“I Only Want to Be with You” is a song written by Mike Hawker and Ivor Raymonde. According to Jean Ryder, the ex-wife of songwriter Mike Hawker, “I Only Want to Be With You” was written soon after she and Hawker married in December 1961, being inspired by Hawker’s intense romantic feelings for his new bride. Reportedly, she and Hawker had intended that she herself would record “I Only Want to Be With You”. However, no formal arrangement for this eventuality had apparently been made by the autumn of 1963, when Hawker received a phone call from Philips A&R director Johnny Franz. Ryder paraphrases Franz as saying “Look we need something which is going to put this girl into the charts, because everybody is knocking her, everybody is saying she’ll never make it [solo] – have you got a song that’s a guaranteed hit?” Dusty Springfield had already recorded nine solo tracks, none of which was deemed the right vehicle to launch her solo career. With Ryder’s permission, Hawker submitted “I Only Want to Be With You” to Franz, having made a demo featuring Ryder singing while keeping the beat by tapping on a biscuit tin lid. Franz, and then Springfield, approved the song, which Springfield recorded in October 1963.
Released in November 1963, three weeks after the Springfields’ final concert, “I Only Want to Be With You” was a global success, reaching number 4 UK, number 12 US, number 6 Australia, and number 21 Canada. In the US, Dusty Springfield was the second artist of the British Invasion, after the Beatles, to have a hit, entering the Billboard chart at number 77 in the last week of January 1964. Raymonde’s arrangement is unmistakable, with its relentless “ticker-ticker” beat and cascading drum rolls, full-on choirs and “Tower of Power” horn section pitched against soaring rock strings. It set the production standard for Springfield’s later hits, such as “Stay Awhile” and “Little by Little”. The song was performed by Springfield on the first-ever edition of the BBC’s Top of the Pops, on 1 January 1964.
In 1979, the song was also covered by The Tourists, a band which included Annie Lennox on vocals – which served as the band’s biggest hit. This version of the song was used on a montage of stars when Thames Television went off the air in December 1992. The song was “put down in twenty minutes at the end of the album sessions”, with Lennox recording the vocals in one take. Lennox later said that “we were taken to the cleaners for doing that bloody song”, as “the press absolutely slaughtered us”. Dave Stewart said that “It was a bit out of proportion with ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ – the poppy side of it was really overplayed by everybody”. Reviewing the song for Record Mirror, Daniela Soave included it the singles of the week, writing that the song “definitely grows on you” and that “Lennox has the same deep mellow tones that Dusty Springfield displayed when she sang the same song, but it is saved from being a carbon-cover version by the instrumentation… handclaps, vicious guitar, chugging bass, that sort of thing.
Nicolette Larson remade “I Only Want to Be with You” for her album ‘All Dressed Up and No Place to Go’ produced by Andrew Gold and recorded October 1981 – January 1982 at Sunset Sound. Released as a single in July 1982 – parallel with the album’s release – Larson’s version featured as B-side “How Can We Go On”, a track from Larson’s 1981 album Radioland which had been an unsuccessful 1981 A-side release. Despite becoming Larson’s fourth single to rank on the Hot 100 chart in Billboard magazine – and her first Hot 100 entry since 1980 – “I Only Want to Be with You” would prove a Top 40 shortfall, stalling at #53 in September 1983. Larson’s label WB Records, electing not to issue a second single from All Dressed Up and No Place to Go, were motivated by the underperformance of that album and its one single to end Larson’s label tenure.
In 1988, British singer Samantha Fox covered the song as “I Only Wanna Be with You” for her third studio album, I Wanna Have Some Fun (1988). Fox would recall the song as being the first song she ever learned to sing, the Dusty Springfield original version being among a stack of singles her mother handed down to her when she was 10. The decision to record the song was Fox’s, and she was relieved when producers Stock Aitken Waterman agreed to the idea, having worried they would only want to record their own compositions, for publishing reasons. “I Only Wanna Be with You” earned Fox her final global hit single to date. In the United States, where “I Wanna Have Some Fun” had been a Top Ten hit, “I Only Wanna Be with You” rose no higher than number 31 and would mark Fox’s final Billboard appearance: in Fox’s native UK her version outperformed her previous six single releases with a number-16 peak, but would also become her final major hit.
