Albert Hammond on The Air That I Breathe

Singer-songwriter Albert Hammond speaks to Jason Barnard about penning timeless hit ‘The Air That I Breathe’.

How did you meet Mike Hazelwood, who you wrote a lot of songs with?

Mike died very young, he was only 59. I still miss him, even though we stopped writing together in 1974 because he wanted to do something else. I met him in London. I went to a few publishing companies and I got to this one, which was part of Radio Luxembourg. It was called Shaftesbury Music and a guy called Geoffrey Everett, who ran it, introduced me to Mike when he heard my stuff. He said, “Oh, you should meet this young Englishman. I think you and he could do well together.” Then Mike and I met and we had 10 years of tremendous success.

‘The Air That I Breathe’, that’s an incredible story, you released your own version. Phil Everly did a version that’s wonderful. Then the Hollies took it into the charts and it’s become a standard. Did you recognise how great it was when you first wrote it?

No, I love everything I do because songs are like my children. I love them all. Some of them do better than others, but it’s okay. I was inspired by a woman with a heart of gold that helped me out in LA when I first got there. She gave me a place to stay. She gave me a car to drive in if I promised I would take her to work and pick her up. One day I just told her that I’m not going to drive the car so she can take it. I came up with 20 minutes of music and I sat with Mike and I told him the story. And ‘The Air That I Breathe’ came up. And probably one of the great, great love songs that we wrote together and maybe one of the great, great love songs in the world today.

What did you think when you heard Phil’s version and then The Hollies’ version?

I loved it. I knew Phil because we’d meet in the studio, when you’re in LA, you meet a lot of people. And he made an album of, you know, 10 songs of nine he wrote, and one he didn’t write. He sent the whole album to The Hollies and said, “I know you love the Everly’s, so choose a song” and they chose. So every time he saw me, he said, “You son of a bitch, you got me!”. [laughs]

The albums and the songs seem to come thick and fast in that period. There’s the album ‘The Free Electric Band’ and the single itself. That seems to be a theme in your music and in that song, the love of creating music and playing it to fans comes out. Is that a theme that you recognise?

When I was growing up, my father and my father were with me, but the rest of the family wasn’t. My father had like four brothers or five that were really against me doing music because they were more business people. So that probably had some influence, in other words, I’m going to do what I want to do and not what you want me to do because I have to love what I do. If I’m going to get up every morning and work on something, I want to love what I’m doing. I don’t want to not get up because I hate what I’m doing. So Mike and I were very good in that sense, that we knew each other so well that we just knew the right things to do and where to go with things.