This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us

Ron Mael wrote it, and Muff Winwood produced it. The first idea was for Russell to sing a movie-dialogue cliche after each verse. The title phrase comes from the 1932 Western The Western Code, and they kept only that line. The Western gunshot effects were picked after a trawl through a whole BBC sound library. Ron wrote it in the key of A, saying it would be sung in A, and Russell adapted to it, describing his voice as untrained and unschooled. Ron told The Guardian he was surprised the label thought it a single, but that Top of the Pops had a tremendous effect.

The single reached number two in the UK, held off the top by the Rubettes, and was also a Top 15 hit in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, West Germany and France. Winwood remembered a sales staffer saying the day after the broadcast that they had already sold 200,000 singles. The Guardian called it a three-minute warning that Sparks were unlike any other band. Pitchfork's Stuart Berman wrote that for a generation of British viewers the Top of the Pops performance was as transformative as the Beatles on Ed Sullivan had been for Americans, and that the zig-zagging melody remains unkaraokeable. Edgar Wright told The Guardian that fifteen million people saw it.

Other versions

Sparks recorded an acoustic version in 1985 as the B-side of Change. On the 1997 album Plagiarism there are two new takes: an orchestral one arranged and conducted by Tony Visconti, which restores a verse Winwood had cut, and a collaboration with Faith No More, issued as a single in December 1997.