia,” a rebirth as momentous as New Order’s “Ceremony,” went to number one. For a response – if you can bear it – look to Marvin Gaye’s “Just To Keep You Satisfied,” the quietly apocalyptic coda to Let’s Get It On.

Date Record Made Number Two: 7 April 1973

Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2

Record At Number One: “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence

UK Chart Position: 31

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