Marti Webb – ‘Take That Look Off Your Face’

27 March 1980

Our first power ballad, a genre that really took off in the ’80s and, like the poor or venereal disease, is still with us. This one, of the West End musical variant, is sung by Marti Webb and written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which suggests the existence of a Webbest. A Lloyd Webber song cycle called Tell Me On A Sunday, with lyrics by Don Black, was screened on the BBC in February 1980, went down a storm, and spawned this hit single. TV close-ups and tight framing no doubt magnified the impact of ‘Take That Look Off Your Face’; not having watched the whole thing (back then I was a toddler; today I’m an adult with free will) I’m assuming it’s the climax of whatever the story is, given that Marti Webb is swinging for the fences with every pass of the chorus.

I had also assumed this song was telling the story of a couple arguing. In fact, the face belongs to a friend of the singer, eager to reveal that the singer’s fella is doing the dirt on her. But the joke’s on the friend, because… the singer already knows about it! In your face, you with that look on your face! If, like me, you find this a strange thing for a real-life human being to be glass-shatteringly triumphant about, one of the verses has a giveaway lyric about how “I noticed a change, but I just closed my eyes / As only a woman can”. You want lyrics from a woman’s point of view, Andrew? Leave it to me, says Don: I know women; they put up with anything and then bitch among themselves! Nice one Don, says Andrew. Meanwhile, in a nearby cemetery, several Pankhursts swivel in their graves.

I’d be slightly more generous towards this song if it wasn’t for Webb’s bellowing delivery; good for testing decibel counters and hitting row Z in the West End, but at closer range it’s like being ridden by a moose. Unfortunately, this decade has more such power balladry bombast to come.

‘Take That Look Off Your Face’ went to number one in Ireland but not in its native UK charts, where it was kept off the top by ‘Going Underground’ by The Jam (which itself didn’t get to number one in Ireland). The public gets what the public wants.