“I Only Want to Be with You” (27) 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. Ryder. 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 Dusty Springfield 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?” 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. Released in November 1963, it 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.
The Bay City Rollers recorded “I Only Want to Be with You” for their album Dedication in June and July 1976 at Soundstage Studio in Toronto with producer Jimmy Lenner. In the US “I Only Want to Be with You” was issued as advance single from Dedication in August 1976: that October the track reached a Billboard peak of number 12, besting the number 28 peak of the previous Bay City Rollers’ single “Rock and Roll Love Letter” Issued in the UK as a non-album single in September 1976, “I Only Wanna Be with You” – so entitled – reached number 4 UK, affording the Bay City Rollers’ a tenth and final Top Ten hit.
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. The song was used on a montage of stars when Thames Television went off the air in December 1992. 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. It reached No. 4 in the UK Chart.
Nicolette Larson “I Only Want to Be with You” for her album All Dressed Up and No Plaace to Go produced by Andrew Gold and recorded October 1981 – January 1982. 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 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.
In 1988, British singer Samantha Fox covered the song 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 Fox when she was aged ten. “I Only Wanna Be with You” essentially earned Fox her final global hit single. In the United States, “I Only Wanna Be with You” rose no higher than number 31 and would mark Fox’s final Billboard appearance: in the UK her version outperformed her previous six single releases with a number-16 peak, but would also become Fox’ final major hit.
