Chris was playing some bass notes which made the chords rather interesting, and I immediately came up with the chromes and the ooo-ooo-ooo', and then I just sang the melody with some fake words. And we really really loved it-we thought we'd written a hit single. Not long afterwards we had our a meeting with the head of A&R at EMI, Dave Ambrose, and then we had to drive from EMI's offices to a pub in Fulham Road where he was meeting a man who was going to put Duran Duran on stamps in South Armenia. And I said, 'You must hear this new track we've done - it's great'. It was very difficult to actually get him to listen to anything. I remember turning it up in the car. Anyway by the time we got to the pub in Fulham he announced he was going to sign us, but I was slightly frustrated because I don't think he'd really taken in what a lovely track it was. There was another song on the tape, called Beautiful beast', totally camp nonsense which had this line we always laughed about- 'then you caught me there within your snare, you beautiful beast' - and had the most corny tune, and Dave Arbores loved that. And I was trying to play him what I thought was the most amazingly cool 'Love comes quickly', about which he said absolutely nothing. So maybe we got signed on the basis of 'Beautiful beast'. But Stephen Hague always loved this song, and when we were Recording it for Please he did an accidental thing with the production.

Chris We used a sequencer on this track, and the sequencer shifted the baseline by a sixteenth, so that it played off the beat, and that was what he worked on.

Neil  This and 'Two divided by zero' were the tracks on the album that were what we wanted to be like: very electro, the middle range sequencer part holding everything together, and also incredibly beautiful. We loved the handy laps fluttering from side to side, which we'd loved ever since that Sharon Redd record 'Never Gonad Give You Up'.

Chris High strings, too.

Neil  This was the first appearance of a high string line, which has appeared in nearly every record we've ever made since. Stephen Hague said we should have a middle bit- he was right- and he wrote the first two chords, where it goes 'I know it sounds ridiculous...'

Chris They're really good, though.

Neil That’s why the songwriting credit is 'Tennant/ Lowe/Hague'. We also decided we needed a sax solo, and always being labels kind of people...

Chris It was the Eighties.

Neil  . . .we thought, 'let's get the sax player from Roxy Music, Andy Mackay'. So Andy Mackay came in with his wife, who was fabulous, a real rock wife. We spent? lost of the time chatting to her. Andy Mackay played for hours and we used a tiny bit on the fade out. It's a good bit, though. We wanted the twelve-inch [CD2, track 8], which we did with Stephen Hague, to sound even more Italian disco. We wanted to just have more of it. When we finished it, we had an acetate mn off and Chris and I went down to this club off Charring Cross Road we used to go to, the Jungle, and we got the DJ to play it. It was all very very exciting. It didn't clear the dance floor. I remember that Stephen Hague was puzzled by the lines 'it may seem romantic/and that's no defence/ love will always get to you'. The whole song was about how you can suddenly fall in love with someone and you can't help it.

I was wnting something gorgeously romantic, but I don't think it was about my life. Unless, now I think about it, it was about afriend falling in love, going through the traumatic start of a relationship, always mshing off and bursting into tears. The song is about the surprise. When you fall in love with someone, it's totally dismptive. You're having a comfortable life, and suddenly everything's just turned upside down. All your priorities change. But the song is also saying that, after it's happened, you suddenly realise you hadn't really been alive at all.