Songfacts®:

• "Point Of No Return" was written by Nu Shooz leaders John Smith (guitar/keyboards/producer) and Valerie Day (lead vocals) around 1983 when the group was a 7-piece party band playing soul classics on a rigorous tour schedule. Smith told Songfacts how the track came together:
  
  "We used to play four hours a night, four or five nights a week. So it was impossible to keep that much material fresh. There's always a set's worth of songs that you're sick of playing. After the gig I'd usually come home and write songs till 4 a.m. I worked in batches of 10, trying to finish two songs a week for Wednesday rehearsal. "Point Of No Return" (P.O.N.R.) was one of those songs.
  
  The bass line was inspired by an original song by another local band. Valerie came up with the main chord figure, the chords that start the tune. The chorus was something out of the 'bone pile,' a notebook of random lyric scraps. Valerie wrote the verses.
  
  Typical of Nu Shooz songs of that period, they're absolutely meaningless. Back then, lyrics were just an excuse to get a cool bassline onto the bandstand, and maybe not have to play 'Rescue Me.' We wouldn't learn about what lyrics could do for another 22 years, when we made the Pandora's Box album."
  
  Smith and Day were a couple and later married. They are still together, as is the band.
• This was the follow-up to "I Can't Wait," which the band released independently in 1985. That song got them a record deal with Atlantic when a Dutch producer remixed it with the stuttering vocal. When Atlantic issued it as their first single in 1986, it became a huge hit in America and across Europe. "Point Of No Return" kept Nu Shooz on the air an in the dance clubs throughout the rest of the year.
• Some emerging technology was used to make this track. John Smith explained: "The Poolside album was made in six weeks with Los Angeles session ace Jeff Lorber. He sequenced it on a Linn 9000. It was a very buggy sequencer that crashed every once in a while. When it crashed it would make this sad disappointed sound like, "Ohhhhhhhh." The bassline was a MiniMoog. Jeff's trick was to put it through a Bass RockMan."
• The "I Can't Wait" video used eye-catching animation and compositing techniques, earning it lots of airplay on MTV. The "Point Of No Return" video was also quite clever. John Smith explains: "The video company that made it came up with this brilliant idea to have a bunch of shoes in the video. Nu Shooz, right? We were like, 'oh... well we've NEVER put shoes in any of our poster art or album covers.' Too literal, you know? But we were new to the record industry, so we said OK. We just wanted to be easy to get along with.
  
  The video used a technique called pixilation. You shoot a frame and move all the shoes another inch and shoot another frame. It's a slow, painstaking process. At one point Valerie fell asleep. In the shot where the shoes fall out of the closet, Valerie's actually asleep on the floor.
  
  We only had 24 hours to shoot our parts, then we had to fly out the next morning. So the final shot where we dance off down the sidewalk, it's not us but stand-ins in bad wigs.
  
  That's show biz."
• An unrelated freestyle pop song by Exposé called "Point Of No Return" was popular in South Florida clubs in 1984 and 1985, then became a hit in 1987 - a year after Nu Shooz' song - when it was released on a major label (Arista).
• Shep Pettibone, who worked on many Madonna tracks, did the mixing on this one.