John Wesley Harding – Adam’s Apple

John Wesley Harding is the sort of hyper-literate singer-songwriter who inspires reviewers to use adjectives such as “clever” and “precocious” — even though, at 38, he’s no longer that next-big-thing wunderkind who burst out in the late 1980s, covering Madonna songs and talking smack about Live Aid.

You wouldn’t exactly call Harding all grown up nowadays, and he has hardly mellowed with age. But Adam’s Apple, his tenth album, is a dazzling piece of pop-craft that shows wide range and real heart. It is, as usual, breathtakingly erudite, with various tracks taking inspiration from John Donne, Shakespeare, an 18th-century woodcut and so forth. The songs are full of clever rhymes and wordplay that will make your inner English teacher smile.

The unabashedly romantic “Sleeper Awake” has a megaton hook that should land it in a major motion picture, in the place where you’d expect to hear the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”. At the other end of the emotional spectrum is “Sluts”, a fun little ditty featuring a Beatlesque guitar riff over a cheerleader chorus chanting the title as Harding revels in the pleasures of casual carnality — fully aware of just how badly it’s going to end.

“We’re sluts and we’re proud of it/Doin’ what’s appropriate/One day we will live like kings/In one big house with separate wings.” He might not be a lad anymore, but Harding is still right clever.