History

On March 11 “The Pop Kids”, the first single from the forthcoming new album is released.  Based on an instrumental demo Chris had written in a Munich hotel room in 2011 while on tour with Take That, it is about a friend of Neil’s who, as the song mentions, went to university in the early Nineties and had a friend who he would go clubbing with; the two of them were referred to by the other students as “the pop kids”. “The actual details of the story are all invented,” Neil points out. “I think the song is ultimately celebrating their friendship, which is expressed through pop music. It’s also celebrating what the song ‘Vocal’ celebrates: euphoria, and camaraderie, and all those things you can get out of pop music. Also it’s celebrating people who take something trivial seriously. Pop music, which is ostensibly trivial, is also very important. We’ve always thought that. So it’s celebrating the type of person who thinks that.”

On April 1 a new Pet Shop Boys album, Super, is released.  It is produced by Stuart Price, was recorded in Los Angeles and is the second part of what the Pet Shop Boys have stated will be a trilogy, but while it broadly shares Electric’s sonic palette, it is emphatically not intended simply as a companion piece and reiteration of the previous album. “It was going to follow on,” Chris explains, “from where Electric finished.” “It’s old Pet Shop Boys mixed with new Pet Shop Boys,” says Neil. They wrote twenty-five songs, then made a selection, says Neil, “favouring electronic sounds and ‘up’ attitude over charming pop…Whereas Electric was super-dance, what links this together is sort of its electronic-ness. We wanted it to be a pretty ‘up’ album. In fact to me I think it’s got something slightly manic about it.” The title came to Chris while walking one day to their London studio. “It’s kind of an uplifting word,” he says. “It’s an international word,” Neil adds. “I think it’s pretty much understood everywhere. It seemed to fit the mood of this album. And it sounds like one of our albums.” 

On May 6, the French musician Jean-Michael Jarre releases the album Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise. It includes a collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, “Brick England”. Jarre approached the Pet Shop Boys through Stuart Price and, though they had never met, Neil and Chris thought “it was a nice idea to link up different generations of electronic musicians.” They built the song “Brick England” over an instrumental piece Jarre sent to them. Its lyric is inspired by a passage in the book Neil was reading at the time, Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, about a woman looking out of a window in an industrial city, watching the sun going down over the bricks of the terraced houses.

On June 24, a new Pet Shop Boys single, “Twenty-something”, is released. (“It was one of those songs we always thought would be a single,” says Neil.) Its music was originally inspired by a reggaeton rhythm they heard one night in a Colombian club while on tour. Its lyric is about a young person in London. “I thought of it as a picture of a twenty-something guy in London, doing a start-up, hanging round in London, dating,” says Neil. “It’s also suggesting how fleeting youth is.”

On July 20, the Pet Shop Boys begin a sold-out four-night residency, Inner Sanctum, at London’s Royal Opera House. “We thought it would be exciting,” says Neil, “to play at a venue a lot of people won’t have been to, the grandest theatre in London. There is actually a creative tension between an institution like the Royal Opera House and electronic dance music, and I think we’ve hoping that will prove to be a rather fruitful tension, because it’s exciting to take electronic music into a venue that doesn’t normally have it.”

On July 22, “Inner sanctum” is released as a vinyl-only 12-inch single, available only through the Pet Shop Boys’ website and at the Royal Opera House. “Probably the clubbiest track we’ve ever done,” comments Chris.

On September 16, “Say it to me” is released as a single. “It’s about a relationship with someone who doesn’t say very much,” Neil explains.

On October 13, the Super tour begins in Santiago, Chile, an evolved version of the Royal Opera House production. Through late October and the first half of November they tour in the USA; after Donald Trump’s unexpected electoral victory they drop “Winner” from the set.