Chris came up with the idea of the lyric for 'Opportunities'. He was playing the three chords C minor; E flat, B flat, which was like Bobby 'O"s 'Shoot Your Shot' for Divine - and he said, 'Can't you sing "let's make lots of money"?' This was in the Eighties, during Thatcherism, and suddenly there had been this huge philosophical shift in the country where the idea of making money was a good thing. People started talking about yuppies and buying Filofaxes and all that kind of stuff, and this was meant to be a sort of satire on that. It's a classic, Chris idea: let's say the unsayable.

Chris I was at university during the whole punk

thing. Groups of our era were still very punk in our attitudes, as opposed to musicians today who have a completely different attitude to the industry.

Neil  It was what you would have called, at the time, a wind-up. You wouldn't have said 'ironic' at the time, you'd have said, 'it's a wind-up'. It was meant to be provocative.

Chris It always used to bug me that it was always the really successful wealthy people, your wealthy rock stars, who are supposed to be not doing it for the money, whereas it is all the scratching disco artists with no money who are criticised for being commercial.

Neil  Chris having said that, I wrote the words in about fifteen minutes. It's meant for everyone to hate it: here's this nauseating synth duo singing a song called 'let's make lots of money'. It was meant to be an anti-rock-group song, singing about the things you're not supposed to sing about. It's the same idea, really, as that anti-hippie album by Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention, We're Only In It For The Money. It's like punks used to sing about unpalatable everyday things in a way that supposedly glorifies them but doesn't really. The two people in the song are supposed to be absolutely hopeless. I vaguely thought of the film Midnight Cowboy, in which Dustin Hoffman is the guy who wants to go to Florida and Jon Voight is the hustler, a brains and brawn combination. People have often thought, and asked, if it was about me and Chris, and actually I don't think it was. This was the first song that I played to Bobby '0' when I met him. He said, 'Oh, I could do this', and I thought, 'Well, of course you could, it sounds like you anyway...' But when we recorded it with Bobby '0' we actually didn't give it an octave baseline, which is the classic Bobby '0' thing, Chris wrote a hip hop baseline.

Chris Electro.

Neil  The Bobby '0' version was much much more moody- it started with, and made more of, the prefix melody. It's much more like New Order. It sounded very very sad. We always thought the song was sad, because it was about two losers. We re-recorded it first with J.J. Jeczalik from The Art of Noise for our first EMI single. We chose him because he'd had a hit record with Tin Tin, 'Kiss Me', and we liked the art of Noise. He did it on the Firelight, which we were very excited about. Before we even got to the studio he'd come up with this weird sound, which sounds like scaffolding falling down, which became the basis of the rhythm track. We spent three weeks making a single with him, in at least three locations. It cost about £40,000. Md no one was ever very happy. We found it an intensely frustrating experience. They brought in a real bass player and it all seemed to take a lot of time. It originally had a bit in the middle, which we edited out weeks later and would eventually use as track six on Please, as 'Opportunities (reprise)'.

Chris Best track on the album.

Neil I think Stephen Hague thought it was a rather strange thing to do.

Chris It was the start of side two of the vinyl.

Neil  It was like: and the beat goes on. The original idea was that there was a party scene in the middle of the song. It was part of our filmic thing. You can hear Lesley White, who was the assistant editor of The Face, saying 'where's

Neil?' at 0.10. We had a party at Sarm East, to get a party atmosphere. The version of the original 'Opportunities' single on this album [CD2, track 2] is the unreleased full version before the party scene was edited out. We also did our own twelve-inch version [CD2, track 4]. Around that time, we'd heard this record called 'Liveried' by Nuance featuring Vikki Love so we had the idea of finding the producer of that, Ron Dean Miller and going to New York and doing the twelve-inch with him. Money was still being spent.

It was a major remix and he put the big chorus dams all the way through. Stephen Hague wanted to re-record 'Opportunities' completely but there wasn't time. The version on Please was based on the single version, but also used elements of Ron Dean Miller's mix and then Stephen Hague did some reprogramming and I re-sung the vocal as well. The vocal is much better on the album -on the first version the vocal is really weak. We also faded out the album version before the final section: All the love that we had and all the love that we hide/ who will bury us when we die?' We decided it was too pretentious.

I remember hearing the original version played on Radio One. We were all in Tom Watkins' office, listening, and the guy on the radio took the p55 out of it at the end and I thought, 'right, I'm not doing that again'. The album version was subsequently a hit, though even then not as big a hit as we'd hoped. Ustening now to the way it starts, it's very grandiose. We always used to like the grandiose, as well as the street. Actually, it's a dialectic. We've always been trying to bring the two things together.