Chart entered : 20 October 1966
Chart peak : 28
Number of hits : 13
Some self-control required here as I try to keep my detestation of this man out of writing about his music.
Steven Georgiou was born in 1948 in London to a Greek Orthodox father and Baptist mother. He was then educated at a Catholic school which no doubt added to his religious confusion. He grew up interested in music and art and spent a year at Hammersmith College of Art with the intention of becoming a cartoonist. He signed his first publishing deal at 17 and began performing his songs at London coffee houses and pubs under the name Cat Stevens.
In 1966 he was spotted by ex-Springfield Mike Hurst who arranged a recording session for him at Decca under false pretences, telling CEO Dick Rowe they were recording a Mike D'Abo song. He wasn't amused by the deception but his boss Edward Lewis liked this song enough to agree to put it out on the sub-label Deram.
It's hard to discern what it was that made Lewis so indulgent. "I Love My Dog" sounds, at best, half-written. It's only two minutes and sixteen seconds long but even so appears to run out of ideas halfway through. There's little more than a single verse where our hero charmingly tells his lover that he expects their relationship to be less substantial than the one he has with his dog. Hurst, as producer, and his arranger Alan Tew, give it a cello-heavy baroque pop arrangement predicating the works of Clifford T Ward and the teenaged Cat already has that unmistakable pained tenor but it still sounds a very slight item. Nevertheless pirate radio play got it into the charts.
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