It’s the early 1980s, and Pat Benatar is one of the biggest rock stars in the United States. Since her 1979 debut In The Heat Of The Night she – with the support of producer, guitarist and husband Neil Giraldo - has developed a rock sound that’s both mainstream and modern, forceful but feminine. Her third album 1981’s Precious Time was a Billboard Number One and having reached the top via the traditional route of building up a live following, a live album seems an obvious move.
But for whatever reason, Benatar’s record company, perhaps nervous that her fourth album Get Nervous had seen a dip in sales, decide to add two new studio tracks to the record, Live From Earth. One of those would take the 30 year old singer’s career onto a new level of success.
Love Is A Battlefield was originally written for Benatar by ex Blondie producer Mike Chapman and his then-songwriting partner Holly Knight. In a 2008 interview with Song Facts, Knight explained how they wrote it specifically for Benatar, largely because the singer called up Chapman at just the right time: "I was at his house, I was just starting to write with him, and Pat Benatar called up and said, 'Mike, I would love for you to write me a song. I'm doing an album, will you write me a hit, please?' And he goes, 'Well, I'm here with one of my writers, Holly Knight, and we were just going to sit down and write. So we'll write something for you.'”
Article continues belowThe pair came up with a ballad. “A very slow ballad,” explained Neil Giraldo, Benatar’s guitarist, producer and husband, in a 2015 interview. “Really slow. So I thought, ‘you know what? I think I have an idea to make this a hit record without playing it slow, but playing it very fast.'”
“The cadence of the vocal melody is really a ‘get back to a Bo Diddley thing’, which I love. It had a certain swing to it and I thought ‘I think the rhythm should balance out and be similar to the melody’."
So Giraldo bought in a Linn Drum – the machine that essentially created mid-'80s pop – and put together a drum pattern. “It was the first day I had it and so I hit a button and made a mistake and instead of an 8-bar phrase it was a 6-bar phrase. So I thought ‘oh how am I going to get back to that?’”
Crucially, he decided to retain the mistake. “I used the 6 bar phrase, built the song from the drum machine, started adding elements to it, and as it started growing, I started thinking ‘wow, I think we’ve got something really serious!’ I knew we had a hit.”
The problem was that the label – Chrysalis – was not impressed. Record companies in the 1980s were conservative by nature. Benatar was a rock artist, and the new Love Is a Battlefield, with its drum machine and synths, messed with their minds.
“We had just sold monstrous amount of records,” remembers Benatar. “We have songs that are going crazy on the charts, everything’s nuts. All they want us to do is to go in there and do that again. The record company went berserk.”
"They refused it and told me, either change the beat, change the tempo, take the talking out, take the whistling out (or we won't release it),” Giraldo told the Ultimate Classic Rock podcast. "I don't like the context - I don't know what it is. What is it, an R&B song? I said, 'No, but I can't change it. I refuse to change it."
In the end, Chrysalis relented. “When I finished the record, if people had to listen to it six times to really get it, I knew I had a hit. On the first listen, everyone is ‘I don’t quite get it’, second one was ‘I’m not so sure’, third one was like ‘er maybe’. By the time it comes to six, they’re like’ we got a hit!’”
For Benatar – seen very much as a rock artist in 1983 – this was a brave move. “Love Is A Battlefield is an intentional direction change for the band, for us,” she said in a 1985 interview. “I just wanted to move. I hate staying in the same vein all the time. I think that the more you restrict yourself, the more other people restrict you.”
The song was helped greatly by its video. These were the days when videos often had to tell stories. So Benatar’s character is a teenager (though the singer was actually 30 at the time) who runs away from home, her dad wagging his finger at here: ‘If you leave this house now, you can just forget about coming back!’ She heads for New York, ending up as a taxi dancer in a seedy club, where she confronts the club owner and ‘liberates’ her fellow dancers. From a 2026 perspective, it’s cheesy as hell, but with its use of dialogue and sound effects, Battlefield was a cut above most of its 1983 competitors. MTV duly hugged it to its bosom.
“I had wanted to do something in the street,” said Benatar at the time. “The song is basically a love song, but I wanted to turn it around so it wouldn’t be a man and a woman relationship.
"I wanted it to have a twist so it would be about young people and the problems that they go through. I didn’t know quite what, but I knew I wanted it to be in the street and to have a lot of kids and dancing. And when we spoke to the director Bob Giraldi, he came up with the runaway idea.”
At over five minutes, the video necessitated some rejigging of the original track. “Because of the choreography and dancing, we had to remix the album version,” Benatar explained. “Neil spent a lot of time in the studio trying to edit and get dance tracks in there so there would be all sort of rhythmic things for the dancers to work off.”
It all paid off. Love Is A Battlefield eventually reached Number 5 on Billboard and it was a huge hit around the world, bagging Number Ones in the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia, though in the UK it had to wait a couple of years before it reached the chart on the back of her British breakthrough hit We Belong.
It also won the Grammy for Best Female Rock performance – Benatar’s fourth in a row in that particular category. She would go on to have other sizeable hits – with many, curiously, also having martial themes – in the shape of Invincible, All Fired Up and Sex As A Weapon.
Love Is A Battlefield was another marker in the subtle shift that took place within mainstream rock during the 1980s, as producers became more open to working with synths and drum machines, and artists more adept in the new field of video. The following year would see the man who was once declared ‘the future of rock n’ roll’ – Bruce Springsteen - score his biggest hit yet with what was essentially a dance track: Dancing In The Dark.
Meanwhile, another member of the 70s old guard decided to use a Linn Drum and scored a huge hit that rebooted his career. Don Henley’s The Boys Of Summer is a similar creation – a rock song draped over a Linn Drum pattern that many have commented may have been influenced by Love Is A Battlefield.
Giraldo certainly thinks so. Last April on Bob Lefsetz’s podcast he recalled that he actually showed Don Henley how to programme his Linn. He even claims Henley asked him directly: “He said, ‘how did you do Battlefield? Because I wanna steal it.’”
The producer’s contention is that Henley’s songwriting partner, and the man who actually did the programming on Boys Of Summer, Mike Campbell, hasn’t given credit where credit’s due. “Don Henley is an honest guy,” Giraldo told Lefsetz. “But somebody else that was part of it doesn’t say the same story.”
In a 2021 Facebook video, Campbell detailed how he created the Boys Of Summer drum pattern, staying up all night with the Linn and an Oberheim OB-X synth: “It was pretty revolutionary at the time,” he explained. “I got a little pattern going - tambourines, claps, drums, snares. I just kept mixing sounds.”
The subject came up again later in 2025 when Giraldo was interviewed by the radio station Q104.3 FM: “I hope somebody out there can take those two songs and dissect them and show how much alike they really are. It sure sounds exactly the same. And I know who said they were going to steal it,” Giraldo said conspiritorally
“I’m hoping that somebody, some great music person, puts the tablature out, check the parts, check out the guitar parts, check out the drum machine, check out the feel, check out how it goes. It’s exactly the same.”
Neither Campbell or Henley has yet to respond. But whether it was an accident, homage or theft, at forty years' distance it matters not. Both songs are now regarded as classics, and proof that drum machines had a place inside rock, and indeed could bring the genre up to date for the 1980s.
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