Ain’t No Sunshine

Bill Withers’ ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ may only be just over two minutes in length, but it’s stood the test of time since its release in 1971. Here are the big facts about the classic soul song :Bill Withers wrote this song for his 1971 album Just As I Am, and it was produced by Booker T Jones. It was Bill’s debut album.Bill Withers was inspired to write the song after watching the 1962 movie Days of Wine and Roses. The film depicts the downward spiral of two everyday Americans, played by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, who succumb to alcoholism and attempt to deal with their problems. Graham Nash was sitting right in front of me, Stephen Stills was playing and there was Booker T and the MGs. They were all these people with all this experience and I was this factory worker. Their general feeling was, ‘Leave it like that’.Bill Withers was 31 years at the time, and was working at a factory making toilet seats for airplanes when he wrote the song. When the single reached gold status, his record company presented him with a golden toilet, marking the start of his new career.The song was originally released as the B-side to another song called ‘Harlem’. However, DJs played ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ as the single instead, and it became a huge hit, and Bill’s first. ‘Harlem’ was later covered by The 5th Dimension. Although it reached number 3 in the US, it somehow never made it in the UK charts in 1971. However, over time it became an iconic song and Withers’ signature song. It wasn’t until the song was performed on The X Factor in 2009 that the song had an appearance in the UK chart, and that was only at number 40.In 1972, a young Michael Jackson released a cover version, and it was a bigger hit in the UK than the original, reaching number 8.