The hit 1980s song that was a “disaster” to record, according to Lionel Richie
Most people have their reasons for believing the 1980s were the best decade for music. For a lot of people, it’s the way rock music changed to something more open, flamboyant, theatrical, with a renewed purpose. For others, it’s the one period of time when people did love songs like they meant it, like you could cut them open and they’d bleed the soft pink hues of romance and longing.
For many people, then, it’s easy to think up a handful of defining names, like The Police, Bonnie Tyler, Whitney Houston, George Michael…because they’re always there, or lingering in the back of the mind readily available like that one scene in Gavin and Stacey where Nessa and Bryn duet ‘Islands in the Stream’. It’s a quintessential cringe that makes the ’80s unironically cool, even if it wasn’t back then.
And just like that, we have a constant bank of wedding floor-esque ’80s hits that never leave our system, no matter how questionable his obsession might be in ‘Every Breath You Take’ or the weird co-dependency of ‘With or Without You’. Stevie Wonder might be doing a bit too much when he calls just to say “I love you”, but this is all the kind of corniness we couldn’t go without, because love in music, specifically love in ’80s music, is all about just that.
It’s also the reason why most of us love a good duet. It’s probably the pinnacle of sugar-sweet ’80s hits, something about Diana Ross and Lionel Richie singing about endless love like it’s a drug that fuels your system, like it’s the kind of karaoke-endorphin fun that makes you want to sing into a hairbrush as a microphone and forget that you’re supposed to be cool. Maybe that’s cool in itself. Sort of. Probably not.
But the interesting thing about most of these hits is that there’s also a story underneath, and often the one you’re not expecting. ‘Endless Love’, for example, was sort of rushed out during the recording process, and conducive to the kind of atmosphere most wouldn’t deem productive or even creative. Richie even later reflected on the whole thing as a “disaster”, because they’d improvised it all last minute on the day before release.
“I’d not written a duet before, but the record company suddenly changed the song to a duet and got Diana Ross in,” Richie told The Sun in 2009. “She arrived at the studio and told me she wants my part. I have to kind of make her part up because I can’t sing in that key. What you hear on the record is what happened on the day as it had to go out the next day for the movie.”
He added: “I wasn’t sure I could do it. What if they didn’t like it? But I was cocky in a way, I told them to trust me. It was a great learning experience for all of us.”
It does have a strangely endearing, spontaneous feel to it that probably also explains why it’s the perfect karaoke song. It’s for the in-the-moment pleasers who want nothing more than to get up and have a good time, without a care in the world for what they might look and sound like. And it just so happened that the song ended up being a hit – one of the best-selling of the entire decade, and of their respective careers, in fact – and it all started as a minor checkbox to accompany a film.
But the question here is less about the means to get the song over the line and more about how its popularity overshadowed such frictions. The ’80s are filled with intense fall-outs and disagreements in the studio, but those are often the stories that underscore some of the era’s best and biggest hits, the ones that encourage you to drop your façade for a moment and look for the Bryn to your Nessa; and be messy in the gloriously cringe haze of after-party floor fillers.
