Fact #191962
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Mick Leeson (co-writer, Would I Lie To You) : The song was written in May 1990. I'd sent Pete (co-writer Peter Vale) the title. In fact, I sent him nearly the whole chorus, and he just put a tune to it. I remember he had the sample of the drum break and that tied us down to a Tamla thing, and it was finished in more or less a day, although we had the hook already.
When we finished writing it, I really liked it, we both thought it was great.
There was no great story behind the lyrics at all, but the verses were deliberately in the style they are.
It wasn't meant to be a love song; it was aways meant to be ambiguous.
When you write a song, you're going for that second when the whole relationship is kind of finished or beginning, that crucial moment, and this lady who's being sung to, this is the moment she has to decide whether this guy is telling the truth or not.
So we wrote it in a day, and took it on our annual trip to Los Angeles where we usually like to play four or five of our new songs.
This was in October 1990, and everybody liked it, but nobody knew it would go into the megasphere as it did.
Eventually Pete cut the song with an a cappella act from New York, called True Image, who were signed in the UK, but their A+R man left the company and his successor didn't see the project through, and it was basically dumped.
But then they, and we, circulated copies of their album around the business, which is how Josh Deutsch, the producer, got to hear the song.
Josh took basically everything that was good, added some things and made what was there better. I mean, that's what you dream about.
But he didn't invent the way it sounds. He refined it from Pete's original ideas.
If you're going to write a Whitney Houston song, a ballad or something, then you don't have to be that inventive on your demo, because David Foster or someone is going to come along and spend weeks and hundreds and thousands of dollars making it sound absolutely magnificent.
Anyway, Josh identified the song as one that would break Charles And Eddie. To break an act you need to be twice as good as everybody else, because you're coming from nowhere. So he identified it as the breakthrough single and worked a long time, and spent a lot of money just going back and getting it better and better.
He did a fantastic version, and what we loved best of all is that basically he married it with Tamla, especially the chorus, while the verses are very reminiscent of early Aretha Franklin.
I remember the first time it was on the radio, the mother of a friend of my little lad said, 'That sounds like a Tamla-Motown song. I'm going out to buy it.' Which was the first indication I had that it was a bit special.
That's what you're trying to achieve the whole time, trying to write songs that do that to people, and this one seems to have done it.
We never thought we would ever have a British number one. We thought our songs were too complicated, which a lot of them are. However, it made No1 in ten or twelve countries and, as in the USA and Britain, it hung around in every territory.
(Source : Inspirations byMike Randolfi, Mike Read and David Stark, Sanctuary, 2002)
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When we finished writing it, I really liked it, we both thought it was great.
There was no great story behind the lyrics at all, but the verses were deliberately in the style they are.
It wasn't meant to be a love song; it was aways meant to be ambiguous.
When you write a song, you're going for that second when the whole relationship is kind of finished or beginning, that crucial moment, and this lady who's being sung to, this is the moment she has to decide whether this guy is telling the truth or not.
So we wrote it in a day, and took it on our annual trip to Los Angeles where we usually like to play four or five of our new songs.
This was in October 1990, and everybody liked it, but nobody knew it would go into the megasphere as it did.
Eventually Pete cut the song with an a cappella act from New York, called True Image, who were signed in the UK, but their A+R man left the company and his successor didn't see the project through, and it was basically dumped.
But then they, and we, circulated copies of their album around the business, which is how Josh Deutsch, the producer, got to hear the song.
Josh took basically everything that was good, added some things and made what was there better. I mean, that's what you dream about.
But he didn't invent the way it sounds. He refined it from Pete's original ideas.
If you're going to write a Whitney Houston song, a ballad or something, then you don't have to be that inventive on your demo, because David Foster or someone is going to come along and spend weeks and hundreds and thousands of dollars making it sound absolutely magnificent.
Anyway, Josh identified the song as one that would break Charles And Eddie. To break an act you need to be twice as good as everybody else, because you're coming from nowhere. So he identified it as the breakthrough single and worked a long time, and spent a lot of money just going back and getting it better and better.
He did a fantastic version, and what we loved best of all is that basically he married it with Tamla, especially the chorus, while the verses are very reminiscent of early Aretha Franklin.
I remember the first time it was on the radio, the mother of a friend of my little lad said, 'That sounds like a Tamla-Motown song. I'm going out to buy it.' Which was the first indication I had that it was a bit special.
That's what you're trying to achieve the whole time, trying to write songs that do that to people, and this one seems to have done it.
We never thought we would ever have a British number one. We thought our songs were too complicated, which a lot of them are. However, it made No1 in ten or twelve countries and, as in the USA and Britain, it hung around in every territory.
(Source : Inspirations byMike Randolfi, Mike Read and David Stark, Sanctuary, 2002)