By 1983, Air Supply were the undisputed kings of the soft-rock ballad — two Australians and a string of featherweight hits about love, loss and longing. But the biggest record of their career was not written by Graham Russell, the duo’s own songwriter. It arrived almost by accident, courtesy of the least featherweight figure in pop: Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf’s Wagnerian architect, a man who built songs the way other people build cathedrals. Steinman wrote and produced Making Love Out of Nothing at All for Air Supply, gave the gentle duo a five-minute power ballad with a full-throated rock band behind it, and then watched his song climb to No. 2 on the American chart — where it was stopped, for three consecutive weeks, by another Steinman song, sung by Bonnie Tyler.
A Film Score, Recycled
The melody had an earlier life. Steinman had composed the main title theme for the 1980 coming-of-age film A Small Circle of Friends, and, as was his habit throughout his career, he later reworked the theme into a full song. A demo exists from 1982: Steinman himself at the piano, with Rory Dodd — the session singer later famous as the “turn around” voice on Total Eclipse of the Heart — handling the vocal. It is a lovely, fragile sketch of what the record would become.
The song was very nearly a Meat Loaf record. Steinman offered it to his old partner for the 1983 album Midnight at the Lost and Found, bundled together with Total Eclipse of the Heart. Meat Loaf wanted both songs, but his record company refused to pay Steinman’s price as a songwriter, and the deal collapsed. It was one of the great own goals in record-business history: Steinman took the two songs elsewhere — one to Air Supply, one to Bonnie Tyler — and by the autumn of 1983 he owned the top of the American chart twice over.
Steinman Builds His Wall of Sound
Air Supply’s version was recorded in August 1982, with Steinman producing as well as writing. Rather than soften the song for the duo, he did the opposite: he built his full arena apparatus around Russell Hitchcock’s tenor. Steinman’s whole philosophy ran against restraint. He wrote teenage emotion at operatic scale — love as life and death, every chorus a climax, every record produced like the finale of a Wagner opera, a style he half-jokingly called Wagnerian rock. Most producers handed a soft-rock act would have trimmed the drama; Steinman handed them more of it, and trusted Hitchcock’s voice to justify the scale. The lyric is built as a catalogue of devotion — I know just how to whisper, and I know just how to cry — line after line of hard-won knowledge, all of it useless, the title admits, when set against the one thing the singer cannot do: make love out of nothing at all. It is a Steinman conceit through and through, a list song that swells into an aria. The band behind the record was close to a supergroup. From Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band came Roy Bittan on piano and keyboards — his rolling piano is the engine of the track — and Max Weinberg on drums. Rick Derringer, the veteran rock guitarist, supplied the dramatic solo. Sid McGinnis played acoustic guitar, Steve Buslowe played bass, and Dodd, Eric Troyer and Holly Sherwood layered the backing vocals. Hitchcock, to his enormous credit, rose to meet the scale of it: his performance is controlled and aching in the verses, then opens into one of the great money-note finales of the decade. The record runs five minutes and forty-three seconds, nearly twice the length of a typical Air Supply single, and there is not a wasted second in it. Structurally it is pure Steinman theatre: Bittan’s piano opens almost in a whisper, the band withdraws and returns in waves, and each chorus stands taller than the one before, until the final stretch — Derringer’s guitar crying out over the massed backing voices while Hitchcock holds the melody like a man refusing to be blown off a cliff — feels less like a pop single ending than a weather event passing. Russell, the duo’s own accomplished songwriter, graciously stepped aside as a writer for the occasion and sings support, a decision that says much about the duo’s professionalism: they recognised a career record when one was handed to them, whatever name was on it.
Number One, Number Two
The song was released in July 1983 as a new track anchoring Air Supply’s Greatest Hits album, with Late Again on the B-side. The collection it fronted became one of the best-selling compilations of the era, and the single was its engine. It peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 that October and stayed there for three weeks. The immovable object at No. 1 was Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart — also written and produced by Steinman, and also built around Bittan, Weinberg and Dodd. Steinman had produced Tyler’s whole comeback album, Faster Than the Speed of Night, in the same period, which means that in the autumn of 1983 he effectively controlled American pop radio’s summit from two directions at once: the Welsh rock singer he had rebuilt as a chart-topper, and the Australian duo he had rebuilt as something closer to a rock band. As Steinman himself liked to point out, no other writer-producer in chart history has held the No. 1 and No. 2 positions simultaneously with songs given to two different artists. Air Supply’s record added No. 2 on the Adult Contemporary chart and No. 3 in Canada; Britain, oddly, never took to it, stopping at No. 80. The RIAA has since certified it double Platinum.
The Song That Wouldn’t Stay Down
The rivalry inverted itself a decade later: in 1995, Bonnie Tyler recorded her own version of Making Love Out of Nothing at All, produced, inevitably, by Steinman. Air Supply themselves revisited it in 2005, cutting an acoustic version for The Singer and the Song. Even the song’s videos tell stories: there are two official clips — a period-piece version set in 1960s New York, and an earlier one shot in Los Angeles that follows the band on the road, with concert footage from the Forum in Inglewood and airport farewell scenes at Van Nuys, where the woman waving goodbye to Graham Russell was his wife, Jodi Varble-Russell.
It remains the strangest and most rewarding entry in the Air Supply catalogue: a soft-rock duo handed a miniature rock opera by a songwriter who knew only one size — enormous — and rising to sing it as if it had always been theirs. It also quietly redrew what the duo were allowed to be. Before it, Air Supply meant gauze and candlelight; afterwards, they had a five-minute-forty-three-second epic in the set that demanded a full rock band and a singer willing to test the ceiling of his range, and every power ballad that followed in their wake — the bigger the chorus, the longer the build — walked a road Steinman paved here. The song has become a karaoke Everest and a permanent fixture of soft-rock radio, yet on record it still sounds faintly dangerous, as if the whole cathedral of sound might collapse under its own emotion. Decades on, it is the climax of the duo’s concerts, the song audiences who came for All Out of Love discover is actually the biggest thing in the show, and it has out-charted and outlasted nearly everything else released under Air Supply’s name. The title promises something created from nothing. Steinman, recycler of his own film scores and holder of the top two chart positions at once, would have appreciated the joke: he made two hits out of almost nothing at all, and let them fight each other for the crown.
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