This song is an homage to Sam and Dave. In London, in our flat in Chelsea, looking up the side street to Kings Road and watching the punk-waiters-with-day-jobs at the English Garden Restaurant (lovely guys!) this was the sound track.

When I started working on the would-be EP "Saints of Song" I was very clear about the sound. Each song was a tribute to an R&B icon who influenced me. I could have copped out and done covers of their songs, but it was funner to write in their style, imagining what they might do on the track.

"No Wrong" references the song structures and lyric style of Sam and Dave's Stax records, most of which (if not all) were written or co-written by Isaac Hayes. The wild thing about Sam and Dave was the frenetic energy of their performances, and how they didn't sing "duet" style, but they'd sing together and over each other as if they were both lead soloists. In fact, you could compare it to taking the soloists out of the Gospel Choir and letting them vamp through an entire song—without the backbone of the choir to nail down the melodic spine.

That freneticism made them an extremely popular live act and the bread and butter of Stax Records. And they gave voice to the young Isaac Hayes who, when Sam and Dave were coopted away from Stax, would step forward and reinvent his songwriting, if not his public image to become Black Moses. All of that innovation and excitement of a small label making history is what I wanted to capture in the songwriting.

Even though the instrumentals may recall a heavy Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder influence (Sunset People), it's based on the club mix of Eurythmics "Would I Lie To You" produced by Eric "ET" Thorngren. ET's club mix stripped "Would I Lie" to you down to a throbbing bassline and Annie's vocal charging through what sounded like a 60s dance hall. It was an excellent way to make the song club-ready, the popular radio version not so club friendly with it's heavy rock influence (Dave Stewart had moved to LA and was working with Tom Petty as I recall). It also returned Eurythmics sound to a state that more clearly reflected the Sweet Dreams album. At the time, I wondered what the "Be Yourself Tonight" album would have sounded like if it had gotten the notably under-produced treatment that "Sweet Dreams" got.

It's also interesting to note that Eurythmics "Be Yourself Tonight" album in many ways was a similar homage to the R&B records that Lennox and Stewart had grown up with. Their popularity and budget allowed them to hire and work with the likes of Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin. Me, I was producing tracks on a sequencer with a single synthesizer in a one-room flat in Chelsea, looking out over King's Road...

The realization of this cut is an almost exact realization of the original demo with better tools and means. Producing this track—I believe written just before or just after The One Thing—was a milestone for me. I heard what I wanted in my head and was able to reproduce it in flesh. Years later, the concept was so strongly embedded in memory, realizing it "properly" was effortless. I've included the instrumental as a bonus track so you can hear how fine tuned and expressive the synthesizers are. Even though it's a straight 8th-note bass line over a 4x4 kick, the ability of synthesizers to expand the sound of a simple arrangement will always be exciting to me. This is something that wasn't explored heavily in the 80s, it was more the paradigm of the 70s with bands like Tangerine Dream. But it was the ethos with which Dave Steward of Eurythmics approached keyboard use, and which ABC revisited on the "How To Be a Zillionaire" album.