History

On May 14, the Pet Shop Boys begin a three-month tour across America, Europe and the Far East at the Jackie Gleason Theater in Miami. The new show is an expanded version of the one they premiered during their university tour earlier in the year. As well as a wide selection of their own songs, old and new, they also rehearse a version of Neil Young’s “Philadelphia”, which they had previously performed on the TV show Re:covered in March, but they only play it once, in Washington.

On April 1 a new Pet Shop Boys album, Release, is released. When they had began working on the album back in 2000, the Pet Shop Boys’ vague plan was to make a hip hop-influenced album, and to this end they even met with one of Dr Dre’s collaborators, but as they wrote songs over the following year they realised it was becoming something very different: a record full of emotional songs, with more guitars and fewer dance influences then ever before. “It was very liberating,” says Chris. “It gave us a lot more freedom to experiment.” They decided to produce the record themselves (with the exception of “London” which, perversely, was recorded in Berlin with German producer Chris Zippel) in their studio in the North-East of England, which had its own influence on the record. “Up there, we didn’t really feel like we were in the middle of some kind of scene,” says Neil. “It is quite a barren landscape, quite bleak, and that is reflected in the type of music we were writing and the way it sounds.” Johnny Marr joined them in the studio when the recording was nearly finished, replaying some of Neil’s guitar parts and adding some of his own. The album title was suggested by Wolfgang Tillmans. “I think it works, because there is a sense of emotional release,” says Neil. “And it is the Pet Shop Boys new release.”

On March 18 a new Pet Shop Boys single, “Home and dry”, is released. “I liked the fact that it was a massive departure from anything we’d done before,” says Chris. The song, says Neil, is “about someone missing their lover who’s away. It’s also about fear of flying. About knowing that someone’s flying across the Atlantic at night. I always think it’s a very lonely place to be: flying across the Atlantic at night.” The song is accompanied by a somewhat unusual and controversial video made by the photographer and Turner Prize-winning artists Wolfgang Tillmans in which a little footage of the Pet Shop Boys performing the song is combined with shots of mice running around beneath the rails at Tottenham Court Road tube station in London.

On March 16 the Pet Shop Boys record a live concert for BBC Radio 2 at the BBC Radio Theatre in London, with their live band, playing a shortened version of their college tour set.

On February 6 the Pet Shop Boys begin a brief tour of English colleges. “We’d never done it before so I thought it would be a laugh,” says Chris. “The original idea was based on Paul McCartney and Wings just upping off and playing universities during the lunch break and stuff. It just seemed like a nice way to play lots of songs off the new album. And also to get a band together.” Neil plays guitar, Chris plays keyboards are there are two other guitarists and a percussionist onstage. “It was really good having a band — noisy,” says Chris. “It was quite interesting because the Pet Shop Boys have never presented themselves as being musicians before on stage, with the exception of when we played at the ICA in 1984,” says Neil. “We’ve always presented ourselves within a visual context on stage, which has been what we’ve become well-known for, and all of a sudden we thought it would be quite interesting to present ourselves as musicians.” At one concert, in Middlesborough, they encore with a version of Eddie and the Hot Rods’ “Do Anything You Wanna Do”. The tour is completed by a one-off date in Cologne, Germany, on February 16. 

During some recording with New York dance music producer Peter Rauhofer in May 2000, he persuaded Neil, who was initially reluctant, to record a vocal over a new version of Raze’s house anthem “Break 4 Love”. “One of your best vocal performances for a long time,” comments Chris. In December 2001 the result is released in America under the name: Peter Rauhofer + Pet Shop Boys = The Collaboration.

On November 12 Montage, a DVD based around the Nightlife tour, is released. Instead of a straightforward document of the tour, the DVD intertwines and interweaves footage shot in Dortmund, New York and Atlanta and web cast footage with background footage from both the Nightlife and summer 2000 tours. 

On October 6, the Closer to Heaven cast album is released, containing fifteen songs written by the Pet Shop Boys and, aside from two instrumentals, sung by the original Closer to Heaven cast. (Only three of the songs have previously been recorded by the Pet Shop Boys, all in very different versions.) The album is produced by Stephen Hague and the Pet Shop Boys. It does not include, however, the rarest of all Pet Shop Boys and Closer to Heaven-associated releases, a CD single only available in the theatre foyer by the character Billie Trix (played by Frances Barber), combining her original 1971 hit “Run Girl Run” with her 1981 re-recording of the same song.

On October 13, after playing for nearly five months to considerable acclaim, the curtain closes for the last time on Closer to Heaven’s London run.

On June 6 the Pet Shop Boys release deluxe new versions of their first six albums: Please, Actually, Introspective, Behaviour, Very and Bilingual. All the music on them has been remastered (a fairly long process in itself, overseen largely by Neil) and each is reissued with an extra Further Listening CD of all the relevant other music recorded by the Pet Shop Boys in the same period, including a number of previously-unreleased recordings. Each now comes in a cardboard slipcase with a new 36 page booklet in which the Pet Shop Boys discuss in detail every single song.