Long before the hair metal years, David Coverdale of Whitesnake was a soul boy. When he joined Deep Purple in 1973, his favourite album was not Led Zeppelin IV but Donny Hathaway Live. And when his new band, Whitesnake, recorded their first EP in spring 1978, alongside the three originals was a cover of a soul song from four years before, recorded by Bobby “Blue” Bland on his album Dreamer.
“Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City” had been written by Michael Price and Dan Walsh, a pair of journeymen songwriters of the kind who could turn their hands to almost anything (they had also written The Grass Roots’ 1970 hit “Temptation Eyes”, and in 1968 had recorded a psychedelic concept album that went unreleased). It was given to Bland as part of an attempt to reinvent him in the first half of the 1970s, from a bluesman to a contemporary adult soul singer. The version that opened Dreamer was a glorious few minutes: Bland’s voice slightly sandpapered, perfectly controlled, mournful and defiant.
The song itself had the lilting rhythm guitar of disco, but taken at heartbroken pace — a style later commemorated on the Too Slow to Disco compilation series. It had the strange trick of a sombre, claustrophobic chorus— in which the lack of love in the heart of both city and town is bemoaned — blooming into ecstatic verses,carpets of strings underfoot, contrasting with Bland’s misery. It reached number 91 on the Billboard singles chart and number nine on the R&B chart.
Whitesnake’s versionwas a little less disco, but not too much. What it added was a simple lead guitar line by Bernie Marsden, a little more force in the verses, and a change of one great voice to another, because at this point Coverdale’s was a caramel wonder, all carnal exhalations. It certainly wasn’t heavy rock, yet it almost immediately became a song indelibly associated with Whitesnake. On their first tour in spring 1978, they stopped at the Regal Theatre in Ashington, in the industrial north-east of England. “That was the first night we played ‘Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City’ live, and it was devastating,” Marsden says. “It was as if we had been playing there every night for five years. They stood and sang and then they applauded at the end and we looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, we’ve got something here.’”
“Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City” became the centrepiece of Whitesnake’s live show, the communal singalong moment, not just at Ashington Regal, but in front of 70,000 people when the band headlined the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington in 1983.
Having become the showstopper for a hard rock band, where would “Ain’t No Love”’s next unlikely recontextualisation be? Jay- Zprovided the answer on his 2001 album The Blueprint, heavily sampling the original on “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)”, to a more insistent rhythm, to a lyric that was part lament for black musical heroes past, part insistent brag. What, Jay-Z asked, was all the fussing for? “Because I'm grubbing more/And I pack heat like I’m the oven door?” The swirls of strings and horns suddenly change meaning in their new context, no longer romantic, but taking on a swagger and hustling Jay-Z along.
To add to the hard rock and hip-hop interpretations, add mod. He has never recorded it, but Paul Weller performed “Ain’t No Love” on Dutch TV during his 1990s revival. It’s the version that’s far afield from the original, spiky and gnarly, as if he’s trying to take Bland to the field blues, but whatever his merits as a singer, Weller doesn’t have the tenderness of Bland or Coverdale. It sounds as though his baby not being around hasn’t devastated him so much as reminded him he hadn’t turned off his hot water before going on holiday.
It’s such a well-formed song that most artists take their versions from Bland’s (even the country star Crystal Gayledidn’t take it too far away from the template), so kudos to Irish singer Mary Coughlan for assembling it around acoustic guitars and muted percussion that make it sound smokier, sleepier and distinctly more Latin than any of the covers. It’s also less lachrymose than either Bland or Coverdale, and rather sexier as a result.
It’s not uncommon for songs to end up with their genes spliced into wildly different descendants — look at the afterlife of Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” as a drum loop in the golden age of hip-hop. It’s rarer, though, for one to crop up in such divergent and unrelated places, and for it to be instantly recognisable as that song. Journeymen they may have been, but Price and Walsh knew universality when they heard it.
What are your memories of ‘Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Universal-Island Records Ltd.; Parlophone UK; Roc-A-Fella; Edsel
Picture credit: Gilles Petard/Redferns