‘I wanted a hit!’ Bryan Ferry on the set of Slave to Love at Bette Midler’s house | Pop and rock

Bryan Ferry, singer, songwriter

I’m no musical detective, but I’d put my money on the inspiration for Slave to Love from Prisoner of Love by the Ink Spots, which I heard when I was five. My Aunt Enid’s husband was stationed in Europe with the armed forces and I think he picked up American records and brought the inkblots home. I still have the 78 RPM single.

I wrote the lyrics in a hotel room in New York while walking on the floor at night. I had done more esoteric stuff in the past, but I wanted something simple and memorable, a song for everyone. A hit! The first line – “Tell her I’m waiting / In the usual place / With the tired and weary / And there’s no escape” – set the scene.

I would love to be in Roxy Music, but when I was solo, the world was my oyster. We had assembled a team of big guns, people like David Gilmour (guitar), David Sanborn (sax) and Nile Rodgers (guitar). Neil Jason had a swing to his bass playing that matched the down-to-earth number. Neil Hubbard had the most wonderful soulful tone and we recorded him early on to build the song around him. The guitar solo in the middle is actually three interweaving guitarists: Gilmour, Keith Scott and Hubbard.

I made the video in Paris with Jean-Baptiste Mondino. It was beautifully filmed, with a certain chicness – all these beautiful girls and me in the background, as I liked to be. At the end of the video I’m hugging a kid, like a long lost daughter or something. Good twist. It turned out that this child actor was the daughter of someone I had dinner with with Salvador Dalí in 1973.

When I performed the song for the first time, at Live Aidthe drummer broke his snare drum, the bass was out of tune, Gilmour’s guitar wasn’t working properly, and someone had to tape another mic to mine because it wasn’t audible. But despite all that, the song took off quite quickly and has featured in plenty of films. It’s great when people identify with your feelings about something.

Rhett Davies, producer

I first met Bryan when I did a track on his 1974 solo album Another Time, Another Place. Then in 1979, when Roxy had reunited, I was brought in to do a week’s work on the Manifesto album and stayed in 40 years. We had found a way to cut Dance Away, which they had tried before but had not succeeded. I suggested laying down a keyboard and drum machine and building it up from there. As Roxy’s sound evolved from Manifesto to Flesh and Blood to Avalon, we continued that way of working.

Bryan’s Boys and Girls album felt like a continuation, just without Roxy. We started working on it at his house in Sussex with just his voice and his CP-80 electric piano. We went to a studio in London called the White House, and then went to Bette Midler’s house in New York. She had been having trouble sleeping and had built a soundproof room so we made a studio in there.

It was one of the hardest tracks to finish and it went through many lives. In the chorus, there’s a little keyboard phrase that came from another track we never got around to finishing, so we moved it to Slave to Love. Bryan loves to have something downright passionate throughout a song, and on this one it was a cowbell. The drummer, Omar Hakim, recorded the big snare drum sounds in the stairwell of New York’s Power Station studios, which had a famous reverb.

Bryan was still working on the lyrics so the vocals came last and it was the last track we finished for the album. Bob Clearmountain (mixing engineer) mixed it so many times in so many studios. He remembers falling asleep at Air Studios mixing it up even more. It was finally finished at three o’clock in the afternoon. When we heard the finished song, there was just excitement. Listening to it now, I wouldn’t change a thing.