We'd never produced anything for anyone else before, and Phil Harding and Ian Cornrow did tons of the work. The original demo, which we'd written in 1985 in Camden Town at the same time as 'Love comes quickly', had been called 'A Roma'.

Chris One of my useless puns.

Neil  It was only an instrumental. We thought it sounded a bit like Shannon. At the time Patsy Kensit had been in Absolute Beginners and she was in this group Eighth Wonder and they hadn't had a hit, and she was seen as a little girl and a controlled hype, and I thought the way that she was perceived could be changed. I thought it would be good if she could be seen as a strong woman. She seemed to me to be a very strong-willed person, slightly ruthless even, and I didn't think it was good that she was just portrayed as a sexy bimbo. Chris and I were obsessed at the time by this record Princess Stephanie had made, 'Irresistible'. We liked that kind of French pop music and we liked the idea of making Patsy a European pop star. I think we did a demo with four verses but there wasn't room for all of them in her version.
I wanted the song to sound as though it was translated from French, hence the line 'what have you got to say of shadows in your past?' I've tried for years to rationalise the line 'tonight the streets are full of actors'. I suppose it's just about people posing. 'Take these dogs away from me...'is actually a quote, or a misquote, from a John Betjeman poem called 'Senex', which is about it being disgusting to feel sexy

when you're old. In the song, the idea is that she's got this horrible gangster boyfriend who's pushing her around but she's going to stand up to him because she's not scared. The dogs are the hooligans and criminal elements around them. So when I sing it I'm doing one of my singing-from-the-point-of-view of a woman songs. I'm singing it as a woman.

Chris You don't get the spoken French bit in our version.

Neil No. But, doing one of our filmic things, we decided to set it in 1968 in Paris, because there was something French sounding about the track anyway. The band at the start is taken from 1968 news footage, and you can hear a fascist speech -it from a counter-revolutionary rally in Paris. I had been reading a book about that period at the time. It was just the romance of revolution: students and workers. We got the tape from ITN but we weren't allowed to use the newscaster; which was a shame, because we wanted to put this bit over the end where he said, in this camp posh voice, 'the workers of France are marching...

' For our version, we reinstated the missing fourth verse. It was after this track that I started singing much higher. If you listen to the first two albums I don't really sing high on them. We produced it ourselves with David Jacob. We did it in a much more Euro pop way with Patsy and we felt we could do it in a more luscious film soundtrack way because the melody line is very string-based and romantic. Our version also sounds more electronic. It's very over the top. I think this is also the only song we've written with a coda where a whole new bit comes at the end.