Having a hit record is great, but such huge success can also come with a certain amount of baggage. You’ll be obliged to play it at every gig you do for the rest of your life – or risk a significant section of your fanbase going home disappointed – and your record company will always be ‘encouraging’ you to try and repeat the trick with a similar song.
Now, you might assume that an artist as big as Eric Clapton would be above taking requests from his paymasters, but it turns out that one of his most memorable songs of the ‘80s was indeed written after his label asked if he could recreate a career-defining moment from the ‘70s.
We’re talking about Bad Love, arguably the standout track from Clapton’s 1989 album, Journeyman, which was itself considered to be a return to form. Opening with a big, hooky riff, it then switches keys for the verse – from D minor to A major – before that riff comes back to power the chorus. And there’s a completely different alternate section, too.
Remind you of another song? It certainly should – a former Clapton glory, in fact.
“Warner Brothers wanted another Layla,” Clapton would later tell Where’s Eric!, his official fan club. “I thought, ‘well, if you sit down and write a song in a formatted way, it’s not so hard.’ You think, ‘What was Layla comprised of? A fiery intro modulated into the first verse and chorus with a riff around it.”
Simple as that, but what about that Bad Love middle section, which gives us another key change to think about (D major)? Well, if you wanted a hit in the ‘80s, you could have done worse than call someone from Foreigner, who had had loads in the past few years, and that’s precisely what Clapton did.
“I had this stuff in my head, so I just juggled it around, and Mick Jones came in to help tidy up,” he confirms. “He was the one who said ‘You should put a Badge middle in there’. So, we did that. Although it sounds like a cold way of doing it, it actually took on its own life.”
The gambit worked: Bad Love was a hit on US rock radio and earned Clapton a Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male. And it wasn’t just in the songwriting department that he had some heavyweight help: the recording features Dire Straits’ Alan Clark on keys (though it’s Greg Phillinganes you see in the video), session legend Pino Palladino on bass, and the unmistakable sound of Phil Collins on drums and backing vocals.
Despite being written to a brief, and not having the iconic legacy of the song that inspired it, Bad Love remains a strong entry in the Clapton canon. It also helped to pave the way for even greater success for the guitarist/singer-songwriter in the ‘90s – just three years later we got Unplugged, which went on to become Eric Clapton’s biggest selling album of all time. Bad Love isn’t among the Journeyman tracks that feature here, but it does include a rearranged version of – you guessed it – Layla, which became a hit all over again.
We’re guessing that Warner Brothers were pretty pleased with that, too.
