Songfacts®:

• One of Rod Stewart's biggest hits of the '80s, "Love Touch" finds him in Romeo mode, pleading with his lover to let him heal their hurting relationship with his "love touch." He's both apologetic ("I didn't mean to be bad") and swaggering ("But darlin' I'm still the best that you ever had").
  
  Stewart delivered it with a wink, which scrubbed some sincerity from the song's intention. Holly Knight, who wrote the lyric, told Songfacts: "I never meant 'I want to give you my love touch' literally. Imagine if you're on the phone and your sweetheart is far away somewhere. You haven't seen them for weeks, and before you hang up, you send them a little love... a heart... a love touch. It wasn't meant to be literally like, 'I'm the greatest lover in the world and I am the best that you ever had,' but he took it literally that way."
  
  "That's one of my favorite songs," she adds. "I think there are some beautiful lines in there. There's one that has this double entendre: 'I want to feel the breathless end you come to every night.'"
• Holly Knight wrote this song with Gene Black and Mike Chapman, who also produced it. Around this time, Knight and Black were in a band called Device that Chapman produced; their biggest hit was "Hanging On A Heart Attack." Chapman and Knight also wrote the Pat Benatar hit "Love Is A Battlefield."
  
  "Love Touch" came about when Stewart's management set up a meeting with him and Knight. She played him a rough demo of the song, and he loved it. They planned to finish the song together, but when they got together, they just hung out and didn't get any work done, so she completed it with Black and Chapman.
• "Love Touch" was featured in the 1986 rom-com Legal Eagles, starring Robert Redford and Debra Winger. The song, although considered the movie's theme, was not featured on the soundtrack, although the video uses scenes from the film.
• Stewart included this song on most of his greatest hits albums but slagged it off, calling it "one of the silliest songs I've ever recorded." He rarely played it in concert, and when he did, he often just sang a snippet and then moved on, derisively dismissing the song even though fans wanted to hear it. The song's co-writer, Holly Knight, was not pleased. "I was heartbroken and stricken," she said. "Like, This is news to me. If you want to talk about a song that is embarrassing lyrically, I would say 'Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?' falls in that area."
• The steel drums on the song came from a Fairlight synthesizer Holly Knight played. She also sang the background vocals. Mike Porcaro of Toto played bass on the track, and Gene Black added guitar.