In the opening minutes of the New Year, the Pet Shop Boys appear on British TV as special guests on the now traditional televised New Year’s Eve pop star performance, this year by Years and Years’ Olly Alexander at London’s Riverside Studios. They joined him for two songs, “It’s a sin” and “Dreamland”. (In a more normal year this would have been a live broadcast, but due to the pandemic it has been recorded several weeks earlier, on December 8.)
On March 22, “Purple Zone”, a single credited to Soft Cell and Pet Shop Boys, is released. The song had originally been recorded by Soft Cell alone for their forthcoming Happiness Not Included album but after the Pet Shop Boys expressed enthusiasm for the as-yet-unreleased song after hearing Soft Cell perform it at the Hammersmith Apollo in November 2021, an initial invitation to remix the song led to its reworking as a collaboration, and to a joint video shoot in a south London pub. “We’ve always acknowledged Soft Cell,” notes Chris. “It felt like a real moment,” says Neil.
On May 10, after two pandemic-related postponements, the Pet Shop Boys’ Dreamworld: the greatest hits tour – originally scheduled to begin in May 2020 – finally opens in Milan.
On June 26, the Pet Shop Boys perform for the third time at the Glastonbury festival. For the first seven songs, a technical glitch forces Chris to perform hidden behind a screen, but eventually he is revealed. “After that,” says Neil, “it was a real adrenaline rush.”
On September 17 in Toronto the Pet Shop Boys play the first of 13 co-headlining shows with New Order across North America on the Unity tour. The idea that the two groups might tour together in this way was one that Chris has floated some years before: “I just thought it would be something I’d like to go and see.” (The tour’s eventual name, Unity, was Bernard Sumner’s counter-proposal to Chris’s initial suggestion, United.) The two acts alternated opening and closing the show, both performing, as New Order preferred, full ninety-minute sets; before, and in between, Paul Oakenfold DJ-ed. “It felt like,” says Neil, “to use our age-old word, an event. It felt like an event for us and for the audience.”
On December 31 the Pet Shop Boys perform at the Hogmanay celebrations in Edinburgh. Their set includes a new version of “Paninaro”, its first performance for thirteen years.
The Pet Shop Boys perform in Irvine, California.
They perform ‘Miracles’ at a live televised ‘AIDS Gala’ in Berlin.
They kick off a Latin American ‘mini-tour’ at the Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic.
Neil gets a haircut at Bill’s Downtown Barbers in Denver. That evening they perform at Denver’s Paramount Theatre. Meanwhile, an exhibition of portraits of the Pet Shop Boys opens at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Chris and Neil attend a Rufus Wainwright concert at Hammersmith Apollo. Backstage after the show, Rufus presents Neil with a gold record for Rufus’s album Release the Stars, which had been executive-produced by Neil.
The Boys are guests on Graham Norton’s BBC2 radio show. Along the way, Chris chooses to play Eric Carmen’s ‘All by Myself,’ Neil chooses The Church’s ‘Under the Milky Way’ and says that a revival of Closer to Heaven is under consideration, and they state that they’re not planning to retire but that Chris would like to take a bit of a break. Of course, their brand new single ‘Together’ is also played.