“Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air/I know I can count on you.” These opening lines crystallise the euphoric, heart-pumping appeal of house music, yet they are from a song — “You Got the Love” by Candi Staton — that pre-dates the rave era that made them famous. The track has enjoyed a long and eventful life even though it was never meant to be released. Recently, it was covered on ITV’s bizarre Saturday night talent show The Masked Singer by soap actor Patsy Palmer, dressed as a butterfly. Milka Chocolate had a children’s choir singing it for its recent UK Christmas TV advert campaign.
The story of “You Got The Love” goes back to 1986, when Staton was on holiday in Nassau in the Bahamas. Her career had been relatively quiet since the 1970s, her best-known song being the 1976 disco hit “Young Hearts Run Free”.
US comedian Dick Gregory was also in Nassau, trying to launch a weight-loss supplement business with a new diet video. His subject was a 900lb man trying to lose a quarter of his body weight. Gregory figured that an uplifting song sung by Staton might work as the video’s theme. As he had no money to pay her, she was offered half of the publishing rights instead. Staton took the deal, and recorded her track on her return to Chicago (it was written by the songwriting team known as The Source: Anthony B. Stephens, Arnecia Michelle Harris and John Bellamy).
Gregory’s video never got made: the subject ended up gaining more weight, then he died. But five years later, in 1991, Staton was told that she had a hit single in the UK. She didn’t know what people were talking about until she finally remembered “You Got the Love”. It “was never supposed to be put on a record at all,” she told The Guardian in 2006.
In fact, the song had already been released as a single a couple of years earlier. In the song’s original version from 1986, Staton’s vocals were cut over a bright, funky, Nile Rodgers-style pop track. In the same year, a 12-inch version of this was released. This also featured a version with her vocal a cappella; this started getting sampled by emerging house music artists in the US.
In 1989, as rave culture bubbled across the UK, British DJ Eren Abdullah mixed it up with Chicago DJ Frankie Knuckles’ mix of Jamie Principle’s “Your Love” — a house classic in its own right — playing it at warehouse parties in London. Another British DJ, John Truelove, pressed this version to vinyl, realising that it had a life outside nightclubs. Credited to The Source feat. Candi Staton, it got to number four in the British charts in 1991.
“You Got the Love” was the ultimate example of what happened to music in the age of sampling. “They’d remixed it to such an extent… I didn’t even know how to sing it,” Staton said. Nevertheless, she made sure she got her money.
In 1997 Truelove released another version, the Now Voyager mix, laden with orchestral strings, piano and breakbeats (this reached its highest UK chart position to date, number three). It became the theme tune for live football coverage on Sky Sports until 2015. It also soundtracked the huge finale to the TV show Sex and the City in 2004, and played over a crucial scene the same year in the thriller Layer Cake, the film that set Daniel Craig on the path to playing James Bond.
Another mix in 2006 also got to number seven, but Florence and The Machine’s 2009 version went further, in several ways. Adding lashings of harp and Florence Welch’s over-the-top vocals to the mix as it tidied up its grammar, the song now called “You’ve Got the Love” got to number five in the UK. It was also mixed into Dizzee Rascal’s single “Dirtee Cash” to create another mash-up, performed live by Rascal and Welch at the 2010 Brit Awards. “You’ve Got the Dirtee Love” eventually got to number two in the UK.
Further versions by Joss Stone, The xx and Kasabian have seen the song’s afterlife pulse on. Staton’s own career has been boosted by its long afterlife, with new albums and festival performances in the past decade. “To do a song that other people like enough to record is a great compliment,” she told the Huffington Post in 2014. “I always ask people to make it theirs.”
What are your memories of ‘You Got the Love’? 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: New State Music; Four Most Cuts; Truelove; Universal-Island Records Ltd; Virgin Records
Picture credit: Simone Joyner/Getty Images