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.
Frankie Valli’s ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’—which Chris and Neil will much later turn into a medley with ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’—debuts on the U.S. singles chart.
RIAA awards a U.S. gold album to Please.
Essentially: The Pet Shop Boys Story airs this evening on BBC Radio 2.
The Pet Shop Boys are interviewed on BBC2’s The Culture Show.
The Boys’ Cubism concert DVD is released in the U.K. On the same day, they conclude the eight-city ‘German leg’ of their Fundamental Tour with a concert in Stuttgart.
Neil and Chris pay a surprise visit to São Paulo, Brazil, where they perform a brief set at the festivities commemorating the first anniversary of the launch of Sky HDTV at the Golden Hall of the World Trade Center of São Paulo.
Neil notes in his diary that he has begun reading the novel Nice Work by David Lodge. As it soon turns out, it inspires a new PSB song, ‘Love Is a Bourgeois Construct.’
Neil visits the immersive exhibition by Japanese audiovisual artist Ryoji Ikeda at The Strand in London. Afterward, on the Boys’ official website, Neil describes it as ‘extraordinary.’
Wolfgang Tillmans’s single ‘Insanely Alive,’ featuring two PSB remixes, is released today digitally and on 12-inch vinyl. Meanwhile, the Boys perform this evening in Manchester—the first of their Dreamworld Tour shows in the U.K.
The BBC2 television network devotes most of its prime-time programming this evening to the Pet Shop Boys. Among tonight’s three PSB shows is Reel Stories: Pet Shop Boys, in which Neil and Chris comment on assorted videos and performances of theirs with host Dermot O’Leary.