‘I had moved down from Glasgow and was sharing a council flat with the girls from Bananarama. We wrote the song after watching the Frank Sinatra film’
I first glimpsed Siobhan Fahey at my publisher’s offices. Later that day, when I was being interviewed by Smash Hits, I told the interviewer: “I really fancy Siobhan from Bananarama.” The next night, she was at our concert, at the front. I remember saying to my bandmates Ken and Dave McCluskey: “I’m gonna get off with her.”
We met in the car park and liked each other. Soon afterwards, I moved down from Glasgow – into a London flat with the glamorous Bananarama girls. It was like the Beatles in Help! One night, we were lying in bed watching the Frank Sinatra film Young at Heart, one of my dad’s favourites, and talking about our backgrounds. Siobhan is Irish but her father was in the British army, so she’d moved around and changed schools a lot. I think she had just wanted to escape, so we started writing lyrics about how her parents had got married young to have sex and have kids, because that’s what people did then. It was the first time since I’d left home that I also realised what our parents had done for us, which fed into the line: “How come I love them now? How come I love them more? / When all I wanted to do when I was old was to walk out the door?”
