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The band recorded and mixed the album alongside engineer Mike Johnson at Britannia Row Studios – originally set up by Pink Floyd –and Jam Studios in North London between October and December 1984. Their willingness to grapple with new technology was well in evidence: is that an Emulator sample of a frog on 'The Perfect Kiss'? Why, yes it is. Meanwhile, Gillian Gilbert had upgraded the Quadra and Prophet-5 synths she'd used previously to a Voyetra-8, and this would form the cornerstone of the band's sound into the '90s.

Old-school approaches were still employed, however. Stephen Morris claims he would resort to thumping the Emulator they were using just to get it working. 'Much like Basil Fawlty, I did like violently thrashing it with a lump hammer or piece of scaffolding', he recalled in Fast Forward. 'Sometimes it would refuse to load its disks and frequently refuse to start up at all. I discovered this was remedied by brute force.'

Word spread to other acts who were suffering their own issues with the Emulator, and according to Peter Hook, Erasure contacted them to ask: 'We've heard you get the Emulator 1 to work by hitting it with a hammer. Whereabouts did you hit it exactly?'.

The group were on the clock during the recording, being under heavy pressure to finish the album ('The Perfect Kiss' being the final song to be completed, having gone through innumerable incarnations) before driving home to Manchester and then flying off to begin a tour of the Far East and Australasia.

'The others fell asleep and me and Mike Johnson stayed up for 49½ hours...', Peter Hook later claimed. There are surely few better adverts for the creative benefits of insomnia.