Neil We wrote 'Rent' in Ray Roberts studio in 1984. We thought of the title first, and we thought it was hilarious. It took us quite a long time to write it-there were three or four versions, though I immediately came up with 'I love you -you pay my rent'. It was almost like a puzzle, working out what the song meant from that. We were very into Italian disco -there was this record I'd been sent at Smash Hits called 'I Love Chopin' by Gazebo and it was meant to sound a bit like that, though it never did. Bobby '0' couldn't believe it. He thought it was the weirdest thing he had ever heard in his life. He thought it was a very strange song. He was almost embarrassed by it.

Chris Originally it was a high energy song - with Bobby '0' we recorded it with this brilliant orchestral sample nicked from a Barry White album - but Julian Mendelsohn thought we had too many high energy songs on the album so Andy Richards very cleverly gave it a half-tempo feel.

Neil I didn't double-track the vocal so it sounded more real. I sing it differently now, with different phrasing. I don't like 'you-ooo'. Nowadays I just sing 'you'. When the album came out I wasn't sure whether I thought it was that great, butt was always impressed how much people liked it. For the single version, [CD2, track 10] Stephen Hague re-edited it, because we thought it repeated too many times. We've done the song several different ways live, and we also recorded it again with Liza Minnelli for her Results album, and got Mgelo Badalarnenti to arrange it- it makes it sound like it's from a Broadway show. The song is from the point of view of a prostitute-a female prostitute. I've always imagined it's about a kept woman, and I always imagined it set in America. I vaguely thought of one of the Kennedys, for some reason, and imagined that this politician keeps this woman in a smart flat in Manhattan, and he's still got his family, and the two of them have some of relationship and they do love each other but it's all kind of secret. He pays the rent of the flat.

But there's atremendous loyalty at play on both sides, and the money doesn't really matter. She thinks about whether or not it's been a wasted life, this emotional currency spent on a relationship, which is not totally satisfactory. At the same time maybe she's quite a lazy person - she's had quite a nice life, thanks to him, and she hasn't had to go out to work. She's survived, but it's not satisfactory. There's a sense of excitement, but also an enamours sense of resignation, a little like 'Why don't we live together?' on Please: 'Is this it, then? Is that all there is?' But, also: 'It's not so bad'. At the time I was worried about having '...you, you...' together in the lyric: 'I love you, you pay my rent'. I thought it was clumsy, butt like it now. Its 'I love you; you pay my rent'. A semi-colon, I suppose. If there was any conjunction it wouldn't be 'but' or 'because’, it would be 'and'.