History

On September 16, “Say it to me” is released as a single. “It’s about a relationship with someone who doesn’t say very much,” Neil explains.

On July 20, the Pet Shop Boys begin a sold-out four-night residency, Inner Sanctum, at London’s Royal Opera House. “We thought it would be exciting,” says Neil, “to play at a venue a lot of people won’t have been to, the grandest theatre in London. There is actually a creative tension between an institution like the Royal Opera House and electronic dance music, and I think we’ve hoping that will prove to be a rather fruitful tension, because it’s exciting to take electronic music into a venue that doesn’t normally have it.”

On July 22, “Inner sanctum” is released as a vinyl-only 12-inch single, available only through the Pet Shop Boys’ website and at the Royal Opera House. “Probably the clubbiest track we’ve ever done,” comments Chris.

On June 24, a new Pet Shop Boys single, “Twenty-something”, is released. (“It was one of those songs we always thought would be a single,” says Neil.) Its music was originally inspired by a reggaeton rhythm they heard one night in a Colombian club while on tour. Its lyric is about a young person in London. “I thought of it as a picture of a twenty-something guy in London, doing a start-up, hanging round in London, dating,” says Neil. “It’s also suggesting how fleeting youth is.”

On May 6, the French musician Jean-Michael Jarre releases the album Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise. It includes a collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, “Brick England”. Jarre approached the Pet Shop Boys through Stuart Price and, though they had never met, Neil and Chris thought “it was a nice idea to link up different generations of electronic musicians.” They built the song “Brick England” over an instrumental piece Jarre sent to them. Its lyric is inspired by a passage in the book Neil was reading at the time, Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, about a woman looking out of a window in an industrial city, watching the sun going down over the bricks of the terraced houses.

On April 1 a new Pet Shop Boys album, Super, is released.  It is produced by Stuart Price, was recorded in Los Angeles and is the second part of what the Pet Shop Boys have stated will be a trilogy, but while it broadly shares Electric’s sonic palette, it is emphatically not intended simply as a companion piece and reiteration of the previous album. “It was going to follow on,” Chris explains, “from where Electric finished.” “It’s old Pet Shop Boys mixed with new Pet Shop Boys,” says Neil. They wrote twenty-five songs, then made a selection, says Neil, “favouring electronic sounds and ‘up’ attitude over charming pop…Whereas Electric was super-dance, what links this together is sort of its electronic-ness. We wanted it to be a pretty ‘up’ album. In fact to me I think it’s got something slightly manic about it.” The title came to Chris while walking one day to their London studio. “It’s kind of an uplifting word,” he says. “It’s an international word,” Neil adds. “I think it’s pretty much understood everywhere. It seemed to fit the mood of this album. And it sounds like one of our albums.” 

On March 11 “The Pop Kids”, the first single from the forthcoming new album is released.  Based on an instrumental demo Chris had written in a Munich hotel room in 2011 while on tour with Take That, it is about a friend of Neil’s who, as the song mentions, went to university in the early Nineties and had a friend who he would go clubbing with; the two of them were referred to by the other students as “the pop kids”. “The actual details of the story are all invented,” Neil points out. “I think the song is ultimately celebrating their friendship, which is expressed through pop music. It’s also celebrating what the song ‘Vocal’ celebrates: euphoria, and camaraderie, and all those things you can get out of pop music. Also it’s celebrating people who take something trivial seriously. Pop music, which is ostensibly trivial, is also very important. We’ve always thought that. So it’s celebrating the type of person who thinks that.”

On December 2, the Pet Shop Boys appear at MAMA – the Mnet Asian Music Awards – in Hong Kong. They are given the Worldwide Inspiration award and play a lengthy live medley, joined for their final two songs, “What have I done to deserve this?” and “Vocal”, by the K‑Pop artist f(x). At the organisers’ request, they wear the Electric tour straw jackets for, possibly, the final time.

On August 15, the final date of the much-extended Electric tour – which began in March, 2013 – takes place at the Flow Festival in Helsinki. The tour has visited over forty countries.

On April 22, the Pet Shop Boys musical Closer to Heaven is performed in London for the first time in fourteen years, in a sold-out month-long run at The Union Theatre. (It will return for a further five weeks beginning on October 21.). For this revival, at the Pet Shop Boys’ request, the musical’s original final number, “Positive role model”, is replaced by “Vocal”.