Songfacts®:

• In this song, Eric Clapton is done with bad love. Thanks to his girl, he's now in the ranks of the lucky ones with that good lovin'.
  
  In real life, Clapton was going through a divorce from Pattie Boyd, the subject of his Derek & the Dominos hit "Layla." Their divorce was finalized in 1989, the same year this song was released. Clapton was in a new relationship - with Lory Del Santo, the mother of his son, Conor - but this song has to be considered a work of fiction, written for hit potential. Clapton's record company, Warner Brothers, was pressuring him to write something similar to "Layla" so they could have a hit from the Journeyman album, and Clapton complied, following his "Layla" formula to create "Bad Love."
• Mick Jones from the band Foreigner wrote this with Clapton. It's not the first time Jones had worked with other rock stars: he produced Van Halen's 5150 album.
• This won the 1990 Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance. Clapton got a Grammy in 1972 for playing on the Concert For Bangladesh, which won Best Album, but this was his first as a solo artist. He won six more in 1993, including three for "Tears In Heaven."
• Phil Collins played drums and sang backup on this track - they first collaborated when Clapton played on Collins' debut solo album in 1981. Other credits on "Bad Love" are:
  
  Guitar – Phil Palmer
  Bass – Pino Palladino
  Keyboards – Alan Clark
  Backing Vocals – Katie Kasoon, Tessa Niles
• The bridge is based on the song "Badge," one of Clapton's hits with Cream. Mick Jones had the idea to use it.
• Following "Pretending," "Bad Love" was released as the second single from Journeyman, the first album Clapton released after his smashingly successful Crossroads boxed set. The song was a solid hit, as was the follow-up, "No Alibis." Journeyman was Clapton's most successful studio album of the '80s, selling over 2 million copies in America and many more globally. The singles did very well on rock radio and were played on Classic Rock stations decades later.
• The black-and-white music video, directed by Gavin Taylor, shows Clapton performing the song with his band in an empty arena. There are lots of shots of Phil Collins, and a few of Clapton playing with a cigarette in the headstock of his guitar. He never smokes it, though, because that would get the video banned on some outlets.