From the British music industry journal, “Music Week”: Pet Shop Boys are facing a close battle with Ronan Keating as they look to score their first number one album in the UK in more than 15 years. The duo’s new Parlophone-issued album “Yes” is presently around 1,200 units ahead of Keating’s Polydor release “Songs For My Mother”, according to early retail reports, but the story is made more complicated by the PSB album having accidentally ended up on iTunes three days early last week. It is understood around 2,500 sales of the album achieved on the Apple site following its premature release there last Friday will not count towards this coming week’s chart as they will be recognised as sales from last week instead. Pet Shop Boys, who won the outstanding contribution award at this year’s Brits, have only topped the albums chart once before. “Very” reached number one in October 1993.
Composer Mark Springer’s new album, “Sleep of Reason”, which includes a collaboration with Neil Tennant, is out now and available on double vinyl, CD and digitally at the link below.
Recent Pet Texts
Tickets for Pet Shop Boys’ “Dreamworld” show at the Royal Sandringham Estate on 14th August are now on sale at the link below.
I loved performing three songs at last night’s London Soundtrack Festival concert at the Roundhouse in London with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra arranged and conducted by Anne Dudley. In this photo Jake Shears and I are duetting on “Rent”. I also sang “Nothing has been proved” and “Everybody’s Talkin’” (from “Midnight Cowboy”). A great experience. Neil x
Photo: Julie Edwards
“Phantoms and Monsters”, composed by Mark Springer, with Neil Tennant on vocals and the Sacconi Quartet on strings is out now digitally at the link below.
This quintet piece is the opening track of Mark Springer’s forthcoming new album, “Sleep of Reason”, which will be released along with a solo piano piece and a quartet piece on 25th April 2025.
Neil discusses Pet Shop Boys’ relationship with Russia in an interview with the independent Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, now also published in The Guardian. Links below.
I just met the composer Mark Springer to get some CDs of his beautiful work, “Sleep of Reason”, the first part of which I sing on. It’s always exciting to get finished copies of a new record and this looks very handsome! It’s released on April 25th. Neil x
Pet Shop Boys have remixed a song by Primal Scream, “Innocent Money”, and you can hear it now at the You Tube link below and on streaming services. More information at the NME link below.
Pet Shop Boys are among more than 1,000 musicians who have come together to release “Is This What We Want?”, an album protesting the UK government’s proposed changes to copyright law, which would allow artificial intelligence companies to build their products using other people’s copyrighted work — music, artworks, text, and more — without a licence.
The album consists of recordings of empty studios and performance spaces and can be heard at the link below. All profits are being donated to the charity Help Musicians.
Just over a year ago the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died in prison in Russia. We wrote and demoed this song in the last few days and dedicate it to his memory and his cause. Neil and Chris x