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.”
Getting together again with Liza Minnelli roughly a decade after working on Results, Chris and Neil watch the BRITS Awards on TV with her at Sarm West Studios, followed by dinner.
They attend the NME Awards to present the ‘Godlike Genius’ award to New Order.
Neil and Chris attend the Berlin International Film Festival, where they watch the documentary If One Thing Matters, which concerns the photographer/artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who had created their video for ‘Home and Dry.’ In fact, a good deal of the film, in which the Boys appear, concerns the making of that video.
Chris and Neil attend an orchestral concert at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, during which a piece titled Stakes ‘n’ Chips is performed for the first time. This work is a ‘random composition’ made up of one-minute segments contributed by twelve different composers, of whom the Pet Shop Boys were one. The Tennant-Lowe section is titled ‘Particle.’
Two PSB TV appearances this evening: on BBC1’s The One Show and on CNN International’s Connect the World.
Indie guitarist Adam Tressler is in an L.A. studio with the Pet Shop Boys, recording tracks for their next album (soon to be dubbed Elysium).