“You Can’t Hurry Love” is a song originally recorded by the Supremes on the Motown label and was the second single from the Supremes’ album The Supremes A’ Go-Go… The song “You Can’t Hurry Love”, is a memory of a mother’s words (“My mama said ‘you can’t hurry love/No you just have to wait'”) telling her daughter that with patience she will find that special someone one day, was inspired by and partially based upon “(You Can’t Hurry God) He’s Right on Time” (“You can’t hurry God/you just have to wait/Trust and give him time/no matter how long it takes”), a 1950s gospel song written by Dorothy Love Coates of the Original Gospel Harmonettes.
Written and produced by Motown’s main production team, Holland–Dozier–Holland, “You Can’t Hurry Love” is one of the signature Supremes songs, and also one of Motown’s signature releases. Billboard described the single as “the group’s most exciting side to date” with “top vocal” and “exceptional instrumental backing.” Cash Box said that it is a “pulsating pop-r&b rhythmic ode which contends that romance is a slow-developing game of give-and-take.” Record World called it “a wonderful and happy sounding tune, chirped by the Supremes, with bells and banjos.”
The single was the Supremes’ seventh number-one hit, topping the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for two weeks, in September 1966, and reaching number one on the soul chart for two weeks and number three in the United Kingdom. The group performed the song on the CBS variety program The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday, September 25, 1966. Billboard named the song number 19 on their list of 100 Greatest Girl Group Songs of All Time. The BBC ranked “You Can’t Hurry Love” at number 16 on The Top 100 Digital Motown Chart, which is based solely on all time UK downloads and streams of Motown releases. The Supremes’ version of the song is honoured by inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s permanent collection of 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
The most notable cover of the song was released in October 1982 as a single by Phil Collins from his second solo album, Hello, I Must Be Going! Collins’s version reached number one on the UK Singles Chart for two weeks in January 1983 (becoming his first number-one solo hit on the UK Singles Chart, and peaking two positions higher than the original song did in that country), and reached number 10 in the United States (his first top 10 single in the U.S.). The single was certified gold in the UK. The song spent a week at number 1 in Ireland in January 1983. The orchestral strings on this track were recorded in Studio 1 at CBS Recording Studios, London W1 by recording engineer Mike Ross-Trevor (assisted by Richard Hollywood) on the evening of June 24, 1982.
Collins said that “The idea of doing ‘Can’t Hurry Love’ was to see if Hugh Padgham and I could duplicate that Sixties sound. It’s very difficult today because most recording facilities are so much more sophisticated than they were back then. It’s therefore hard to make the drums sound as rough as they did on the original. That’s what we were going after, a remake, not an interpretation, but a remake.”
