Pet Shop Boys at dead of night, between the lines

Between the lines

other songs

Nothing Has Been Proved

(written for Dusty Springfield)

Neil: "We were approached by the film producer Steve Woolley, who told us he was making a film about the Profumo affair, Scandal, and asked whether we'd like to write a theme song for it. Many years beforehand I had written a song about the Profumo affair on the guitar having just read a book by Ludovic Kennedy about the case of Stephen Ward - a very sad story, because he ended up killing himself, and really he was a victim of the establishment. The words simply describe the true events. So we wrote new music for those words - the verse was written by Chris and the 'it may be false, it may be true' bit was written by me - and I made the line 'nothing has been proved' into the refrain."
Chris: "All the crashing drums were done on the Fairlight, and there's a really good orchestra sample all the way through it. It's a really atmospheric backing track."
Neil: "Dusty was going to sing it so she came round to the rented flat I was living in by the Royal Albert Hall. I had a piano there and I played it to her, and she agreed to do it. I think she might have said, 'It's got a lot of words'. When I went out, one of the porters said, 'Excuse me, sir - would that have been Miss Dusty Springfield?' They were dead chuffed. Her version was released in 1989 and as we were going on tour then, we decided to perform it. Chris played the keyboards live."
Chris: "I can't believe I was able to remember the chords."
Neil: "This version is our demo version, which has never been released, though the lyric here is my final version, the one that Dusty recorded."

So Sorry, I Said

(written for Liza Minnelli)

Neil: "This was a demo done very quickly at Abbey Road Studios, around about the same time as 'Nothing has been proved'. Chris wasn't there when I did the demo. It's basically an attempt to sound like Stephen Sondheim, and was written for Liza Minnelli. Our demo was never mixed, it was just put onto cassette, so this is the one song we have remixed for these re-releases. I wrote the music on the piano at home. I'd had the sheet music to work out 'Losing my mind' and so I started to play some other very Stephen Sondheim chord changes. The song was written to be a duet. That's why you get lines like 'how tough it gets' then 'don't talk to me about it'; those are the two people talking to each other. We had this fantastic idea that, as Liza Minnelli was touring with Frank Sinatra in The Ultimate Event, and as we knew that Liza was coming to the recording studio after having done the concert, that we would get her to sing it as a duet with Frank Sinatra. It would just be great to be able to say to people, 'Oh yeah, we had Frank Sinatra in the studio the other day'. But it didn't happen."
Chris: "I don't know if she's ever forgiven Frank Sinatra for nicking 'New York, New York' from her."
Neil: "She said she thought she and I should sing it together. We did actually try it - I sing it higher than she does, or it sounds like that. I couldn't sing in her key and she couldn't sing in my key but it sounded quite interesting. Anyway, eventually she recorded it on her own for Results, although in 1991 I did sing it as a duet with Pam Sheyne in the Performance shows. It's about a woman in an unhappy relationship, possibly an abusive relationship, who realises that she always gives in. I think I just came up with the line 'so sorry, I said' and the rest followed."
Chris: "I would have said 'I said, so sorry'. I would never have thought of saying 'so sorry, I said'."
Neil: "I don't think I would have, but I did, for some reason. It just came from somewhere. In the song, the woman says 'so sorry' when really she shouldn't. When it comes to the crux of the matter she just swallows her pride. And Liza said she really understood that."

Falling

(written for Kylie Minogue)

Neil: "'Falling' started off as a remix Chris did of 'Go West'. He'd re-harmonised it."
Chris: "I made it an ascending chord change, but the 'Go West' melody still worked over it."
Neil: "I thought the chord change he'd come up with was wasted on the remix. Also, we didn't really need a remix of 'Go West', but we had been asked to write a song for Kylie. And I thought this introduction sounded pure Kylie Minogue. So this turned into our song for Kylie. When I heard the chord change I immediately started to sing 'I'm falling in love all over again'. I think this has the distinction of having one of the worst lyrics I've ever written, even though I was writing from experience. It's about realising you're still in love with someone when you've finished with them. Writing it, I always imagined Kylie doing a very Kylie dance routine, but this was for Kylie's first post-Stock Aitken Waterman album and it was a little bit contrary of us to give her a song like that. Kylie wanted to be New Kylie, not Old Kylie, and we were being very contrary and did Stock Aitken Waterman Kylie. It's got that soaring quality. She recorded it with Farley and Heller, and they did it as a sort of deep house thing and she spoke the words rather than sang the melody. I was very disappointed because I thought it was a strong melody. We did this demo at Sarm West and mixed it. I really disliked the original version of the first verse which is what Kylie sang - it began 'kiss the past 'til it's better' which is terrible - so at some later point I changed the lyric on our version. We nearly put this on a b-side but we never did, so it's never been released. I think we forgot about it."
Chris: "Actually, I think it worked better as a 'Go West' remix."

Generic Jingle

Chris: "We recorded this for when we stood in for Simon Bates for a week on the Simon Bates show on Radio One in 1991."
Neil: "We made a few jingles but this is the only one we could find. We recorded this one specially in Sarm West. They said to us, 'You could just do a generic jingle', and we thought, 'oooh, "Generic Jingle"'."

Forever In Love

(original version)
Neil: "This was originally to be the b-side of 'Go West' at the end of 1992, the version we didn't end up releasing. I've never liked the first verse of 'Forever'. Even now, I'm embarrassed by it. After we didn't release it, I realised that you could take off the first verse, without losing anything. Then it fitted on Relentess, where it was called 'Forever in love', but this is the original version. We liked the idea that you'd got songs with little bits of verses, a David Bowie Low kind of thing, unfinished songs in a way."
Chris: "Because I had this studio in the country I was writing a lot of dance music which wouldn't work as traditional verse-chorus pop music. I was writing stuff knowing that it wasn't going to be on Very, some of which became Relentless, though there's still some other tracks lying around, which I'm sure will never see the light of day."
Neil: "It's about falling in love for the first time. I don't think I was thinking about anything specific from my life."
Chris: "It's got a huge big disco bit in the middle, at 3.13. It comes as a complete surprise. You're not expecting what's coming up next. And then there's the obligatory house piano which had to go on every track then."

Absolutely Fabulous

Chris: "Very under-rated. The title is a description of the track."
Neil: "We were huge fans of the programme, Absolutely Fabulous, like everybody else, and we had the idea one afternoon in the studio at Chris's house of sampling good lines from the show. It took about three hours."
Chris: "It sounds like an authentic Euro-disco record of the time. There were tons of records like this then.
Neil: "Actually the chord change is not remotely cheesy. You could make something very beautiful with the chords. But we did it as a Euro thing because we thought that was the kind of the music that they would make if they made a record - what the characters would think was trendy. We mainly sampled lines from the first episode: 'Lacroix, Sweetie...'"
Chris: "'Names names names...'"
Neil: "We thought it was hilarious beyond belief, so we sent it to Jennifer Saunders who phoned up and said, 'How long does it take you to do that?' I said, 'About three hours.' She said, 'It's very good.' So we suggested it for Comic Relief for a) a reason to do it and b) Comic Relief was the BBC so we'd have no problem getting the samples. As we've often said, we really just did it as an excuse to have dinner with Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley."
Chris: "Which we did."
Neil: "It was hilarious. It was at Orsino. We were completely drunk. We did a video with them at the BBC. Before that Jennifer had come to Sarm West and done some ad-libs: 'it's the bloody Pet Shop Boys', 'ride on time ride on time'."
Chris: "She wanted to know what the dance clichés were. 'Let the music lift you up'."
Neil: "We thought the single was really funny and on its own terms really successful, but the NME put us on the front cover and slightly slagged it off, and in rock magazines it is often referred to as our second great mistake. The first one, of course, being the film."
Chris: "Both of which I think are fantastic. I think it's the highlight of this CD. I was listening to it in the bath, laughing my socks off. Which, of course, I wasn't wearing at the time."

Paninaro '95

Neil: "The original version of 'Paninaro' came out in 1986 [commentary is here]; 'Paninaro '95' was released as the single from Alternative, our bonus tracks and b-sides collection. It seemed a bit weird having a single off a b-sides album. We thought about releasing 'Shameless', but it had been on the b-side of the 'Go West' single and that had done so well. And we did have a new version of 'Paninaro' Chris had done, and it's always been a very popular track."
Chris: "This is based on the live version from the Discovery tour. Whenever I have to do this song live I always get fed up with doing it as it was originally, so I end up messing around with it. If we had the time I'd probably redo every song every tour because I always get fed up with them as they are. And then, after a while, you can go back to the original. You go, 'It wasn't that bad, was it?' There's a new rap in this version which took me, oooh, weeks to write. A sad rap in the middle. There's also a new French horn line, which I like, and a new, slightly ragga bassline, and a funny noise thing. There's also new percussion from Oli and Liliana who played on the tour. The only things that remain from the original are Neil's chorus vocals and the squeaky synth noise at the start. On tour I did silly dancing to it. It's the bits where I have to go from one side of the stage to another that are embarrassing."
Neil: "They're great. Pure Manc. Chris, coming from the North-West, actually does the Manc goldfish look. The Ian Brown look. They're all just born with it."
Chris: "It's in our genes. A lot of shame. Or no shame."

Somewhere

(extended version)
Neil: "We decided we were going to do these concerts in a theatre in London in June 1997, and we also decided that we should bring out a new single so that we had something new to coincide with the concerts. Chris suggested that we did 'Somewhere' from West Side Story."
Chris: "I love 'Somewhere'. I've always liked it. And I thought it had disco potential. I just like the line: 'a place for us...somewhere a place for us...' It's all about promised lands. It's like 'Go West', really. The same theme. I also like 'hold my hand and I'll take you there'."
Neil: "At one point we were going to do an EP called Showtunes. Our EP ideas are always good, but we always get talked out of them."
Chris: "The record company always asks the question 'why?' when we have these ideas. They stop us from doing them. 'Why?' Because we want to. As Billie so rightly said."
Neil: "Anyway, we worked on the single with Pete Gleadall and Bob Krausaar. We did a basic sort of high energy version and then got Richard Niles to do an arrangement with a brief that it was like a film. So the orchestra shows Richard Niles at his most insane. And we used the film samples because we wanted to set the song - which comes from West Side Story, which is Romeo and Juliet in the ghettos of New York - in the Los Angeles riots. We said to the tape op, 'Are there any gangster films here?' and Menace II Society was lying around the studio. So we took the dialogue at the beginning from that: 'You want to live in this lousy world?' 'When the riots stop, the drugs start'. I've never even watched Menace II Society."
Chris: "I've watched it."
Neil: "The Leonard Bernstein estate weren't very keen on us putting that dialogue on, and in fact we had to write and explain it to them. They refused at first, but eventually they agreed. Doing a big record is always really difficult, and we weren't happy with the rhythm track. The Trouser Enthusiasts had done two remixes for us and so we got the Trouser Enthusiasts in at the last moment and he did some work on the seven-inch at Sarm West. The seven-inch version starts with 'One Hand, One Heart' which is my favourite song in West Side Story and it ends with 'I Feel Pretty', which is another West Side Story song. Then, in the studio, we did a long mix, which was intended specifically to be the music for us to come on stage to at the Savoy Theatre. Chris did this whole long introduction, and then there is the big fanfare where we walked onstage. We wouldn't actually perform the full song until the end of the show. Consequently, when I listen to this track, I am standing backstage at the Savoy Theatre waiting to go onstage, and it makes me feel slightly sick."
Chris: "We're at our best when we're doing a showtune. What's better than a showtune combined with high energy?"
Neil: "On the long introduction you can hear Chris saying the lyrics from 'One Hand, One Heart'. That's my favourite bit of the record. He sounds like Liam Gallagher. He goes Manc again, one of his range of accents. It was my idea for him to say it but he did it uncomplaining and unflinchingly, in one take, and he didn't even throw everyone out of the studio."

It Doesn't Often Snow At Christmas

Neil: "Originally I was trying to do this pretentious Christmas-y thing. This instrumental thing, but I lost interest in it. I spent hours fiddling around, while Chris was kind of snoozing on the sofa or reading the paper. Then I said, 'Maybe we should do something really corny...'"
(Literally 18, 1998)