Rod Stewart - The First Cut Is The Deepest
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American expatriate singer P. P. Arnold had the first hit with the song, reaching No. 18 on the UK Singles Chart[5] with her version in May 1967, well ahead of the song appearing on Stevens' album. The Arnold hit featured an up-tempo, soulful vocal set against harpsichord, horns, and strings. It also appeared in the 2012 feature film Seven Psychopaths.
Keith Hampshire had the first chart-topping hit of the song when his recording of it became a number-one hit in Canada in 1973, reaching the top of the RPM 100 national singles chart on 12 May of that year.[6] It also topped the Canadian Adult Contemporary chart and charted in the United States, albeit outside the top 40.[7][8]
Stewart recorded the song at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, United States, and it appeared on his 1976 album A Night on the Town. It was released as a double A-side single with \"I Don't Want to Talk About It\". It was a huge success, and spent four weeks at No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart in May 1977,[11] No. 11 in April in Canada, and also reached No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. In a departure from the original, Stewart excludes the concluding \"But when it comes to being loved, she's first\" from the refrain. In 1993, he recorded a live version during a session of MTV Unplugged. This was included on the album Unplugged...and Seated.
Swedish musician Papa Dee released a reggae cover of \"The First Cut Is the Deepest\" in 1995. It was released as the first single from his fourth album, The Journey (1996), and remains his most commercially successful track. Scoring chart success in Europe, it peaked at No. 5 in Sweden, No. 9 in Denmark and Norway, No. 20 in Austria, and No. 38 in Iceland.
Sheryl Crow's version of \"The First Cut Is the Deepest\" is the first single released from her 2003 compilation album The Very Best of Sheryl Crow. It became one of Crow's biggest radio hits, peaking at No. 14 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and becoming her first solo top-40 country hit following the success of her duet with Kid Rock, \"Picture\".[31] The song stayed on the Hot 100 for 36 weeks and became a gold seller, also reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary and Adult Top 40 charts. Internationally, the song was a top-twenty success in Hungary, Ireland and New Zealand.
Richard Kramer: ... lay out some inconvenient truths about how financial markets really work. Now, our new strap line is, if there's a bubble that bursts, we pricked it first. And this week's episode will cut like a knife, pun intended, in that we're gonna try to make sense of the headlines about headcount reductions and cost-cutting strategies across tech companies large and small. The First Cut Is The Deepest was the song from Cat Stevens, then copied famously by Rod Stewart and Sheryl Crow, but there's a lot more than one verse to that song, and we can expect lots more about cuts to come in the markets. More in a moment.
Will Page: So we're gonna go back to our foundational series of Bubble Trouble Podcast where I assume no prior knowledge on a complex topic in finance, which for me is called method acting, and then I grill someone who does know a lot about complex topics and financial markets, that's Richard Kramer, so our audience can make sense of it all. This one is for our audience not for ourselves, and I wanna get straight into this headline frenzy about hiring freezes, headcount reductions, and cost-cutting we're seeing in tech companies, which in many cases have never had to do this dance before. So let's dive in on that point, Richard. When we talk about first cut's the deepest, full credit to Cat Stevens in North London or there, but would it be fair to say that the Googles, the Amazons, the Meta Facebooks of this world haven't had to cut before Is this the first time that we've seen net reduction in headcount in these tech companies
Richard Kramer: Well, to answer your question directly, Will, indeed this is the first RIF, or as they say in the business, reduction in force that many of these companies have ever undertaken. Now, certainly there have been areas they de-emphasized in the past, there have been areas they shut down, and there have been areas they've had headlong growth, but what we've seen since the end of last year is that nearly every tech company has fired around five or 6% of the staff. And if you do the math, that's around one and 20 at the organization. And typically they're split up into teams that might be 10 or 15 people, so it might be that your team escapes unscathed, or it might be that your team gets de-emphasized.
Will Page: Great. Now, I think what we should do to kind of give the foundational stepping stones for this podcast is just look back over the past year or so and put into some sort of chronological order what these layoffs have looked like. And I'm interested in layoffs which have got at least four figures, maybe five, and I think the first one to cut them like a knife was Shopify. If we go back to July, they shed 1000 people. It's a big correction there in their stock price. Then in August, we saw Peloton shed 780, and Snap 1,280. Moving forward to November, and then we saw that knife cut that bit deeper. We saw November, we saw Twitter delete 3,037 tweets, Meta shed 11,000 friends, Namson offloaded 10,000, and then doubled that again in January.
Richard Kramer: And Meta added about 42,000 people and let 11,000 go. Microsoft added over 77,000 people and let 10,000 go. Even Salesforce, which is certainly under a lot of pressure from a theme we touched on in a previous podcast, activist investors, they're piling in there, they've let go of 8,000, but have added, both through hiring and through acquiring other companies, about 31,000 people. So the first point that we wanna make is that while you hear about these big number headcount cuts, there were many more people hired and what you're doing oftentimes is swapping out older, more expensive staff for younger staff with credentials that might fit what the companies next big projects are a little bit better.
Will Page: That's inspired two thoughts. That's a very, very helpful description there that- not just for me but for our audience gets their head around the headlines, but the first thing is not all headcount is the same because, to your point, if I just stopped hiring, I could reduce the headcount on my phone through natural churn. And what you're saying is I'm just gonna bring that headcount reduction forward, as opposed to let natural churn do the job itself. Then secondly, again to reiterate, not all headcount is the same because [laughs] I think Amazon fired their recruiting force and that was about 10,000 people. So I'm firing the people whose job is to recruit labor. So if I'm not gonna hire anymore, then I don't need to- that headcount involved in hiring. Fair comment
Will Page: Right. [laughs] So it just made me think about that expression tech is eating tech. Maybe one of the perverse outcomes of the pandemic is that we've now had technological advancements which means tech can destroy its own headcount even faster as well. Now, we were toying with the idea of a name for this podcast, and we leaned on Cat Stevens' song First Cause Is The Deepest because you're saying it's not the first cut. You're saying there could be a second and a third on its way. Talk me through this idea you have about why first cut is not the last.
Richard Kramer: So in my close to 30 years of being a tech analyst, I have seen many companies go through what is affectionately called restructurings. The typical pattern of these is usually involving three or four stages. Now, the first stage is a very simple, very easy one, you cut the flight of fancy projects; the providing Internet service in emerging markets with balloons or gliders-
Richard Kramer: ... the strange robots that are supposed to follow you around your home and ask you questions or listen to what you're saying. All of these crazy projects that get funded, especially in very heady times when everybody wants to believe the best and interest rates are zero, so money is free, you may as well try your hand at things, all of those flight of fancy projects are the first ones to go on the chopping block to say, \"Look, we've poured a lot of money into this, it's clear it might take years to come to fruition or never work, let's just end it now. Let's cut- cut our losses and move on.\" That's the first phase, and I think that got done already before these headcount cuts you're talking about come through.
Will Page: Grand stuff. All right, so I think the best way to close out part one here after our three cuts is the deepest, which is what's the sign for our audience here, what's the sign we- that cut is the last
Will Page: Fantastic. Well, you've taken us through the first, second, and third cut in the deepest. Let's park it up for part one. And p- part two, I wanna get into how these cuts are working with stock buybacks. How can companies hack their workforce yet buy up their own stock But for the now, First Cut Is The Deepest and we'll be back for the second and third in the second-half of this show.
Richard Kramer: Sure. So The first thing you can see is that the numbers of staff are what gets all the headlines, but what you've got to realize when we dig into the profit and loss statements of these companies is that the headcount alone is only part of the cost you reduce. Because remember for all of those staff, you've got benefits, you've got the desk space and the office space, the HR coverage, the healthcare plan, the food in the cafeteria, the travel to the sales conferences-
Now, let's bring it to a close with what we do best. I've got a pair of Rizla's, you've got some tobacco, we're gonna go smoking. But the first cut is not the deepest, you've clarified there is gonna be a second and maybe a third on its way. So with regards to those two and three, what about giving us one or two smoke signals so