Give Blood (song)

"Give Blood" is a song by Pete Townshend, the guitarist for The Who. The song is the opening track for Townshend's fourth solo album, a concept album titled White City: A Novel, and was released as a single. "Give Blood" features Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. He also appears on another song from the album, "White City Fighting", the music for which was written by Gilmour.

The song was used to encourage blood donation on June 14, 2021 on World Blood Donor Day.

Background
When Townshend was asked about the song he said:

"Give Blood was one of the tracks I didn't even play on. I brought in Simon Phillips, Pino Palladino and David Gilmour simply because I wanted to see my three favourite musicians of the time playing on something and, in fact, I didn't have a song for them to work on, and sat down very, very quickly and rifled threw [sic] a box of stuff, said to Dave, "Do one of those kind of ricky-ticky-ricky-ticky things, and I'll shout 'Give Blood!' in the microphone every five minutes and let's see what happens." And that's what happened. Then I constructed the song around what they did."

In an interview with Modern Drummer, Phillips recalled that the instrumental track originally lacked a bass guitar and instead consisted of an electric guitar with echo. For the purpose of augmenting the electric guitar track, Phillips created a drum part built around sixteenth note rhythms and a prominent backbeat. His drum work on "Give Blood" was later highlighted in the 1986 edition of Modern Drummer's Best Recorded Performance Chart.

Release and reception
The single failed to chart in UK or to make the Billboard Hot 100 US Pop Chart, but reached number 5 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Charts.

Cash Box said that the song was "strong paean to world peace." Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic ranked "Give Blood" as one of Townshend's best compositions, calling it "anthemic".