Chris This song sounds like the music for a holiday programme.

Neil  That's what George Michael said.

Chris Some of it also sounds like New Order to me. The baseline is from a keyboard that you only buy for that bass sound.

Neil  We struggled a bit with this, and then we applied the Spanish idea to it and found the sample of Spanish gypsies. I wanted it to sound like pilgrims singing. In the first verse you have me comparing my life with the pilgrims in Santiago de Compositely. These pilgrims have walked 120 miles and it means they've achieved eternal salvation, and then there's pathetic  Neil looking out of the hotel window thinking about how good it must be to have that kind of faith. The second verse is set in Budapest - these were both real trips I'd just taken. It was 1996 and in post-communist Hungary there were still people who looked like they had really shit lives, and it was five years since communism had ended.

They're still waiting 'for market forces to provide/what history's so far denied'. Everyone really only wants the same things - comfort, security, education. It doesn't seem that much to ask. But it seems impossible to get it. And I'm sitting in a big international hotel drinking a glass of white wine and looking at them. There's a certain amount of guilt, I suppose, about that. And then, in the song, I'm comparing these things with what I'll decide to do, whether I should step aside because I don't want to be changed anymore by the

experiences I've been going through. It's partly about me and the relationship I was in. The end bit is the important bit: 'Will I always need you?/ Would you want me to?' In other words, it's all very nice now, but it's not going to last. Or will it? There was also some sort of notion in the song about stepping aside from the Pet Shop Boys, or from pop music. Just thinking about what it does to you, being famous and being in a pop group.

Do you grow away from your roots completely? I'm not convinced that you do, but it's thinking about that, saying: maybe wouldn't it be a good thing to step aside? I sometimes think I'd rather give up the competition of the whole thing and live quietly somewhere. Live a simple life. Not try to be clever. I think about it all the time. But I don't want to do it, either.