On May 14 Cubism, a DVD of the Fundamental tour, directed by David Barnard and filmed in Mexico City on November 14, 2006, is released. They chose Mexico to film as audiences had seemed so good on their previous visits: “Also, to us it seems almost slightly incongruous: ‘Pet Shop Boys in Mexico City’.” The DVD is also accompanied by a CD of the concert.
At the Edinburgh festival an Australian musical theatre piece, Seriously, which structures a loose narrative out of an eclectic sequence of Pet Shop Boys songs has its first British performances. The Pet Shop Boys attend: “Very moving”.
On October 8 the album Disco 4 is released. Reversing the Disco series’ more usual practice, this album principally consists of mixes that the Pet Shop Boys have done for other artists: The Killers, David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Madonna and Atomizer. Also included are two of their own mixes of Pet Shop Boys songs, including a radically new version of “Integral”. A video is made of “Integral” though the song is not released as a conventional single.
On November 1 they appear at a War Child benefit at the Brixton Academy in London, a concert arranged by Keane. They perform four songs: “Rent”, “West End girls”, “Integral” and “Being boring”.
On February 20 “Sorry”, the second single from Madonna’s Confessions From The Dancefloor album, is released. It contains a remix by the Pet Shop Boys, “Sorry (PSB Maxi-Mix)”, in which Neil’s voice intermingles with Madonna’s, and reaches number one in the British charts. That same month, Neil presents Madonna with her Best International Female Solo Artist award at the Brit awards. In her acceptance speech she declares: “It’s ironic because even though I’m an American recording artist, it is British recording artists who have influenced my work the most., from David Bowie to Elvis Costello, Portishead to Radiohead, the Pet Shop boys to Goldfrapp…”
On May 8 “I’m with stupid”, a song “about Bush and Blair, comparing them to somebody with an apparently stupid partner”, is released as a single. “The main point, though,” Neil explains, “is the line ‘Is stupid really stupid? Or a different kind of smart?” The video features actor-comedians David Walliams and Matt Lucas, longtime Pet Shop Boys fans most famous for the BBC comedy series Little Britain, playing the Pet Shop Boys in a low-rent musical after having kidnapped their inspiration.
On May 22 they release a new album, Fundamental, produced by Trevor Horn. “We had the title before we ever started making the album. It originally comes from the endless discussions of fundamentalism that we live through at the moment. As ever with an issue like that, we related it to what we do, and we wanted to make an album that was very electro, that was fundamentally Pet Shop Boys.…The idea behind the lyrics was to take contemporary events and put them into songs that are apparently about interpersonal relationships.”
On June 15 the Fundamental tour begins at the Skein Sommerfestival in Norway. The innovative show, designed by Es Devlin who designed the musical Closer to Heaven, is centred around a giant cube which can be unfolded, and inhabited, in a multitude of ways.
On July 24 “Minimal” is released as a single: “The words of the song are simply about miniminalism”. Its video is the closest to a straight performance video the Pet Shop Boys have ever made.
On September 18 Chris returns to his old school, the Arnold School in Blackpool, to be shown round the school and open some curtains to reveal a plaque to mark the opening of their new music facility, the Lawrence House Music Centre.
In an interview appearing in the Minneapolis-St. Paul City Pages newspaper, Neil again addresses the problem of PSB being thought of as a ‘gay group’ in the U.S.
‘Numb’ is released as a single.
The Pet Shop Boys perform at ‘Personal Fest’ in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, back in their native U.K., the TV documentary Synth Britannia makes its debut. It includes interview segments with the Boys, who are mentioned on several occasions, including a bit of the ‘West End Girls’ video after which the narrator says, ‘The Pet Shop Boys gave us a glimpse of what the future held for British electronic music.’
The ‘2013 leg’ of their Electric Tour having completed the night before, Neil and Chris catch a flight from Mexico City this evening back home to England.
The Unity Tour comes to an end with the Pet Shop Boys’ (and New Order’s) final show of the tour in Vancouver, British Columbia.