The album cover is misleading. This Aussie is not the David Cassidy touted by the album design inherited from Capitol, Springfield's previous label. Instead he's an adept musician (guitar and keyboards) and gifted pop songwriter. A mini-David Bowie perhaps. His subjects (film stars, mysterious women, will I make it?) are clean-cut teenage reactions to Bowie, and his music, again like Bowie's, a highly produced and facile synthesis of every catchy hook of the past ten years. You may have heard it before but you can't quite remember where, and it's put together so expertly that anyone with a fondness for pop will find it irresistible. Del Newman's string arrangements are gorgeous, perhaps the best he has ever written. The album intersperses lovely ballads with effective rockers, and Springfield sings them all credibly, if a bit uncertainly. His pretty-boy vocals are not quite up to his other talents, but they hardly detract from an otherwise attractive confection. (RS 155)

KEN EMERSON