The single was sounding amazing and pretty much following closely the demo arrangement. This time the now trademark spiralling dub effects were perfect. I wired up the VHS video machine in the studio and we laid on the voices from Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, Scarface, The Terminator and Rambo. They sounded amazing adding such dark atmosphere and the opening beat from A Clockwork Orange music by Walter Carlos was a perfect start to your first single. The hairs still rise on the back of my neck when I hear it. It was pure Alchemy. The poster too, a homage to the original film poster looked SO powerful when it went up on walls all over Britain.
This was our moment! The advance orders were amazing, hundreds of thousands. Papers were running bets on whether this would be the fastest selling single of all time...
And it was an amazing record. Everything we’d hoped for... and it was rocketing to the top of the charts all over Europe. Those were heady weeks and for a moment in rock history we were the hottest band in the world, with so much promise, so much still to come.........
That was probably one of the most exciting moments in my career to date and understandably I felt on top of the world.
When the record was released we put the various brilliant 12” mixes that Moroder did in bags to look like those Japanese imports that you buy, always paying over the odds for just because they have that paper strip around the sleeve. I’d loved those and always bought them myself as a fan. Except this time I did them in Russian, Spanish and Italian too. The day the record came out I felt a shiver of anticipation as I walked down London’s premier shopping street, Oxford Street. There, outside every record store was a queue... for our record. All those years planning, believing, dreaming.... It Worked.
The day after the documentary aired in the UK I was getting a cab to EMI and not recognising me, the cabbie turned and asked had I seen that Sputnik group on the telly last night?...”He’s got ‘is head screwed on that Tony James” he assured me!
