Songfacts®:

• Prefab Sprout were a UK pop/rock group formed in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 1982. This song, in which their frontman and songwriter Paddy McAloon recalls the romantic folly of his youth, was their first of seven UK Top 40 hits.
• In an interview with the October 2009 edition of Mojo magazine, McAloon was critical of one of this song's lines. He said: "I became very conscious of other people making hit records and I wanted to be there with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Scritti Politti. It would be nice to have a song the milkman could whistle, I like the glory of language, the gag. Some don't work out, like on 'When Love Breaks Down' - which I'd always heard as uptempo - 'absence makes the heart lose weight.' It seems prissy, glib, too thought out."
• The album was titled Steve McQueen in all countries apart from the United States, where it was called Two Wheels Good, due to a legal conflict with the estate of American actor Steve McQueen.