Fact #192184
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Nick Van Eede (vocalist, Cutting Crew) : (I Just) Died In Your Arms started out as just a title originally, and I still love the way it works on lots of levels. Titles are really important. A lot of people say that the title meant so much to them regardless of what the song was about.
The song was born when I spent some time lodging at my friend Pete's in Epsom. I had no money. I'd sold my last Telecaster to get through the last two months and I moved into Pete's house with his fifteen guitars, keyboards and drum machine. Sometimes the best thing for a writer is to get a new toy because it's the most exciting thing to have new sounds, like real posh strings or a dirty bass. You are either going to write something fantastic in the first six hours or you've lost the moment - and that's what happened with Died In Your Arms.
I moved in, strapped on Pete's Gibson SG or something, cued up the drum machine, keyboards and, at the risk of sounding cliched, the whole thing - words, intro, keyboards, the cello line, the harmonies, everything - was done in about two hours. I've read it told by others, but it just seems to happen that way.
I think I changed a couple of lyric lines later on, but this title just kept coming out, and I remember all I had on paper were the lyrics more or less as they eventually went on the record.
The biggest hurdle was trying to retain all the ideas and basic sounds I had on my little demo, and get them transferred to the final master. That took a lot longer than expected with quite a lot of hassle.
Cutting Crew got signed to Siren, a subsidiary of Virgin, within three months of the band being in existence in November 1985, and we were in new York a month later recording the songs. However, the tracks didn't work out as well as we would have liked, so we ended up back in London, still working on them but, again, things weren't happening.
I called our A+R man at midnight from Air Studios in Oxford Street and said, 'For God's sake, it's gone wrong again. I know there's only one producer that can do this for me, and his name is Terry Brown.
Terry was a mate of mine from Canada who had done all the early Rush albums and had produced my old band, The Drivers, in Toronto. However, my request caused a tantrum between our manager and the A+R man. But Terry came over (I'd already asked him before telling the record company!) and from that day on it just went smooth as anything.
Peter Vitesse, the keyboard p[layer we used, also did a lot for the song. He took my little demo and said, 'I think I know what you're getting at here.' He got this big posh keyboard sound and kept it faithful to the original, which I loved about him. The boys in the band played great, Kevin McMichael played a great guitar solo and arranged the guitars.
Nobody gave a toss who Cutting Crew were, so we only got one review - which was lovely - in The Guardian. It became a big hit in the UK, and it then became a number one in 23 countries including the States. I've even heard Richard Branson say that it was the song that launched Virgin Records in the USA - although he always forgets our name and calls us Crowded House.
(Source : Inspirations by Michael Randolfi, Mike Read and David Stark, Sanctuary 2002)
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The song was born when I spent some time lodging at my friend Pete's in Epsom. I had no money. I'd sold my last Telecaster to get through the last two months and I moved into Pete's house with his fifteen guitars, keyboards and drum machine. Sometimes the best thing for a writer is to get a new toy because it's the most exciting thing to have new sounds, like real posh strings or a dirty bass. You are either going to write something fantastic in the first six hours or you've lost the moment - and that's what happened with Died In Your Arms.
I moved in, strapped on Pete's Gibson SG or something, cued up the drum machine, keyboards and, at the risk of sounding cliched, the whole thing - words, intro, keyboards, the cello line, the harmonies, everything - was done in about two hours. I've read it told by others, but it just seems to happen that way.
I think I changed a couple of lyric lines later on, but this title just kept coming out, and I remember all I had on paper were the lyrics more or less as they eventually went on the record.
The biggest hurdle was trying to retain all the ideas and basic sounds I had on my little demo, and get them transferred to the final master. That took a lot longer than expected with quite a lot of hassle.
Cutting Crew got signed to Siren, a subsidiary of Virgin, within three months of the band being in existence in November 1985, and we were in new York a month later recording the songs. However, the tracks didn't work out as well as we would have liked, so we ended up back in London, still working on them but, again, things weren't happening.
I called our A+R man at midnight from Air Studios in Oxford Street and said, 'For God's sake, it's gone wrong again. I know there's only one producer that can do this for me, and his name is Terry Brown.
Terry was a mate of mine from Canada who had done all the early Rush albums and had produced my old band, The Drivers, in Toronto. However, my request caused a tantrum between our manager and the A+R man. But Terry came over (I'd already asked him before telling the record company!) and from that day on it just went smooth as anything.
Peter Vitesse, the keyboard p[layer we used, also did a lot for the song. He took my little demo and said, 'I think I know what you're getting at here.' He got this big posh keyboard sound and kept it faithful to the original, which I loved about him. The boys in the band played great, Kevin McMichael played a great guitar solo and arranged the guitars.
Nobody gave a toss who Cutting Crew were, so we only got one review - which was lovely - in The Guardian. It became a big hit in the UK, and it then became a number one in 23 countries including the States. I've even heard Richard Branson say that it was the song that launched Virgin Records in the USA - although he always forgets our name and calls us Crowded House.
(Source : Inspirations by Michael Randolfi, Mike Read and David Stark, Sanctuary 2002)