On March 19 two books by Chris Heath – Literally from 1990, and Pet Shop Boys versus America from 1993 – were reissued by the Penguin imprint Cornerstone, completely redesigned by Farrow design, and new introductions and afterwords written by the Pet Shop Boys and Chris Heath.
On April 21, Discovery, the film of the Pet Shop Boys 1994 South American tour – “the tour I enjoyed the most,” Chris notes – is released on DVD, accompanied by the release for the first time of a CD of their performance.
On May 7, a new Pet Shop Boys song, the ten-minute “Cricket wife”, is released on CD (accompanied by “West End girls (New lockdown version)”) with the periodical Annually 2021. “Cricket wife”, written during lockdown, began as an extended piece of music created by Chris. “My mum asked me if I would write a piece of classical music for her,” he explains. “I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got nothing else better to do.’ ‘Classical’ in inverted commas, obviously – I’m no classical composer. In the style of classical music.” When Neil received it, it struck him that it might fit a poem he had written some years before. “It’s really about my parents,” he says. “My father played cricket for many years.”
On December 26, the Pet Shop Boys host a three-hour radio show, Pet Shop Boys, Takeover, on BBC Radio 2 between 9pm and midnight, playing a selection of favourite songs; a broadcast also billed by Radio 2 as “Neil and Chris’s Unpredictable Party Playlist”. (The show has been pre-recorded on the afternoon of December 13.) The Pet Shop Boys have recorded five new jingles for the show, titled “Takeover”, “Strings”, “Beautiful”, “Boxing Day” and “Electric”, and introduce a joyously eclectic selection of music, including records by Matt Monro, Alcazar, Paul Weller (their recent remix of his song “Cosmic Fringes”), Gloria Ann Taylor, Eric Prydz, Françoise Hardy and The 1975. “We’ve only ever done radio when we can play records that we want,” says Chris. “I love doing radio. There’s something very satisfying about broadcasting to the nation.”
‘Go West’ is released as a single.
Having concluded their brief tour of Germany performing their Battleship Potemkin score, Neil and Chris fly back to London from Hamburg.
For the second night in a row, the Boys perform at the House of Blues. But whereas the previous night’s show was at the House of Blues in Boston, tonight’s is at the House of Blues in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
They appear at the Radiopreis Awards Show in Hamburg, Germany, where they perform their new single ‘Leaving.’
They perform at the Berlin Festival in—you guessed it—Berlin.
Chris and Neil fly to Los Angeles to begin work with Stuart Price on their next album, which will eventually be titled Super.
They perform the second of their two Super Tour shows in Dublin. A rare technical error—an apparent computer crash—occurs during ‘Domino Dancing,’ but they deal with it professionally (Neil makes a joke of it), quickly recover, and resume the show without another hitch.
Neil is among the many celebrities who attend the Ambassador Theatre Group’s Summer Party this evening at Kensington Palace Gardens, which includes a fundraising auction for the Theatre Artists Fund.
The Boys perform at the Funny Girls club in Chris’s hometown of Blackpool.