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.
‘Before’ is released in 12-inch single format in the U.S.
The official PSB website announces that a new ‘Greatest Hits’ collection will be released in the autumn.
Chris and Neil make a surprise guest appearance with Yoko Ono at the Meltdown Festival in London. They perform the PSB mix of Yoko’s ‘Walking on Thin Ice.’
They perform in Copenhagen.
In the wee hours of the morning, the Boys perform as the closing headline act at the Hultsfred Festival in Sweden—a show marred somewhat by pouring rain.
Spinning off from ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ Neil and Miranda Cooper turn it into a different song altogether that they call ‘Dreaming.’ It will soon evolve into ‘More Than a Dream.’
Twenty years and three days since their Performance show in Dublin, the Boys are back there again on their current tour with Take That. This evening, however, they’re free, so they visit a pub and enjoy a few beers with friends.
In spite of what Neil describes on their website as ‘very heavy rain,’ the Pet Shop Boys perform their Super Tour show this evening at Bergenfest in Bergen, Norway.
They continue work on ‘Love Is the Law.’
As the Boys describe it on their website, it’s ‘a misty, moisty evening’ in Oslo, Norway, where they perform their Dreamworld Tour show this evening at the OverOslo Music Festival.
They perform at OVO Arena Wembley, London’s second-largest indoor arena after the O2.