Jim Capaldi – Love Hurts

Everyone knows Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” — but in Britain, the hit version was recorded the same year by Traffic’s drummer, and it climbed higher.

In 1975, two versions of “Love Hurts” arrived within months of each other, both by British acts, both destined to chart. The one the world remembers belongs to the Scottish hard-rock band Nazareth — the aching, cracked-voiced ballad that reached the American Top 10 and turns up in films to this day. But in Britain, the bigger hit was the other one. It climbed to No. 4 on the UK chart that November and stayed there through an eleven-week run, outperforming Nazareth’s version at home. And it was sung by a man far better known for sitting behind a drum kit: Jim Capaldi, of Traffic.

Keep watching: Nazareth – Love Hurts · Traffic – Light Up or Leave Me Alone

“Love Hurts” had already lived several lives before either 1975 version. The American songwriter Boudleaux Bryant wrote it, and the Everly Brothers recorded it first, in 1960, tucking it away as an album track they never released as a single. Roy Orbison scored the first hit with it in Australia in 1961. More than a decade later, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris turned it into a country landmark, their duet becoming one of the song’s most cherished readings. By the time Nazareth and Capaldi reached for it in 1975, “Love Hurts” was already a standard — a song about the cruelty hidden inside romance that seemed to deepen with every new voice that took it on.

The drummer out front, again

For Capaldi, the timing carried a certain symmetry. He had spent years in Traffic as the drummer and lyricist, usually writing words for Steve Winwood to sing, occasionally stepping forward to take a lead vocal himself. By 1975 he was building a solo career alongside the band, and “Love Hurts” — recorded for his album Short Cut Draw Blood — became its high point. It was his highest-charting UK single, a bigger commercial moment on his own than almost anything he achieved under the Traffic name. Rolling Stone singled out his interpretation for carrying “a sense of pain very different from Roy Orbison’s,” a reading shaped by Capaldi’s warmer, more worn voice rather than Orbison’s operatic ache or Nazareth singer Dan McCafferty’s rasp.

Two hits, one song, one year

The strange double-life of “Love Hurts” in 1975 — two British versions charting at once — is a small case study in how a great song outlasts any single performer. Nazareth won the wider world and the long tail of soundtracks and radio; Capaldi won Britain, at least for that autumn. The single also charted in the United States, Ireland, Canada, Sweden, and West Germany, carrying the former Traffic man further up the charts on his own than he had gone before. Jim Capaldi, born August 2, 1944, kept recording and performing until his death in 2005, a year after Traffic entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His “Love Hurts” endures as the quiet answer to a trivia question most people get wrong — the hit British version of a song everyone thinks they already know.