‘WORD DANCING’ I CALL IT. YOU BEGIN WITH A THOUGHT, and then you start word dancing and then it’s step, step, step. This was a straightforward love song, really, about a lonely person saying, ‘Can’t wait till we’re together.’ There are a few more lines to reinforce that idea: ‘’Cause I know what I feel to be right’ and ‘You’re my guiding light’. It’s about the heartache of being apart from your loved one and, when you’re back together, not wishing to be apart from them again – ‘May I never miss the thrill / Of being near you’.

David Gilmour plays the solo on the record. I’ve known him since the early days of Pink Floyd. Dave is a genius of sorts, so I was pulling out all the stops. I admired his playing so much, and I’d seen him around; I think he’d just done his solo About Face album. So I rang him up and said, ‘Would you play on this?’ It sounded like his kind of thing.

I wrote this song specifically for a film that I also wrote: Give My Regards to Broad Street. The song did better than the film. Originally, the opening of the film was me walking around Broad Street station with some sound effects played over the top. But I wanted to do a film tune, so I wrote this song to go with the music. I then later rearranged it as an up-tempo version so that when it played out at the end there was a dance version.

The film’s title was a play on the old show tune ‘Give My Regards to Broadway’. We made it around the same time as my solo album Pipes of Peace and, I think, I wrote some of the screenplay on the train between Sussex and London. The plot’s a bit of a caper. It’s a dreary, wet day, and I fall asleep on the way to a meeting and have a dream about losing the master tape for a new album. We think Harry, a reformed criminal, is back to his old ways and he’s going to bootleg it. We have to find the tapes before midnight; otherwise Mr Rath, the film’s baddie, is going to take over the record label.

It was a lot of fun to make, and people like Ringo and his wife Barbara got involved. Linda was there too, plus George Martin and Tracey Ullman. Wrestler Giant Haystacks was also in it, and Bryan Brown. We had some nice set pieces, re-creating the old Liverpool dances of the fifties for the song ‘Ballroom Dancing’, and it was fun to do ‘Eleanor Rigby’ onstage at the Royal Albert Hall.

In the film, just as things are getting really bad and we can’t find Harry or the missing tape, I pop into the pub to see Ralph Richardson, who plays Jim, a bit of a Polonius-type father figure. Sir Ralph was an incredible Shakespearian actor, so it was great to act in a scene with him, and I think this was the last film he released. Ralph’s character, Jim, tells me off for running around too much, but then he gives me some words of wisdom, paraphrasing W. H. Davies’s poem ‘Leisure’:

Paul on the set of Give My Regards to Broad Street. Buckinghamshire, 1983

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

I think I would have read that at school in English class. Anyway, I can’t slow down, because I have to get to Broad Street train station, as the station plays an important role in the plot. And that’s where the film’s title comes from.

This was getting into the days of the big music video, and we did two for this song. One was shot in the train station at night, and the other was a bit of a clip reel with highlights from the film. The single did really well but just missed being number one, which I think was Wham!’s ‘Freedom’.

But Gilmour really goes to town on that solo, especially on the album version, which is longer and gives him more space to play. It’s a really nice solo, with that signature Fender Stratocaster sound of his. He played guitar at a show I did at The Cavern Club in December 1999, which they’d reopened along the street from where it had been when The Beatles originally played there. So, that was a pretty good way to see out the twentieth century.