Chris To me it sounds like the theme from Thunderbirds. Neil I always think it sounds like The Specials.

It's a sort of satire on the European community. Once we'd decided that the album was going to be called Bilingual I had the idea of 'single.. Bilingual’. Originally this song was called 'Latino' and the only lyric I had for it was 'single bilingual', which I just thought was moronically funny. and then, as ever, there was a lot of rubbish about the European Union in the papers, and we were always travelling and I thought it would be funny just to write a song about the minutiae of business travel. The guy in the song is superficially confident but really is absolutely hopeless. He thinks he is really on the ball and sexy- he's staying in a junior suite and flies business class; he likes all his little perks and everything - but really he's scared. He's pretending that he's a sophisticated ladies man -he's single bilingual! - but he's not really  Communicating either, and he knows it. In actual fact he's a hopeless, tragic wreck. He's a bit like the person in 'Let's make lot's of money...' who's never going to make any money. He's superficially got all the right things but he's just not gelling there. He doesn't understand why, but he's not. Chris He doesn't understand that business class is a rip-off on a short flight. You get no more leg room.

Neil Exactly. Chris wrote the music, but I wrote the middle bit. The song had what we wanted in the album - it's going in and out of English and Spanish. Another reason we thought of doing a Latin album was as a reaction against Britpop, and that we like being in Europe - that we are a very international group and like the fact. This song fitted in with that. Also I've always wanted to mention my name in a song, ever since Martin Fry did, in 'The Look of Love':

and then my friends just might ask me, they say, "Martin, maybe one day you'll find tme love..."' In this you get 'perdoneme me ilamo Nell'. It was the album's third single, but when it was released as a single, Everything But the Girl had just released a single called 'Single', so we changed its name to 'Single-Bilingual'. Noel Gallagher commented on this song to Johnny Marr at the Q Awards in 1996. He said, 'That new Pet Shop Boys single is really mad, isn't it?' Which I took to be the highest possible compliment

Chris I don't know if I liked this at the time but I like it now. It's ageing very well.

Neil  It ends with a reprise of 'hay una discoteca por aqui?' He could literally be going to a club, but it's also saying that he's a lost and frightened person. Right at the end, you get the chord of the album. We come back to this chord three times. That chord is at the beginning of 'Discoteca', and 'It always comes as a surprise' also starts with it.