Love Really Hurts Without You

Billy Ocean wrote "Love Really Hurts Without You" several years before recording it, while working as a pattern cutter at a fashion house on Savile Row. When a co-worker mentioned she was selling her piano, he impulsively borrowed £23 from his boss to buy it and carried it up to the third floor of his parents' council flat off Brick Lane, where it fit perfectly in his little bedroom. He taught himself to play, coming home every lunchtime and evening to tinkle the keys until the song emerged, with his left hand playing the melody and his right doing down beats while the opening lyric about running around town like a fool came out of him.

The tune strongly resembled the Four Tops' 1965 classic "I Can't Help Myself", which had been a UK hit through Donnie Elbert's 1972 remake around the time of the song's inception. Producer Ben Findon touched up the composition before it was recorded, and it was released on 23 January 1976 as only the second single under the name Billy Ocean. It debuted at number 34 on the UK Top 50 and rose to number two by late March, held off the top by Brotherhood of Man's "Save Your Kisses for Me".

Ocean reckoned he was the most surprised person in the world that the song became a hit, since it was his tenth release and he had assumed his records would be flops. He was on the Ford Dagenham assembly line when he heard it on Radio Luxembourg, and knowing he was free to leave, he left. In the US it reached number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the song later featured in the 2013 film Filth and a 2019 episode of Sex Education.