'Opportunities' was released twice as a single. It was the first Pet Shop Boys release on Parlophone in 1985, prior to the Please album. It was again released in remixed form in 1986.
Releases and versions[]
The 1985 release was issued in 7" and 12" formats around the world. Standard single and extended versions of the Jeczalik/Froome mix appeared coupled with the b-side In The Night (many versions of the 12" listed the extended version of the b-side, but were in fact the shorter version). Also, limited edition vinyl was issued with remixes by Ron Dean Miller of the Latin Rascals.
In 1986, the re-recorded album version of the track was remixed by Shep Pettibone and released as the fourth single from Please. Later on that year, the Version Latina mix by Ron Dean Miller was included on Disco: The Remix Album.
Design and Packaging[]
The 1985 single artwork was compiled by XL design and featured black and white photos of Neil and Chris taken by Eric Watson. Music credits were written vertically in white on a black stripe at the side of the cover facings.
In 1986, the cover was a sparse typographical design by Mark Farrow and the band themselves. No photos were included, simply the title and artist in gold and white on a field of grey. Some countries' releases altered the grey inking to black.
Videos[]
The music video for the first single release was directed Eric Watson and Andy Morahan. It depicts Chris in an underground parking garage; a Cadillac pulls up to him and stops, whereupon Tennant materializes in front of it, dressed in a hat, glasses, and a suit by British fashion designer Stephen Linard, and standing inside a rectangular hole in the ground while singing the song while his face continually twitches suggesting missing frames and inflates in similar fashion to a frog. The video ends with Tennant disintegrating into dust and the car driving away. Watson was partly inspired by the images of preachers in Wise Blood, the film adaptation of the Flannery O'Connor novel of the same title, in designing Tennant's appearance.
For the re-release, the prestigious Polish director Zbigniew Rybczyński (who previously directed Art Of Noise's famous 'Close (To The Edit)' video) was recruited. In the video, Tennant is again dressed in a suit and hat, while Lowe wears the hard hat, jeans, soiled shirt, and work gloves of a construction worker, depicting the two roles spoken of in the lyrics. The camera pans over a background of city skylines and clouds rendered in neon lines as Tennant and Lowe appear duplicated repeatedly, passing to each other symbols of the different statuses they represent — including a top hat, a trophy, a brick, and a sledgehammer.