Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Chords

The Chords Are Simpler Than You Remember

I picked this up back in 2007 when some musicians at a pub asked if I knew it. I hadn't played it in years but I'd heard it on the radio constantly in '85. The real trick with this song isn't the progression itself, it's getting the timing right. The chords sit around E minor, B7, C major, and A major. That's basically it. Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Chords follow a pretty standard pop structure but nobody talks about how important the E minor to B7 movement is. That B7 is doing heavy lifting. It creates that unresolved tension the song leans on. Play it plain E minor without the B7 and the whole thing sounds flat.

Breakdown

Verse runs: Em | B7 | C | A | Em | B7 | C | A. You strum steadily but not hard. The original track has that driving beat coming from the guitar and the strings, so you need to keep time locked in. Chorus opens with C | G | D | A then moves to Em | B7 | C | A. The G chord here is where most people mess up. They play E minor over G instead. Keep it a clean G major. The transition from C down to G gives that downward pull the vocal melody rides on. I ran into a problem once when a guitarist wanted to transpose this into D minor because his voice sat lower. I tried it and hit a wall. The B7 becomes F#7 and suddenly the string arrangement parts made zero sense. The chords still work but you lose the open string resonance that gives the song its ring. We ended up just transposing to D major instead and he sang an octave higher with the harmonica doubling the lead. Worked fine.

What People Miss

The bridge section is often skipped or played wrong. It goes: C | G/B | Am | D | F#m7b5 | B7 | Em. That F#m7b5 is the whole secret sauce. It's an Fhalf-diminished and it leads beautifully back to B7. Leave it out and you get a plain Am to B7 move which sounds cheap compared to what Kevin Rowland's arrangement actually does. Also the tempo. The original sits around 132 beats per minute. If you play it slow like most guitar tutorials suggest, it loses its character. It's not a ballad. It's a driving, urgent piece. You need the energy. Play it through a couple times with a metronome. Start at 100 and work up. You'll notice the Em to B7 to C to A pattern gets easier around 120. From there you can push into the full speed territory. Takes about twenty minutes to lock in the fingerings properly if you practice it right.

I don't have a tab file to share. It's been out of print for decades and the sheet music nobody posts online gets it wrong anyway. Better to learn by ear or find a proper transcription from the original arrangement. There are books online that claim to have it but they're usually wrong on the bridge progression. The song was written by Kevin Rowland, Albert West, and Jim Paterson. Released in 1985 on the album Too Rye Advantage. It hit number one in the UK and stayed there for three weeks. Still gets played in pubs every single day which tells you something about how memorable these chords actually are once you know them.