There’s a certain pleasure in a song that was made to order and turned out better than anyone had a right to expect. “Bad Love” is that sort of record. Eric Clapton wrote it with Mick Jones, the guitarist from Foreigner, because his record company had said, in effect, that it would like another “Layla”, please. The result is a thumping, brooding rock song about a love that’s no good for you and can’t be given up, and it won a Grammy. It’s the sort of tale that ought to make cynics roll their eyes. Instead, I think it ought to make us consider how good songs sometimes arrive by the back door, wearing their work boots and carrying a deadline.
A Commission, Not a Confession
By 1989 Clapton had been signed to Warner Bros for six years, and the label had decided the time was right for a big rock single. They wanted something with the drama and the guitar power of his famous record with the Dominos. Clapton, who was then making Journeyman, shrugged and agreed to write one. As he later told it, the idea didn’t seem especially daunting: if you sit down and write a song to a formula, it ought to be manageable. So he enlisted Mick Jones, who knew a thing or two about radio-friendly rock, and the two of them set about building a hit as a joiner might build a chair.
Jones, as you’ll remember, was one of the founders of Foreigner, the band behind “Cold as Ice” and “I Want to Know What Love Is”. He had also produced a Van Halen album, which tells you something about his range. The two of them came up with a song that wore its ambitions openly: a dark, rolling riff, a big chorus, and a lyric that took no prisoners. It’s a surprisingly accomplished piece of work for something that began as an assignment. There’s no trace of the committee about it. It sounds like two guitarists enjoying themselves in a room, which, for all the commercial pressure, is probably exactly what happened.
The Music: Layla’s Shadow
The comparison with “Layla” is, I suspect, unavoidable, and one critic at the time described the song as a mixture of that record and “Badge”, the Cream song Clapton wrote with George Harrison. You can see what he meant. There’s the same slow-burning intensity, the same sense of a man circling something he can’t shake. But “Bad Love” is leaner and more compact than either of them. It runs just over five minutes, yet it feels tighter than that, with every riff and every vocal line pulling its weight. Nothing sprawls, and nothing goes missing, and the whole thing moves like a well-oiled machine.
Phil Collins plays drums on the record, and sings backing vocals as well, and you can hear his unmistakable thump giving the track its muscle. Collins and Clapton had been friends since the early eighties, when Clapton played on one of Collins’s solo records, and their musical chemistry is easy to hear. Alongside them were the bassist Pino Palladino and the guitarist Phil Palmer. It’s a fine band, and they know exactly what they’re doing. I’d argue that much of the song’s drive comes from the rhythm section, which pushes the whole thing along with the confidence of people who’ve been given a good brief.
What the Lyric Is About
The words describe a relationship that has turned sour but won’t end. The narrator knows it’s bad for him, knows it’s doing him harm, and goes back anyway. There’s something almost physical about it, like the pull of a craving. It’s a well-worn theme in rock, but Clapton delivers it with a conviction that’s hard to fake. His vocal is gritty and close, as though he’s confessing it to a single listener across a table. Nobody is given a villain’s role. The trouble is simply that he can’t bring himself to walk away, which is a much more recognisable human failing.
It’s tempting to link it to Clapton’s own struggles with addiction, which by 1989 were behind him but far from forgotten. A love that damages and that you cannot leave is, after all, a fair description of how he had once felt about the bottle. I wouldn’t push that reading too hard. The song works perfectly well as a romantic tragedy. But it does add an extra layer if you want it, and Clapton, who has spoken often about how much his songs draw on his life, probably wouldn’t object. Good songs have room for more than one meaning, and this one holds several comfortably.
The Grammy and What It Meant
In 1991 the Grammy committee, at the thirty-third annual awards, named “Bad Love” the best male rock vocal performance of the year. It was a sweet bit of vindication for a man whose label had effectively dictated his output, and who had gone along with it. The single also did well on American rock radio, and in Britain it reached the top thirty. Clapton had been told to write a hit, and he had done so with a straight face and a lot of skill. There’s a lesson there about taking a brief seriously, even when it’s one you wouldn’t have chosen for yourself.
The success mattered for another reason. Journeyman was the record on which Clapton began to rebuild his reputation, after a decade in which critics had tended to write him off. “Bad Love”, along with “Pretending”, was a big part of that. It showed he could still make music that felt urgent and muscular, even when the process was thoroughly commercial. It’s an important reminder that great art sometimes begins with a brief, and that inspiration, like a bus, will occasionally turn up only when you’ve been standing at the stop for long enough and have stopped looking for it.
The promotional video, filmed on the tour that followed the album, shows the band simply playing the thing live, with Collins at the kit, Nathan East on bass and Greg Phillinganes on keyboards. There’s no gimmickry, no storyline, no model draped across a bonnet. It’s a handful of musicians in a room, looking as though they’re rather enjoying the volume. In 1990 that was almost old-fashioned, and I’d say it was all the better for it. It’s also worth remembering that the single’s flip side was “Before You Accuse Me”, which means that anyone who bought the record got a rock thunderclap on one side and a blues shrug on the other. That’s a good deal for the price of a single.
Where That Leaves Us
So what does “Bad Love” mean? On the surface, it’s about a destructive relationship that can’t be escaped. Underneath, it’s a lesson in craftsmanship: a song written to order, by two experienced hands, which turned out to carry real feeling. It proves that inspiration and commerce aren’t always enemies, and that a deadline can sharpen a mind as well as a pencil. I’d never claim it’s his finest hour. But it’s a great deal of fun, and it holds up. Not every hit begins in a flash of inspiration. Some begin in a meeting, and still end up meaning something. Give it a spin, and see if you can resist the swagger of the riff. I can’t.