Say You'll Be There - Writing and Recording

Writing and Recording

We recorded it in our trackies and socks in a studio in the producer's house. It was a cool vibe—dead laid back. A lot of the sentiment in the song has got to do with what we've been through together. We've always been there for each other, so we wrote about that.

Without access to Herbert's address book, the group knew nothing of Kennedy's whereabouts other than he lived in Sheffield. Melanie Brown and Geri Halliwell drove to Sheffield the day after the departure from Heart Management and looked for the first phone book they came across, Eliot was the third Kennedy that they called. That evening they went to his house and persuade him to work with them, the rest of the group traveled to Sheffield the next day. Kennedy commented about the session:

None of them played instruments, so I was left to do the music and get that vibe together. What I said to them was, 'Look, I've got a chorus—check this out'. And I'd sing them the chorus and the melody—no lyrics or anything—and straight away five pencils and pads came out and they were throwing lines at us. Ten minutes later the song was written. Then you go through and refine it. Then later, as you were recording it you might change a few thing here and there. But pretty much it was a real quick process. They were confident in what they were doing, throwing it out there.

The group stayed at Kennedy's house for the most part of the week. He named his studio Spice, after the group, because it had never been used before. Together, they composed two songs in the session: "Love Thing" and "Say You'll Be There". Paul Wilson and Andy Watkins—the songwriters and production duo known as Absolute—produced the song and recorded it for the most part at Olympic Studios in Barnes, London. At first, discussions were made about what song the group would release as their second single, originally it was going to be "Love Thing", but in the end they decided to change it for "Say You'll Be There".

In December 1996, while charting across Europe, "Say You'll Be There" became the focus of a controversy when the Israeli soldier Idit Shechtman accused the group of copying her song "Bo Aylai" ("Come to me"), a highly similar song released two years earlier in Israel. Shechtman hired lawyers and threatened to sue. A spokesman of the group later declared: "Where there's a hit, there's a writ. There's always someone who crawls out of the woodwork claiming to have written a hit song. We look forward to seeing her in court."