Speed Your Love To Me

Album: Sparkle In The Rain (1984)
Charted: 20
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Songfacts®:

  • This urgent love song was the second single from the Sparkle In The Rain album, following "Waterfront." It finds lead singer Jim Kerr burning with desire, and using lots of fire imagery to make his point:

    You go to my head
    With the flames that grow higher and higher
  • Jim Kerr's love went speeding toward Chrissie Hynde of the Prentenders around the time this song was released. Simple Minds and Prentenders crossed paths in early 1984 when they were each touring in Australia - they toured separately but were both on the bill for the Narara Music Festival in January. On May 5, 1984, they got married, and soon after embarked on a US tour, with Simple Minds opening for The Pretenders on the Learning To Crawl tour. They divorced in 1990.
  • The Righteous Brothers famously sang, "Godspeed your love to me" in "Unchained Melody." In a Songfacts interview with Jim Kerr, with asked if it was an influence. "Yes, there must have been," he replied. "We loved that song. Such a great sentiment."
  • Steve Lillywhite, who had worked with U2 and Phil Collins, produced this track along with the rest of the album. It was Bono who introduced Lillywhite to Jim Kerr.
  • Kirsty MacColl, the daughter of folk singer Ewan MacColl, sang on this track and made some other contributions as well. Jim Kerr told Songfacts: "We used to live in this hotel in London, and everyone would come and hang around. And there was this younger girl called Kirsty. She liked Simple Minds and she would hang around, but you know, she would piss us off. She was hanging around, hanging around, and we'd say, 'Get out of the way! Go home, you're young.' Whatever. She was a ballsy little thing. She was smarter than all of us, and she could just kill us in one line. And that would make us laugh, and then we would let her in the gang.

    So, she would come down to the studio. We knew that she was the daughter of Ewan MacColl, albeit they were estranged. But anyway, we knew that she had roots. And we knew that she played a bit of acoustic guitar and did a bit of singing. We allowed her to come down and hang around, and as soon as she'd get in, she started bossing people around.

    We were a bit lost on that track. We knew it had a great melody, but the arrangement was kind of puzzling us. And with a stroke, she said, 'Do this. And put that there. And put that little bit at the end.' And we were like, Listen to you!

    I've got great memories of that. And, of course, she said, 'I want to sing on it, as well. Let me do this thing.' And she went."
  • Simple Minds' record company pushed this song to radio stations in America when the band began their tour there in 1984 with The Pretenders, but few stations added it. The group was doing very well in England and seemed like a good candidate for US success, but MTV wasn't impressed, which kept them following acts like Joe Jackson and The Police in conquering the country. Their breakthrough didn't come until 1985, when "Don't You (Forget About Me)" was used in the movie The Breakfast Club. That was their first song to chart in America, and it went to #1.

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