UKH

In the Pet Shop Boys 1980s hit single Opportunities, Neil Tennant appears to be trying to persuade someone to join him as a partner in crime, with Neil to be the brains of the operation and the unseen potential partner (you the listener, maybe?) to be the muscle.

But there is a line “my car is parked outside, I’m afraid it doesn’t work”.

Now, if someone swaggered up to me with the promise of illicit criminal riches to be gain if I partnered with them, but admitted that their car didn’t even work, I would frankly be dubious of getting involved with them, as they don’t seem that smart or successful.
In Neil’s position I’d have kept quiet about the car and if it came up in conversation I’d say it was the garage or something. 

Am I right ?

Haha. It's a reasonable point.

I think the point of the shit clapped-out banger was to illustrate "look, at the moment, we're both on the dole, but thanks to the new ruthless entrepreneurial culture of Thatcher's Britain, we'll soon have a Porsche each."

Isn't the protagonist just lamenting his failure in life?

He’s a doctor of mathematics! Which is quite good going given that he studied at the Sorbonne, a humanities institute 

If I was the poor guy Neil was trying to rope into his criminal escapade I'd be thinking "What've I done to deserve this?"

"You can tell I'm educated I studied at the Sorbonne
Doctored in mathematics I could have been a don"

But I guess he never did become a don.

It’s all occurring in Suburbia.

Hey anyone might thing that mid 1980s Pet Shop Boys had a theme going on...

http://ufrmath.sorbonne-universite.fr/en/research.html

The Sorbonne University is a 2018 merge of several institutions. 

Opportunities, by Pet Shop Boys, is from 1986. 

I don't know that they did not teach mathematics at a doctoral level at this time, but "Notable Alumni" whilst including a mathematician and a chemist, suggest otherwise. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris-Sorbonne_University#Notable_faculty_and...

Admittedly, the song's protagonist does not actually say that he "doctored in mathematics" AT The Sorbonne. He may have done so elsewhere, and studied something else at The Sorbonne. 


Anyway his car is still knackered, as far as we know. 

Not just the muscle, though - also "the looks."  Based on that, one could - admittedly at a stretch - come up with a more sinister interpretation than one fantasist loser bullshitting to another. For example, imagine the speaker talking to a runaway teenager in a London station.