I’ve had enough of scheming

and messing around with jerks

My car is parked outside

I’m afraid it doesn’t work

I’m looking for a partner

someone who gets things fixed

Ask yourself this question:

Do you want to be rich?

I’ve got the brains,

You’ve got the looks

Let’s make lots of money

You’ve got the brawn

I’ve got the brains

Let’s make lots of money

You can tell I’m educated

I studied at the Sorbonne

Doctored in mathematics

I could have been a don

I can program a computer

choose the perfect time

If you’ve got the inclination

I have got the crime

Oh, there’s a lot of opportunities

If you know when to take them

You know there’s a lot of opportunities

if there aren’t, you can make them

You can see I’m single-minded

I know what I could be

How’d you feel about it?

Come, take a walk with me

I’m looking for a partner

regardless of expense

Think about it seriously

You know it makes sense

I’ve got the brains,

You’ve got the looks

Let’s make lots of money

You’ve got the brawn

I’ve got the brains

Let’s make lots of money

1983. Chris and I were in the demo studio in Camden we regularly used, playing round with a simple C minor/E flat/B flat chord change when Chris suggested: ‘Why don’t you just sing “Let’s make lots of money”?’ And that was that, pre-dating both Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’ and Gordon Gekko’s ‘Greed is good’ by a few years. Thatcherism as an ideology was emerging towards the end of Mrs Thatcher’s first term as prime minister and the collective political culture we had grown up in was being replaced with a more individualistic, money-oriented culture. The character singing the song, however, has a lot more in common with Charles Dickens’s Fagin, encouraging his younger accomplice to join him in a life of crime, but the middle section, ‘there’s a lot of opportunities’, is pure Thatcher. We saw this as a punk song, crude and satirical, but by the time it became a hit single in 1986 it was in danger of seeming like a celebration.