Neil We had the musical idea of writing a song with the same chord change and tempo as ‘Opportunities’, which it was going to be the b-side of. We thought you would then be able to mix one into the other. The words were inspired by a book I read about Pans in the occupation, Pads In The Third Reichl A History Of The German Occupation, 1940-1944, by David Pryc Jones; I read about these people called les Zazous who were like prototype beatniks.

They were apolitical and used to grow long hair and listen to American jazz music, which of course was illegal under the Nazis. They were very existentialist and sat round talking about love and the meaning of life. I was just fascinated that they were totally out of the context of their times; that you had this beatnik culture in the middle of the Second World War in occupied Paris.

The lyric mentions the clubs they went to, like Select and Le Colisee. They also sneered at the masculinity of both the resistance and the Germans; I suppose I sympathised with them. The song looks at the moral implications, because the Nazis hated them and the Resistance hated them, because they were fatalistic and didn't participate in the resistance, and the song asks whether that's collaboration.

It revolves around the chorus - 'there's a thin line between love and crime and in this situation/a thin line between love and crime and collaboration' - because the fact of the matter is that if you're not really against something, you're for it, and in a way they collaborated with the Nazis by just carrying on a normal life. So, in the end, I am criticising them.

We recorded it in PWL. Tom Watkins said there was this really good engineer at PWL called Phil Harding, and he'd done a mix of Bronski Beat's 'Why?' so we worked with him and his programmer Ian Curnow. We recorded it across two nights because they were working during the day on Brilliant’s album. We'd work from ten o'clock at night until ten o'clock in the morning. Chris had already written the music on Blue Weaver's Firelight.

Chris It was so boring making 'Opportunities' over three weeks that we decided to beaver away on the Fright while they were doing that, and we knocked this out. And the great thing was, the bloke who was mastering the record thought this was the a-side and that 'Opportunities' was the b-side.

Neil When I sang it, I tried to sound like Donovan, because I was thinking of a Donovan song, 'Goo Goo Barabajagal'. Although he was a hippie he had a rather cool way of singing.