Songfacts®:

• Although they prided themselves on writing their own material, brothers Chris and Eddie Amoo, who were members of The Real Thing, decided they needed to be more commercial just to get radio play. So they recorded this song, written by songwriters Ken Gold and Michael Denne, which gave them the commercial success they were looking for.
• The Real Thing were four Liverpudlians who first came to public notice in the UK on television's talent show Opportunity Knocks. After an unsuccessful spell with two other labels, their fortunes changed after signing with Pye Records. This was their first chart entry and eight other hits followed over a three-year period, including "Can't Get By Without You," also written by Ken Gold and Michael Denne, which reached #2. Most of their other hits were written by the Amoo brothers. In the mid 1980s, re-mixed versions of their '70s hits revived interest in them and a remixed version of "You To Me Are Everything" by Froggy, Simon Harris & KC took the band back into the Top 5. The new version stayed on the UK charts for 13 weeks, two weeks more than the chart-topping original.
• Michael Denne came up with the chorus first, and he and Gold wrote the bulk of the song in less than an hour – melody and words. They took the demo of the song to Real Thing lead singer Chris Amoo and their manager, Tony Hall, and the group recorded the song at the Roundhouse studios a week later.
  
  "Chris wanted to take the melody in his own direction," Gold recalled to The Guardian. "He said he was trying to put some soul into it. But sitting up there in the control room, it just wasn't working for me and I remember getting very nervous because he was starting to get a little combative. I said: 'Honestly, Chris, I'd just like to hear you sing the melody exactly as it was written.' And that's what we did. If you can write a melody that gets into someone's head after just one play, then you have something people can sing."
• Two different cover versions reached the top 20 of the UK singles charts in the 1990s. They were recorded by Sonia (#13 in 1991) and Sean McGuire (#16 in 1995).
• Gold attributes the song's longevity to its simple sentiment of a girl who means everything to a guy, but she doesn't feel the same way. Its message of an unrequited love had nothing to do with the songwriter's personal lives – Gold had gotten married several months before they wrote the song and Denne was unattached. "The truth is," Gold explained, "we were trying to grab a good lyric that made sense and rhymed."