This was written by group members Steve Winwood, Spencer Davis and Muff Winwood, although solely credited to Steve Winwood on the UK single label.
Bassist Muff Winwood recalled that the song was conceived, arranged, and rehearsed in half an hour. He said that in 1966 they were under pressure to follow up their chart-toppers Keep On Running and Somebody Help Me. Manager Chris Blackwell took them to London, put them in a rehearsal room at the Marquee Club, and ordered them to come up with a new song.
‘We started to mess about with riffs, and it must have been eleven o’clock in the morning. We hadn’t been there half an hour, and this idea just came. We thought, bloody hell, this sounds really good. We fitted it all together and by about twelve o’clock, we had the whole song. Steve had been singing ‘Gimme, gimme some loving’ – you know, just yelling anything, so we decided to call it that. We worked out the middle eight and then went to a cafe that’s still on the corner down the road. Blackwell came to see how we were going on, to find our equipment set up and us not there, and he storms into the cafe, absolutely screaming, “How can you do this?” he screams. Don’t worry, we said. We were all really confident. We took him back, and said, how’s this for half an hour’s work, and we knocked off Gimme Some Lovin’ and he couldn’t believe it. We cut it the following day and everything about it worked. That very night we played a North London club and tried it out on the public. It went down a storm. We knew we had another No. 1.’
He was nearly right. It reached No 2 in the UK and No 7 in the US.
The song was remixed for the US:
This is a live performance from 1967 – Winwood’s voice is even better than on the record.
It featured in the wonderful 1980 film The Blues Brothers.