Riviera

There is a card in a travel agent's window on Southend High Street, spring of 1984, and it has been in that window long enough that the sun has taken the blue out of the sea on it. VILLA BIANCA. Sorrento. Half board, ten nights, one hundred and twenty-nine pounds per person. I wrote it on the back of a cigarette packet because it looked like a band, and because I had been standing at that window on and off since I was about eleven.

I want to be accurate about this, because people are romantic about it and it does not need help. We were not dreaming of the sea. We had a sea. Ours went out a mile and a half twice a day and left mud. What we were dreaming of was the version of the sea that other people got to have, and that is a different thing, and it is the more interesting thing, and it is what the record is about whether or not any of us could have told you so at the time.

Listen to the words and you will notice there is nothing in them that happened. Sunglasses. A marble floor. A silver dress. A speedboat, champagne, a last cigarette. It is a list of objects. There is not one event in the entire song. I have had forty years to be embarrassed about that and I have decided instead that it is the best thing about it. You do not describe a place that carefully unless you have never been. People who have been describe the traffic.

Monaco and Marrakesh are not on the same coast. They are not on any itinerary a human being has ever taken. They were two covers on a rack. Nobody has mentioned this to me once in four decades and I would like it on the record that I knew.

The saxophone is Bev Tulloch, from Ilford, on the afternoon of the eleventh of February 1985. He was paid forty-five pounds, in cash, on the day, and he used about ninety minutes of the time we had booked. Those eight bars are the most widely heard thing that anyone connected with this record ever played and his name is not on the original sleeve, which was normal then and is still wrong. It is on this one.

The twelve-inch is called the Coast Road Mix. Everyone has always assumed I meant the road above Monte Carlo. I meant the A13, which runs from Southend into London past the oil terminal at Coryton, where the flare stacks burn all night and the sky over them goes the most extraordinary orange. I never corrected anybody. A remix that sells is worth more than a remix that is understood.

The picture on the front of this edition was taken on the seventeenth of July, on a terrace above Villefranche, ten days after we went to number six. Vic flew us out at seven in the morning and we were home by midnight, and it is the only day the four of us were ever there. The sleeve you would have bought in June has a photograph of a drained swimming pool in Essex on it, because in June that was the budget. Both of them are accurate. I would not want either one thrown away.

Marco would not take his jacket off. It was thirty-one degrees. He stood at that balustrade between set-ups looking at the water and Pierre shot half a roll of him doing it without being asked, and those are the frames every magazine used, and I have never told him why they are the good ones.

Dev hated the snare sound. He wanted to play like Steve Gadd and we handed him a gate. He was right about it and he was outvoted, and it is now the sound people mean when they say 1985, so we were also right, which is the only argument I know of where that is possible.

Russ wore espadrilles to a photo session on the seafront in November.

Marco sings the verses very slightly ahead of the beat. He always did it and he never knew he did it and I never told him, because on this song it sounds exactly like somebody who cannot wait.

We got to number six and stayed fourteen weeks and it did better in Japan than it did here, which none of us has ever fully understood. What I would say to anybody hearing it now is that it was not made cynically. I was the cynical one and I could not manage it. You cannot fake that chorus. You have to actually want to go.

— Lyn Fairhead