Songfacts®:

• Released in November 1990, Alison Limerick's "Where Love Lives" was the solo debut of a singer who, until then, had been best known as a dancer (including Andrew Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express) and session vocalist. Yet what started as a modest club single became a bona fide dance anthem, one that would go on to soundtrack decades of late-night euphoria, remixes, and, eventually, a John Lewis Christmas advert.
• "Where Love Lives" is a song about sanctuary. Limerick sings to a partner battered by heartbreak, offering her love as a refuge, a warm room where faith and self-belief can be safely rebuilt. The message is simple but timeless: come on in, you're home now.
• "Where Love Lives" was written by Swedish producer Lati Kronlund. He happened upon Limerick performing Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child" at London's ICA, where her two-octave range stopped him cold. He told her she was perfect for the song he'd penned.
• After Limerick recorded her vocals, the Godfather of house, Frankie Knuckles, and future superstar DJ David Morales, then working together as Def Mix Productions, mixed the track.
  
  "Probably of all the songs I've worked on, this is the most lyrical - musically it says everything," said Knuckles to Music Week. "It was one of the first mixes David and I did together, it's classic Frankie and David, hard edged and fused with lush, beautiful orchestral arrangements."
• Limerick didn't think much of the song at first. "I just went in and sang the song with absolutely no expectations of where it might lead," she told Billboard in 1982. By the time Limerick got a call saying Arista wanted to sign her up, she'd almost forgotten about the track.
• The single's first outing in 1990 was modest, peaking at #87 in the UK, but its pulse was too strong to stay underground for long. The 1991 re-release, re-titled "Where Love Lives (Come On In) '91," caught fire in clubs, climbing to #27 in the UK and #3 on the Billboard Dance Club chart. Billboard even named it Dance Track of the Year. Five years later, the Dancing Divaz remix took it higher still - #9 in the UK, #4 in the US - cementing it as the definitive version. When yet another remix surfaced in 2003, it charted again, this time at #44.
• Limerick's debut album And Still I Rise followed in 1992, featuring both "Where Love Lives" and her other UK Top 20 hit "Make It On My Own." That same year, she took home Best Female Artist at the Disco Mix Club (DMC Awards).
• Limerick recorded a new live version with Brooklyn Funk Essentials in 2018, giving it a brassy, organic warmth. In 2022 Rolling Stone and 2025 Billboard placed it on their lists of the greatest dance songs ever made.
• The song is the emotional centerpiece of the 2025 John Lewis Christmas advert, titled Where Love Lives. In the ad, a son gifts his father a vinyl copy of the single, sparking a tender bond over the music. It begins with Limerick's original club version before segueing into a new, slower piano rendition by Labrinth, turning a 1990s house classic into a Christmas hearthside lullaby.
• The annual John Lewis advert has become a staple of the festive period in the UK. Previous years have featured music from a diverse range of artists, including Taken By Trees, Ellie Goulding, Slow Moving Millie, Gabrielle Aplin, Lily Allen, Tom Odell, Aurora, Vaults, Elbow, Dan Smith, Celeste, Mike Geier, Andrea Bocelli and Richard Ashcroft.