“I recently heard that on the Ukraine war front, the soldiers were resting at night, and they were playing Living On A Prayer,” the song’s writer, Desmond Child, tells Classic Rock. “The song ended, and then they could hear it being played on the other [Russian] side. It’s like they were communicating with each other, and it was a levelling. It’s very moving to hear that.”
Desmond is extremely good at writing songs that move people. With huge, euphoric choruses, they frequently ferried the musicians he co-wrote with into unfamiliar territory in the upper echelons of the charts. Those bands needed his help; the songs struck a chord, and they sold millions.
You Give Love A Bad Name? That’s Desmond. I Was Made For Loving You? So is that. Dude (Looks Like a Lady)? Yep, that too. You know this. Songs so ubiquitous there’s no need to identify the bands whose names adorn the cover art.
Desmond hasn’t slowed down. Speaking to Classic Rock from his home in Nashville, he’s a livewire interviewee, delivering a masterclass in storytelling, regularly bounding off on unexpected tangents and excitedly revealing the details of future projects no one’s officially supposed to know about.
But we’re here to talk about the songs that influenced Desmond’s career in music, and to get the lowdown on his new live album, recorded in 2022 at the 2000-year-old Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a Roman amphitheatre set on the slopes of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.
“People like Maria Callas sang there,” says Desmond. “Why would they want me?”
The show, which was put together by the Ministry of Culture of Greece and the Acropolis Museum – with a helping hand from the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis – was a celebration of Desmond’s songs. Ticket sales benefited the Museum’s ongoing work to repatriate the ancient Greek sculptures commonly known as the Elgin Marbles, which are currently housed at the British Museum in London.
Jon Bon Jovi was asked to appear but turned the opportunity down (“I don’t know what he thought it was going to be,” muses Desmond, “like some kumbaya experience or something”), but others were happy to come on board: Alice Cooper, the late Bonnie Tyler, Kip Winger, The Rasmus and many more.
The staging was designed by Fokas Evangelinos, who’d worked on multiple Eurovision Song Contests and directed the Athens edition of the show in 2006. So it was always going to be spectacular, with just the occasional hurdle overcome.
Six months before the show, Desmond injured himself in a fall, which necessitated sleeping in a reclining chair for two months. Still unsteady as the date neared, he told Evangelinos that he was concerned about part of the staging.
“The way Fokas designed the set was a circle, but there was a higher level, and there was a staircase down the centre. It didn’t have handrails or anything, and so I said, ‘I don’t think I can make it down those stairs,’ and so he said, ‘I’ll take care of you.’
“He hired four gladiators dressed all in blue, and when it was time for me to come out, they all came up the stairs, and then they all put their arms up, and I used them as guardrails. And they wrapped a beautiful Steinway in blue vinyl that matched my outfit. It was very, very Liberace. And I had knee-high blue boots that had been sprayed blue. I just came down like a superhero.”
The show itself? It was big. Really big. So big that Desmond himself didn’t know what to expect. During The Rasmus’s performance of Love Will Keep Us Alive (originally written by Desmond with the Scorpions), as frontman Lauri Ylönen descended the stairs, dressed in angelic white, Desmond spotted some unexpected movement.
“Suddenly, from the very top staircase down, all these children were holding these glowing orbs, and then they went around the periphery of the stage, just all dressed in white and holding these orbs,” he reveals. “And then all of a sudden, there were about 50 more people coming after them, and they were up and down the stairs. It was so impressive. I mean, it was like, wow. I didn’t know that was going to happen.”
Desmond Child Rocks the Parthenon: The Live Concert Album is on streaming platforms now. Below, Desmond picks the 10 songs that guided his path through music.
Dionne Warwick – Walk On By
“I was about 13 years old, and the first album I bought was Dionne Warwick’s Greatest Hits. I’d play it on vinyl, and those songs were so magical; the orchestration, the chords. My mother was a songwriter, so I grew up around music, but that was Cuban style, and it was a different thing.
“The [Burt] Bacharach and [Hal] David songs were influenced by Brazil and jazz, and then they brought Brill Building pop to it, which made it so innovative. And so when I heard Walk On By, which was so haunting, I said, ‘I want to do this,’ and changed my life.”
Carole King – (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman
“When I worked with Carol King (it took me years upon years to finally get in a room to write with her) she told me the story of how that song came about. They were on the sidewalk at the Brill Building, and Jerry Wexler, the grand producer, came around in his car and saw them smoking outside, and pulled over and said, ‘Hey, I’m doing an Aretha Franklin date tomorrow night. I need a song,’ and and they said, ‘What?’ And so he said, ‘Yeah, write it, and it has to be called Natural Woman.’ So they gave him songwriting credit for that title. Isn’t that great?”
Laura Nyro – Eli’s Coming
“A friend of mine played me her music, and the song that stuck out was Eli’s Coming, which was later recorded by Three Dog Night. That song is so special because it has parts that speed up and then slow down. They weren’t done to a drum machine. It goes all over the place, tempo-wise.
“I got a chance to sit next to Joni Mitchell at a dinner. She was smoking a joint, and she passed it to me, and I don’t do anything like that. Then (songwriter) Diane Warren kicked me under the table. She said, ‘Smoke it! It’s fucking Joni Mitchell! So I went [acts out briefly smoking a joint], and then handed it to Diane.
“I asked her what she thought of Laura Nyro’s music, and she said that she maybe wouldn’t have started playing piano had she not heard Laura’s records. She said, ‘Laura Nyro is one of my biggest influences.’ I got a chance to spend time with Laura, and Joni said the same thing. She was saying she was influenced by Miles Davis, and Laura said the same thing, which was very interesting.”
Sade – No Ordinary Love
“That song. I never tire of it. We play it anytime company comes over. It’s so classic but sounds like it was made today.
“She performs very rarely, I saw her but at the Staples Centre, and her set was magnificent. Every every song had a different set. All of a sudden, five stories high, red curtains came down, and all of a sudden it looked like a cabaret, or it was all in gauze, and it looked like snow, and then it was like you were on a sleigh, and then she pops up in the middle of it all on this pedestal. It was one thing after the other!”
“We think of Sade as a jazzy, soft singer, but live, her voice was so strong, and she could sing really high. I didn’t know she could do all that, and she was like Catwoman in this tight black leather outfit with these high heels, and she came up out of the floor on a staircase.”
Seal – Crazy
“One of my favourite songs of all time, and I think it was revolutionary. Just the sound of it, and the way that the harmonics of that song unfold, that was very influential to me.”
Barbra Streisand – People
“When I was 15 years old, I went to see a movie called Funny Girl that had Barbra Streisand starring in the role, and when she got to the song People Who Need People I had goosebumps all over. So it had been my ambition my whole life to work with Barbara Streisand, and I finally got to do it in 2016.
“I wrote her a special song that I solely wrote. Most of my songs are collaborations, mainly because I couldn’t sell songs to anybody that I had written on my own; I had to co-write with the artist to make sure I got on the albums. But I wrote it by myself and produced it, and it’s called Lady Liberty. I got her to sing like she hadn’t in many years, because I pushed the key half step higher than she was comfortable, and she was calling me a taskmaster, slave driver, and all this kind of stuff. And as soon as she let go, Streisand arrived.”
“She really believed in the lyrics. It starts out, ‘Lady Liberty / Lift your lamp of hope a little higher / Burn that flame of freedom / Just a little brighter for all the world to see and still believe,’ and it’s more appropriate now than ever.”
Duran Duran – Ordinary World
“One of the things that I coveted and was so special to me was the British pop movement of the 80s. Duran Duran’s Ordinary World is a masterpiece, and I was so jealous of that sound because I had gotten into a thing where I was writing with all these rock bands because that’s who wanted to hire me. I mean, I did OK with that. But I longed to write songs like Ordinary World, and I never get sick of that song. The way it modulates. It’s just so great.”
Toto – Africa
“That song was revolutionary.”
The Police – Every Breath You Take
“I got to hear it before it came out because the guy who was mastering the record was a friend of mine, and he said, ‘Want to hear something cool?’ And he played me Every Breath You Take, and I couldn’t get a copy of it, so I kept going back every day. He’d play it for me one more time, and it was so magical. All of that was exotic for me because it was British music or Irish music or just from over there, from people who have funny accents. I wanted to do what they were doing.”
George Michael – One More Try
“It’s just stunning. That’s the most stunning vocal performance of his: the lyrics, the song, everything about the way it was produced. I just so longed to work with him.
“It was the night before the Grammys, when I was up for three Grammys for Livin’ La Vida Loca, and I had gone to this Korean bath spa to try to relax, and they had these plunge baths. I go into one where there were two showers, and I walk in. There’s a guy in there, bent over, trying to get the soap off the floor. And then he stands up, and it’s George Michael, and he’s looking at me, and I was like, wow!
“First of all, he was a very hairy guy, very Greek. Yes, hairy, front and back. I said hello, and he reeled back. Like, ‘Hello, who are you? Why are you talking to me?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m Desmond Child.’ ‘Oh, Desmond Child! Oh my God!’ We became fast friends going in and out of the plungy plunge, and then I said, ‘Okay, I’m having a win-or-lose Grammy party tomorrow night, and he said, ‘I’ll come, ‘ and I was like, ‘Yeah, right.’ You know, doesn’t he have something better to do?
“And he showed up, and he stayed all night, and so we exchanged numbers. I didn’t know what was going on in his life, but I wanted so much to write with him, and I didn’t get a chance to. I have to say, One More Try by George Michael is superb.”
Desmond Child Rocks the Parthenon: The Live Concert Album is on streaming platforms now.
