"Under the Bridge" is a song by American rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers and the eleventh track on their fifth studio album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991).

In April 1998, English girl group All Saints released a cover version that topped the UK Singles Chart for two weeks in May 1998.

During the production of the Red Hot Chili Peppers's 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik, producer Rick Rubin regularly visited singer Anthony Kiedis to review his new material.

[6] After singing the poem to guitarist John Frusciante and drummer Chad Smith, they "got up and walked over to their instruments and started finding the beat and guitar chords to match it".

He wrote in his 2004 memoir Scar Tissue: "The loneliness that I was feeling triggered memories of my time with Ione and how I'd had this beautiful angel of a girl who was willing to give me all of her love, and instead of embracing that, I was downtown with fucking gangsters shooting speedballs under a bridge.

[11] Other possible locations include the Belmont Tunnel about half a mile from MacArthur Park,[12] and the overpass where Interstate Highway 10 (the Santa Monica Freeway) crosses Hoover Street close to downtown L.A.[13] "Under the Bridge" is performed in 4/4 time in the key of E major.

[16] As Kiedis begins to sing, the guitar playing becomes more rapid until it reaches an E major seventh chord that halts the song; the silence is broken by drummer Chad Smith's closed hi-hat and cross stick struck at a fast tempo.

[14] Frusciante borrowed the E major seventh chord technique from British guitarist Marc Bolan of the glam rock band T. Rex, who used it in the song "Rip Off" from the 1971 album Electric Warrior.

The first single from Blood Sugar Sex Magik was "Give It Away",[17] which reached number one on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart on October 26, 1991.

[7] As Kiedis begins to sing, he appears on camera bathed in purple light with blue fluorescent stars as a backdrop, surrounded by clouds.

[29] Parry Gettelman from Orlando Sentinel described the song as "an interesting Hendrix-Prince-Zep hybrid that has a lovely bass line (and none of Flea's increasingly predictable popping).

"[30] Nick Griffiths of Select dismissed it as "all mellow strumming and thoughtfully shallow vocals, though it's almost exonerated by a shrill unexpectedly choral middle eight".

[31] Reviewing the album, Ben DiPietro of the Richmond Times-Dispatch was impressed by the Chili Peppers' incorporation of slower tracks, especially "Under the Bridge".

Far from being their usual in-yer-face energetic rap, "Under the Bridge" is a tender, thoughtful and quite sad tale of loneliness, the sort of thing that Pearl Jam would do if they forgot to ask their ten friends to play their guitars really loudly.

[36] According to Amy Hanson of AllMusic, it became "an integral part of the 1990s alterna-landscape, and remains one of the purest diamonds that sparkle amongst the rough-hewn and rich funk chasms that dominate the Peppers' own oeuvre".

[37] She praised "Under the Bridge" as a "poignant sentiment that is self evident among the simple guitar which cradles the introductory verse, and the sense of fragility that is only doubled by the still down-tempo choral crescendo".

David Fricke of Rolling Stone said that the song "unexpectedly drop-kicked the band into the Top 10",[3] while Philip Booth of The Tampa Tribune commented that it was a "pretty, undulating, [and] by-now omnipresent single.

Unlike several of the Chili Peppers' other songs, "Under the Bridge" is not interpreted in a different manner than what is on the record—aside from being played acoustically, the track is performed the same as it appears on Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

Kiedis said that it "felt like I was getting stabbed in the back and hung out to dry in front of all of America while [Frusciante] was off in a corner in the shadow, playing some dissonant out-of-tune experiment.

"[50] Frusciante used a distortion pedal for the ending verse and screamed incomprehensibly into the microphone when providing backup vocals, neither of which were originally planned or typical of live performances.

[52] Recently, however, Kiedis has experienced a revival in interest: "Although there have been times when I was over ["Under the Bridge"], I've rediscovered it and now I feel close to it and it still has power, and life, and purpose as a song.

"[52] Frusciante believed that the flexibility of "Under the Bridge" has contributed to its success: "A lot of the time that is one of the ingredients of a hit; you can hear it over and over and it will still always mean new things, but you do go through cycles.

[53] "Under the Bridge" was played at the 1999 Woodstock Festival, which the Red Hot Chili Peppers headlined; they were the final act to perform.

Lighthearted foul-play escalated into violence when several women who had been crowd surfing and moshing were raped and nearby property was looted and destroyed.

[54][55][56][57] Other notable performances were at Slane Castle in August 2003 to 80,000 attendees;[58] and in 2004 at London's Hyde Park, in which, over the course of three days, an estimated 250,000 people were in attendance.

[59] Released as the band's first live album, the event became the highest-grossing concert at a single venue in history, with a total revenue of $17.1 million.

[106] "Under the Bridge" was slightly altered because it contained personal lyrics by Anthony Kiedis, and the All Saints covered it because they liked the overall sound and feeling of the recording.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers were, however, displeased with this version; Kiedis felt the cover was poorly recreated and, because the final verse, which contains the line "Under the bridge downtown / is where I drew some blood", was omitted, it lost all personal significance.

[109] British magazine Music Week gave the cover version a positive review, writing, "The soulful foursome weave their R&B spell around this classic Red Hot Chili Peppers song.