Neil After we were signed to EMI, we went into Terminal Studios to do some writing, with all this equipment which didn't work. Then we wrote 'Suburbia' and 'Tonight is forever'. Chris wrote all the music for 'Suburbia'.

Chris The inspiration was 'Into The Groove', the baseline. It's virtually the same. The song's nothing like it, but the baseline is.

Neil I wrote the words that night, and we went back the next day and finished the demo. The album version is exactly like the demo. I thought it was amazingly catchy.

Chris I thought it was corny.

Neil Something.

Chris What makes it acceptable is the lyrics.

Neil It’s a hard lyric, soft tune. That was our idea-to writes disco music with un-disco lyrics. The words were inspired by this film we'd seen, Penelope Spheeris's Suburbia. I thought it was a great idea to write a song about suburbia and how it's really violent and decaying and a mess. It's quite a theme in English art, literature and music, like in Graham Greene or Paul Theroux - that the suburbs are really nasty, that behind lace curtains everyone is an alcoholic or a spanker or a mass murderer. Also, this was the era of the riots in Toxteth and Brixton. I remember some friends of mine having to drive through the riots in Brixton to visit me in Chelsea, and being scared. Brixton was a prosperous Victorian suburb, and eighty years later it had become this decaying inner city. And there was a feeling that the riots had been started by the police hassling these kids hanging around a bus stop. The dogs in the song come totally from the packs of dogs in the film, though I remember Chris telling me that it happened in Liverpool when he lived in Toxteth -these huge packs of dogs with a big one in front and the little ones at the back. I used to be a bit scared of dogs -my sister once got bitten, and doing paper rounds you're always scared of dogs; you hear them tear the paper when you put it through the door, and that's a symbol of the threat of violence.

Md so the song just describes the riot happening, and the middle bit sums up why we are having this riot: 'I only wanted something else to do but hang around...' People are bored. Then it refers to the aftermath being reported on TV, just sociological nonsense and police officers blaming television for the whole thing. People always say, 'You can never find a policeman when you need one' and here the media is saying, 'Where 5 a policeman when you need one to blame the colour TV?', turning it upside down. So when it says, 'This is their hour of need', the hour of need isn't the people in the suburbs needing jobs, it's the media needing their talking heads to talk a load of nonsense. My mother always recognises the reference to her - 'mother's got her hairdo to be done' - because she always got her hair done every Thursday when I was a child, and her hairdresser Dominic would tell her the gossip.

Chris When we made the demo we had just discovered a car crash sample on the Emulator.

Neil  So that was all over it. We would always bicker with Stephen Hague about things like that and the number of sampled orchestra hits. He would say, 'Right, we will take out fifty per cent of the orchestra hits on this track because there are so many orchestra hits, and you can't have the car crash that loud...' We had a car crash solo on it originally. We used the riot noise off a film, and ‘Axe F’ influences the high keyboard sound, which was a hit at the same time. We didn't spend long recording this track because we made the whole album in ten weeks, and we always felt we'd rushed through this song. When Please came out, all of the fans, and our families, said 'Suburbia' should be a single. We'd, typically, gone off it by that point. Then we decided to re-record it as a single, with Julian Mendelssohn, who Tom Watkins recommended to us. Julian had remixed 'Relax', and he brought in his keyboard programmer Andy Richards, who we were very impressed with because he had worked on loads of Trevor Horn records and we were always incredibly impressed by Trevor Horn.

And we decided to make the new version more filmic. Andy Richards took the synchs line and made it verge on a horn section sound. The new version had dogs on -we upped the dog quotient. The twelve-inch version, 'Suburbia the Full Horror)' [CD2, track 11] -which the seven-inch is basically just an edit of- is more epic. It's very Diarnond Dogs, very Frankie Goes To Hollywood, especially the 'where the suburbs meet utopia' bit. By the way, that's where the word 'suburbia' comes from: 'suburb' and 'utopia'. Lots of bombs go off at the end. M entire suburb is being destroyed in a lot. Twelve-inch mixes weren't really made for dancing back then.

We also recorded the sound of smashing glass in Sarm West studio two. They couldn't find a good smashing glass sample anywhere, so we got a pane of glass and the assistant smashed it, with half a black, I think.

Chris There was several attempts.