“Love Is a Battlefield” – Single by Pat Benatar from the album Live from Earth
B-side “Hell Is for Children” (live version)
Released September 12, 1983
Label Chrysalis
Songwriters Mike Chapman and Holly Knight
Producers Neil Giraldo and Peter Coleman
Charted No. 5 in US; No.48 in UK; No.3 in West Germany; No.1 in Netherlands; No.1 in Australia; No.1 in Belgium; No.11 in Switzerland
The song was written by Mike Chapman and Holly Knight. Chapman was an established songwriter and producer, while Knight was a former member of the band Spider and was just starting to write songs, something she proved very good at.
Knight and Chapman wrote this song as more of a ballad, and they were surprised to hear what Benatar did with it. Says Knight: “When Mike and I first heard it we were horrified, we hated it, because it was so different. But then it became such a huge hit, and we had to step out and say, You know, they did a very good rendering of it, and that’s how it was meant to be. There’s lots of ways you can hear that song, and they’re all good.”
Pat Benatar married her guitarist Neil Giraldo in 1982, and he has been her producer ever since. It was Giraldo who decided to make this an uptempo song.
The Bob Giraldi-directed music video features Benatar playing a rebellious teenage girl runaway (Benatar was actually 30 at the time). Her father (played by actor Trey Wilson) berates her as her mother watches helplessly. Benatar waves goodbye to her brother (played by actor Philip Cruise), who watches sadly from an upstairs window. She later becomes a taxi dancer at a seedy club in the city. She writes letters to her brother, who is reassured that she is okay, as her father begins to regret yelling at her. When she witnesses the club owner (played by actor Gary Chryst) harassing another dancer, Benatar rounds up her fellow dancers and leads a rebellion against him. The dancers get the upper hand on the club owner and escape from the club, dancing off as the sun rises. After thanking Benatar for helping liberate them, the dancers bid each other goodbye and all go their separate ways. The video ends with Benatar sitting in the back of a bus headed for an unknown destination. The video was choreographed by Michael Peters,[16] who appears briefly in the video.
A special dance club remix of the song was created by Jellybean Benitez. Benitez also created an edited version of his mix specifically for the video. It differs slightly in structure and instrumentation, and aside from appearing in the video, has never been commercially released.
The video was one of the first ever to feature the use of dialogue – Philip Bailey’s “I Know” was the first but Benatar’s got more exposure. The scenes featuring dialogue include the opening argument scene between Benatar and her father in which he shouts at her, “If you leave this house now, you can just forget about coming back!” and the scene when the club owner harasses the taxi dancer, causing her to scream “Leave me alone!” at him.
The video was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Video.
