Neil  I like it. It's got a funny quality, though, particularly when the out of-tune choir come in, although I'd always liked that Russian choir sound. By then, we'd got the idea the album was kind of global -the Latin thing, New York-and so, almost just to make the concept broader; I went to Moscow and recorded a Russian choir; The Choral Academy Of Moscow. The conductor; Victor Popov, was the only one that wore headphones at the recording session and the rest, about forty of them, just sang. I was tearing what remains of my hair out. The recording session was at the State Broadcasting House. The BBC were there and they asked one of the kids if they enjoyed singing pop music and they said, 'No, it's just a job'. 'Do you know the Pet Shop Boys?' 'No.' 'Do you like the song?' 'No.' I thought, 'Well, thanks a lot'. Votor Popov said, at the end, 'work is work'.

Chris I was in Las Vegas for the Frank Bruno fight.

Neil  The song started off as Beethoven's 'Song Of Joy'. We thought that, as 'Go West' is nicked from Pachelbel's Canon, why don't we go through classical music, take the chord change of a famous piece of classical music, put it to a 4/4 beat and see

what it sounds like? So we did this to 'Song Of Joy' and another song, 'Delusions of grandeur' to 'Moonlight Sonata'. We really just used the classical pieces as a starting point. This was originally called 'In C major', a big optimistic song in C major. We were trying to write something anthemia. It went 'in C major...', where it now goes 'all I want...' It was a real struggle, that first day. We both sat there endlessly trying to write melodies for it.

Chris We were into this thing of the baseline not being the root note of the chord, which we learned from Danny Tenaglia.

Neil  Apparently that's the basic starting point for any bass player, someone told me. It took us ten years to discover that. This is actually a very unusual track. It's sort of Euro disco but it actually has really weird chords -you think it's just a descending chord change but it's not. I always imagine an RAF unit marching to it. It took me ages to think of 'red letter day' and write the words. In his speech when he presented us with an Ivor Novello award Elton John said that it was one of his favourite songs. He said he'd recently felt like giving it all up and he put this record on coming out of the shower and changed his mind. It has one of my favourite lines: 'but for all of those who don't fit it! who follow their instincts and are told they sin! this is a prayer for a different way'. I originally had a more explicit, sort of gay rights bit, but I took it out.

It's about waiting for someone to tell you they love you. Possessions are meaningless, love is everything, and everyone in the world has the same aspirations - it doesn't really matter who they are, everyone wants love, to have some excitement in their life, to have a sense of security at the same time as to beloved.. . and it's very difficult to achieve. It quotes the Bible: 'what on earth does it profit a man?' Eventually, when I tried to sing it, we realised that the key was wrong, so we redid the whole thing and it stopped being in C major. Somewhere along the way we looked up why 'red letter days' were called red letter days.

Chris Isn't it literally a red letter that used to be sent for a special occasion? You get a red letter for being invited, or something.

Neil  When we were in Hong Kong in 1989 I had written this other piece of music called 'Black sun', and when we were making the album I put it at the beginning of 'A red letter day'. The She Boom drums are slowed down so that they sound threatening.

I hadn't intended the choir to sing on it but when I got to Moscow I found out that the tape they'd been working off had this introduction on so they started singing this bit too. Then when we were working with the three singers on 'Before', one of them sang like an opera singer for this. And we put sleigh bells going past-I kind of imagined sleighs going through Red Square. My way, having faffed about with this for forever; we decided the introduction was too pretentious so we took it off the album version, though you still get the sleigh bells at the end. The following year we decided to work with Motiv 8, who'd done the fabulous single 'Oooh Aaah Just A Little Bit' for Gina G, and they reworked 'A red letter day' for the single. They made the bassline follow the chords, and put in a really good sequence towards the end.

Chris We made the worst video of our career for it.

Neil  The single version we released didn't have the long introduction on it, but it was always still on the mastertape of all the versions, and on the b-side of 'A red letter day' we did release the original full album version, which was called the 'Moscow Mix'. But the other version here [CD2, track 12] is the complete Motiv 8 single mix with the long introduction at its beginning, which has never been released before