For Your Love

This is the Yardbirds as a pop act, which is a different and in some ways more interesting proposition than the Yardbirds as blues explorers. The harpsichord figure that opens the song is extraordinary — delicate, almost fussy, a Baroque instrument dropped into mid-sixties British pop with complete confidence. The structure is tense and compressed, the arrangement always threatening to tip into chaos but never quite doing so. Lyrically it is a transaction — I will give you this if you give me that, love rendered as negotiation — and the slightly clipped, formal delivery suits that transactional quality perfectly. Giorgio Gomelsky's production has an almost theatrical quality, every element placed for maximum effect, the contrast between the harpsichord's precision and the guitar's roughness deliberate and productive. This song helped establish what British Invasion pop could do with arrangements, could borrow from classical forms without becoming academic, could be simultaneously sophisticated and viscerally satisfying. It sounds nothing like anything that preceded it and everything that followed it. Play it when you want to understand a moment in music history not as an abstraction but as a physical sensation — the particular excitement of a sound that had not existed the day before and suddenly could not be unimagined.