Songfacts®:

• Duran Duran lead singer Simon Le Bon wrote the lyric to "Save A Prayer" while the band was on tour. The song revolves around a chance meeting between two people that flares into a one-off sexual encounter. Le Bon described the lyric as "realistic, and not romantic."
• According to Le Bon, the song's chorus structure is based on Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind."
• The video was filmed by frequent Duran Duran, Australian director Russell Mulcahy, in Sri Lanka. The visual earned plenty of airplay on MTV with its shots of the ancient rock fortress of Sigiriya and the ruins of a Buddhist temple at Polonnaruwas as well as the island's southern coastline.
• The song was sampled for British hip-hop house duo Shut Up and Dance's "Save It 'Til The Mourning After," which reached #25 on the UK singles chart in 1995.
• The Arctic Monkeys' 2007 single, "Teddy Picker" contains the lyric, alluding to a line in this song's chorus: "I don't want your prayer, save it for the morning after."
  
  The Sheffield band's debut single "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor" had previously apparently nodded to another Duran Duran song with "Your name isn't Rio, but I don't care for sand", referring to a line in the Rio title track. Speaking to XFM, Arctics frontman Alex Turner said that he actually had little knowledge of Duran Duran music apart from a concert DVD he'd seen and the references must have come from his subconscious.
• Eagles of Death Metal covered this for their 2015 album, Zipper Down. The American band's Josh Homme is a Duran Duran fan. He said to NME. "I long for pop music being that hooky and cool and not being about getting a text and going to the salon, or 'Look at what I bought.' That was a good pop band."
• On November 13, 2015 there was a mass shooting during the Eagles of Death Metal's concert at Paris' Le Bataclan, during which 118 civilians were killed by terrorists. In response to the atrocity, a campaign was launched to get the band's cover of this song to #1 (it stalled at #53). Duran Duran announced that they would donate proceeds from the American band's version to charity.
• Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor fell into water used as an animal latrine during the filming of the video and ended up being hospitalized with dysentery. At 3 minutes, 40 seconds into the clip, you can see him perched on a branch looking a tad dazed, immediately before his unscheduled splash. Taylor recalled in his biography Wild Boy: "I suppose there's a lesson there somewhere: if you smoke dope and drink Jack Daniel's in the tropical heat, don't fall into a lagoon full of elephant's urine."