Neil 'Slave To The Rhythm', particularly.

Chris 'The Look Of Love' by ABC.

Neil And The Art Of Noise. I've always liked big orchestral pop music. I've always liked Phil Spector's records, and the big Beatles records like 'A Day In The Life' and 'I Am The Walrus', and Trevor comes out of that school of production. Also, he was fun. We'd chat with him in the studio and have a laugh.

Chris He's very good at anecdotes. He's always got one about being in a backing band for someone up in some Northern club.

Neil  Hazel Dean, for instance. And he'll tell you about how he played Madison Square Gardens as the lead singer of Yes. Also, he has this way of looking at you and his glasses seem to go opaque and you get this very blank look from him.

Chris It's hilarious.

Neil  So we thought it would be fun to work with him, as indeed it was. We went into Abbey Road, the day before we'd arranged to meet him, to write something. Chris was doodling on the keyboard, and I was reading the Melody Maker and making phone calls and thinking 'I can't be bothered -can we go out for lunch?', and suddenly Chris got a baseline and I suggested we put it with these chords he had and it sounded quite good. Chris was in quite a hard-working mood, so he programmed it and I progressed onto the NME and then I realised -with joy-that I was singing to myself 'left to my own devices I probably would'. I don't know where it came from - it certainly wasn't Melody Maker.

 Chris It was more like a Motown song, to begin with.

Neil  The demo was much more moronic. It was slower than the finished record. I put onto it these guitar power chords from the Emulator and suddenly it was seriously happening so Chris read the Melody Maker and I did this mix where it built up from not very much to this enormous throbbing thing. It got louder and louder and louder until it distorted.

Chris Neil was enjoying himself.

Neil Across the road from the studio Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair had a little flat, which they used for making demos, and I played Trevor a cassette of this instrumental. He was quite interested in working with us, but when the track was playing it got so distorted that he stood up and turned it down in case it damaged his speakers. A very Trevor moment. He said he didn't want to judge this song because it had no words, apart from 'Left to my own devices'. Two mornings later I sat down at the typewriter.

I thought, 'I've got to write this bloody song'. I didn't get out of bed at half past ten, I used to get out of bed at half past nine, as I still do, but I just thought it sounded better. I know that the 'party animal' was my friend Jon Savage because he always phoned up in the morning. Actually he's not a party animal but in the Eighties he'd go out more and we'd talk about what had been going on. Originally it was going to be 'drink some tea, maybe if you're with me, we'll drink some coffee'. When I thought of 'do some shopping' instead, I knew everyone would say it was pathetic -another Pet Shop Boys song mentioning shopping -but I decided 'coffee' was even more pathetic. Even though it is the kind of thing I'll do - I'll decide on my own I'll drink some tea, but if someone comes round I'll offer them coffee. The line 'pick up some brochures about the sun'.. sitting in front of me on the table that morning were some brochures about holidays in Italy, because I knew a travel agent who'd given me these brochures about Italian villas. And then it goes into a major childhood experience: 'I was always told you should join a club...' Which is completely not true, by the way. That's when I realised what the song was about -that this person goes through life always doing what he wanted to do. I liked the idea of writing a really up pop song about being left alone.

Chris I wonder what I would do if I was left alone.

Neil  I had been to see my parents not long before and my mother had said to me that she worried that when we were children we each had a corner of the garden - mine was the top left-hand corner - and I used to spend a lot of time there. I had a bit of bush in my corner and when it rained you could sit under there and you didn't really get wet and I used to like to sit there for hours and hours playing with my toy soldiers. I used to make caves for them there and bury them with twigs and leaves over the top, and then soil over that, so that they were secret caves, and only I knew where they were. This was when I was about eight.
And I used to pretend not to be a Roundhead but to actually be a Cavalier-I used to jump around the garden pretending I was on a horse. My mother used to say she worried that I wouldn't have any friends because I'd sit there and live in a fantasy world. When she heard this song she said she was worried by the line 'I was a lonely boy, no strength no joy', but in fact I wasn't remotely lonely. The third verse was originally a rap in the middle of one of the first songs  Chris and I ever wrote, 'It's not a crime'. The rest of the lyrics went: 'Love is all I want to see/now I want you here with me/through the morning afternoon/all night long is none too soon/ and oh I've got the time/I've got the time and oh it's not a crime/it's not a crime Now I've fixed it we're all alone/don't look back and don't go hotel through the morning afternoon/ lock the door and lose the key...'

Chris Of course it was a crime then. But it was a bloody good song.

Neil  The song is a day in the life of someone, so it starts off with getting out of bed and being on the phone and drinking tea and all the rest of it, and it ends up with coming home. The last section of 'Left to my own devices' is meant to be a dream. That's why everything is jumbled up- Chew Guevara is drinking tea and takes to the stage in a secret life. Chris Guevara becomes a drag queen in the dream; that's what I always imagined. The 'Debussy and a disco beat...' section was written in the studio with Trevor. I mentioned that it should sound like Debussy, and Trevor said, 'I've always wanted to do Debussy to a disco beat'. I was going to mention Chris Guevara in 'Domino dancing'. I'd been very interested in him since I was 14 when I'd bought his book on guerrilla warfare. So I paired him with Debussy to combine revolution with beauty. By this time I was making the words very exaggerated and camp, though writing a book and going on the stage were both things I had wanted to do when I was young.

Chris I just wanted to get married and settle down with kids.

Neil I had put on a guide vocal of the first three verses and the chorus at Advision, and the guide vocal is the one they used on the album. Trevor and Steve Lipson put it into the Synclavier; and I never changed it apart from putting harmonies on the chorus. Trevor Horn had this fantastic idea that we would programme all the keyboards and the computers, we would commission an orchestral

arrangement, and then we would go in and record the whole thing live: the machines, the orchestra and the vocal. And it would all be done in one day. Six months later the record was finished, because it wasn't quite as simple as that. Trevor was working on a Simple Minds record at the time, and also with Paul McCartney. This was the first time we worked with the arranger, Richard Niles. We did the orchestral session at Abbey Road, and we were slightly appalled by it when we first heard it. Trevor said, 'now, don't worry- if we don't like anything we can edit it out'. But we were quite shocked.

Chris There was too much of it.

Neil  But in the end we kept most of Richard Niles' arrangement, which is actually really brilliant, and we ended up working with him a lot after that. We really liked the idea that you had a dance track with this vast orchestra playing. The opera bit - 'I would if I could' -is sung by the opera singer Sally Bradshaw. Trevor had the idea that she should sing 'house' at the beginning because there were lots of records in the chart at the time that would go 'house music'. We did the seven-inch version [CD2, track 11] much later. We went back into the studio in the autumn of 1988, and I think we improved it. Steve Lipson plays guitar; and we added some extra backing vocals - Trevor got his mate Bruce Woolley to sing backing vocals on it because he could sound like me and I wasn't available.