I Believe in You

I Believe in You sits at the center of the second side of Spirit of Eden. Hollis and Friese-Greene first recorded a twenty-five-voice choir for it; Hollis had it wiped the next morning and replaced with six boy sopranos from Chelmsford Cathedral. The lyric speaks of seeing heroin on the street and young people laid waste. Hollis told Oor he had watched the misery the drug causes in people who thought it would never get hold of them; he also said the song was not based on his own experience, and accounts differ over how far it reflects people close to him.

EMI wanted a single, and the band reluctantly cut the song down to three and a half minutes, which Hollis said simply chopped off its beginning and end. Tim Pope filmed him sitting with a guitar, singing; Pope said he started the camera and sent the crew away. Hollis told Q that the video was a massive mistake, depressing, and what happens when you compromise, and that the song meant too much to him to mime to. It reached eighty-five in Britain. Talk Talk never performed it live. S. Carey and Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire both recorded it for the 2012 tribute album. The upload in the hypersongs web is the HD single-edit video posted by the band's channel in 2025.