Neil In 1983, when I was working in New York at the American version of Smash Hits, I bought my father a Talking calculator, which spoke the numbers out loud for his Christmas present.

Chris and I loved the calculator's voice - it had a very very sad quality. When we played ii to Bobby '0' he loved it too - he said 'this isa whole album!'. Bobby '0' had given us a backing track he'd done which he couldn't think of anything to do with, so we had the idea- because you OQuld make the calculator say mathematical sentences- of making it say 'two divided by zero', and building a song around that. I think it was Chris who thought of it-it's not the kind of thing I'd have ever thought of.

Chris Two divided by zero is infinity, isn't it?

Neil   I think at the time we had this discussion about whether or not it was infinity. Anyway, it was rather a romantic idea.

Chris Two divided by nothing. It's like 'when two become one'.

Neil   Precisely. It was just the idea that two people couldn't be split up by anything; could be split up by nothing. And that suggested this idea of two people running away. It reminded me of when I was a teenager. This girl Maureen and I often had this romantic notion of running away to London, and we sometimes used to go to Newcastle Central Station at night to see the trains going to London. And, in the song, maybe there's trouble at home, so the two people are going to run away. In this instance, to New York. The 'when the postman calls...' part of the song comes from the way, when I was a teenager, people were always having pregnancy scares, most of them totally manufactured, I think, for the sheer value of the drama. The suggestion is that one of them is pregnant. We originally recorded the song with Bobby '0', and then again for the album with Stephen Hague.

I'd given the calculator to my dad after we made the first version, then I got it back off him for the album, and he never got it back again after that. I don't know what happeried to it. Bobby '0"s version was all programmed on a Linn drum and had loads of samples on an Emulator, and Bobby '0' also sampled himself and me, each saying 'two divided by zero', and there was a lot more of the 'divided by.. . Divided by...'. For Please, Stephen Hague spent ages working on it, and I think it's the best-sounding track on the album.

The arrangement is very similar to Bobby 'O"s, but it sounds bigger. We were always very concerned that it should still sound hip hop and not get too smooth - that's what we were concerned about for the whole album - and I think the whole track has got that sort of rush of excitement, of running away. At the same time, you know that there's no way the people in the song are really going to end up in New York. Absolutely no way. Just like Maureen and I.