Neil It’s the first proper song we wrote. Chris wrote the music for this in his parents' house in Blackpool. It was about 1982.

Chris That year I was at college in Liverpool and I used to go home quite often. There was a piano at home, in the dining room, and I'd sit playing it. I would doodle, normally, and not be able to remember anything I'd done, and I'd think: I'm just wasting creative juices here - what I need is a computer that's going to be able to save it all for posterity. But one day I sat down at the piano and this just came out. It was probably meant to be a bit like that big ballad in the Seventies, 'You're A Lady' by Peter Skellern - 'you're a lady, I'm a man' -which was very popular with the Lowe family.

Neil Chris actually liked it so much he made a cassette - he was bubbling with excitement - and it was the moment when I realised we were actually quite serious about writing songs together; because he actually did that. There was a sort of commitment. I knew I was quite serious about it, but I didn't really know whether Chris was. This was before we'd ever been in a studio. I was amazed at the sophistication of the music. He said, 'Why don't you write some words for that?'

Chris It was probably the first time I'd ever constructed a song.

Neil The structure has never changed since he recorded it in Blackpool. The first time we went into the demo studio - we hired it with my redundancy money from Macdonald Educational - we did three songs, 'Bubadubadubadum', 'Jealousy' and 'Oh dear'. Chris just played it on the piano and I sang it live, and I think maybe he overdubbed strings. Chris had said he wanted it to be very intense, so I wrote about jealousy. When I first met Chris, my other friend called Chris was very jealous, and that inspired the song. My friend and I had an argument once where he said, about Chris Lowe, 'You see a lot of him, don't you?' because the other Chris was my official best friend and this wasn't a part of his life. I turned it into a story. It's about unrequited love. The 'strangers roaring the street' was about the King's Road at night.

Chris There's some good lyrics in there, like 'you didn't phone when you said you would'. You know when you stay in and they say they're going to phone at eight o'clock and they don't phone all night and you go absolutely bonkers?

Neil We considered doing 'Jealousy' on Please, and again on Actually; in 1986 we did another demo of it in Wandsworth. But I think we didn't record it then because we didn't want to have too many old songs on Actually. On Behaviour we just remade the Wandsworth demo. The orchestra is all samples played by Harold Faltermeyer; but on the single version - it was the final single from Behaviour- we used a real orchestra. I think we re-did that because of Musicians' Union rules - we'd had a problem with them, and we thought it would be easier if we were going to play the song on TV shows. We also remixed it so that it sounded slightly more electronic, and there's an extra sequencer line it. The twelve-inch version [CD2, track 8] has a long introduction over which I quote a Shakespeare speech about jealousy from Othello. I only knew it because I did Othello for A-level, by the way. It's logo, who has put the idea into Othello's head that his wife is being unfaithful to him, and so lago says to the audience, as an aside, 'not poppy nor mandragora nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owedst yesterday'. I always loved that line at school. When we were recording the twelve-inch I didn't know how you pronounced 'mandragora' so I phoned up our foremost Shakespearean actor; Ian Mackellen, and he told me.