ABC / How to Be a Zillionaire / 1985
Between You and Me
combative, wry, theatrical
A domestic quarrel is dressed up in the language of Cold War conflict and geopolitical rivalry, with the chorus repeatedly stripping away the grand comparisons to insist the real fight is private. It's a song about mutual antagonism between two people who can't stop performing their resentment for an audience.
romantic conflict as warfare Cold War imagery mutual accusation performance of intimacy irony and self-awareness
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses a partner directly, accusing them while admitting his own faults; the tone is knowing and a little self-mocking rather than wounded, suggesting a narrator who enjoys the drama as much as he resents it.
What happens
The song opens with trouble entering the scene and the narrator framing the coming fight as worthwhile, almost inevitable. He escalates the stakes by invoking superpower rivalry and espionage, then repeatedly pulls back to clarify that none of those grand frames apply — the conflict is purely personal. The structure loops rather than resolves, ending where it began, as if the argument itself is cyclical and unresolvable.
How it's built
Verses build escalating lists of large-scale conflicts (ideological, military, political) while the chorus functions as a correction, stripping those frames away to land on the stark two-word phrase that gives the song its title. The repetition of the chorus's negations creates a call-and-response rhythm between grandiosity and deflation, and the final line looping back to the opening image of trouble entering the door reinforces the sense of a repeating cycle rather than a story with an ending.
Section by section
Opening verse
“trouble comes strolling through the door”
The image personifies conflict as a casual, almost welcome visitor, setting a tone of resigned anticipation rather than surprise. The narrator frames the fight as something earned or deserved, hinting at a relationship sustained by its own friction.
Pre-chorus admission
The narrator concedes that his partner sees him as harsh, then immediately claims to feel the same way about them. This symmetry establishes the song's central move: refusing to let either party claim victimhood.
Chorus
“between the devil and the deep blue see”
Each grand opposition invoked here is immediately negated, deflating the idealistic or historical framing in favor of a blunt, unglamorous truth about two people's private battle.
Second verse
“the stars and stripes meet the hammer and sickle”
The Cold War imagery intensifies, but the accompanying line about financial motives undercuts any ideological seriousness, suggesting the conflict (like the relationship) may be driven by self-interest rather than principle.
Closing repetition
Returning to the opening image of trouble entering unannounced reinforces that no resolution has occurred; the argument is structurally built to recur, matching the song's refusal to end on reconciliation.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated 'not between' constructions pile up historical and ideological oppositions only to discard them, building rhetorical momentum toward the plain admission that follows.
- extended metaphor
- Cold War and superpower imagery (ideological rivalry, espionage, superpower symbols) stands in for a two-person relationship, inflating a private squabble to the scale of international conflict for ironic effect.
- irony
- The narrator's confession that he matches his partner's cruelty undercuts any claim to moral high ground, turning what could be a complaint into mutual self-indictment.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a satirical inflation of a romantic argument into the rhetoric of global conflict, mocking both the narrator's self-dramatizing tendencies and the absurdity of treating a private feud as world-historical. An alternative reading could take the geopolitical imagery more literally, as commentary on espionage or betrayal between nations, with the 'you and me' functioning as a metaphor for superpowers rather than the reverse — but the repeated insistence on stripping away ideological categories in favor of a personal pronoun makes the romantic reading stronger.
Context
ABC's 'How to Be a Zillionaire' (1985) marked a shift toward a brighter, more synthetic pop sound and a knowing, cartoonish sensibility compared to the band's earlier, more orchestral work. This song fits that era's taste for arch, self-aware lyrics that play with big cultural signifiers (Cold War iconography was common pop shorthand in the mid-80s) while keeping the emotional content small and personal.
Listen for
- the rhythmic insistence of the repeated negations in the chorus
- the contrast between the verses' grand imagery and the chorus's plain title phrase
- the narrator's tone of amused self-implication rather than pure complaint
- the cyclical return to the opening line at the song's end
About ABC
ABC are an English pop band which formed in Sheffield, South Yorkshire in 1980, evolving from the earlier electronic band Vice Versa. Associated with the new pop movement of the early 1980s, ABC blended synth-pop with disco and rock influences.
1980 - present / United Kingdom
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