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The trick is that the record never sounds like a costume. The horns, the rhythm section, the reverb on the snare and the girl group backing vocals are all borrowed from 1963, but the writing is contemporary, blunt and frequently very funny, and the two never fight each other. Rehab is the obvious example and also the misleading one, because the centre of the album is the title track and Love Is a Losing Game, where the arrangement drops away and what is left is a phrasing decision every two bars.

Critics praised the voice and the production straight away and the album placed high on essentially every year end list. The reservation, made at the time by a few, was that the songs orbit a single relationship and that a couple in the middle coast on the sound rather than the material. That is true and it barely registers at thirty five minutes. Two decades on it sits near the top of the all time lists, a standing its own year of prizes only hinted at.