And in that villa, he wrote “Sexual Healing.”
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PART EIGHT: SEXUAL HEALING—THE COMEBACK
The song came together in Ostend in 1982. Marvin Gaye was there with several collaborators, including a musician named Odell Brown. The two had been working together on a reggae-influenced instrumental—Gaye had become deeply interested in Jamaican music during his European years. Gordon Banks also contributed to the composition’s development.
David Ritz, a music journalist and Rolling Stone contributor who visited Gaye in Ostend in 1982, has said that during a conversation about the healing properties of sex, he supplied the phrase that became the title. Ritz was eventually credited as a co-songwriter on the published version of the song, following a lawsuit he filed against Gaye’s estate after Gaye’s death. Freddy Cousaert has disputed Ritz’s account, saying that Ritz’s contribution was essentially the title phrase and nothing more. Harvey Fuqua, who was also in the studio during recording and who contributed the whispered “get up” and “wake up” vocals, is also credited. The precise creative history of the song is disputed.
What is not disputed is the song itself, or what it did.
“Sexual Healing” was recorded at Studio Katy in Ohain, Belgium. It was unlike anything on pop radio in 1982—a slow, hypnotic, deeply intimate song built on a synthesizer pattern and Gaye’s voice singing about longing, about a physical and spiritual need for human connection, about wanting to be healed.
Released in November 1982, the song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 78 and climbed over the following weeks to No. 3 in January 1983. On the Hot Black Singles chart—what Billboard then called the R&B chart—it was even more dominant. It sat at No. 1 for ten weeks, a record for R&B that would stand until Whitney Houston broke it in 1993.