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.
Behaviour is released.
The Pet Shop Boys receive the World Arts Award in Hamburg, Germany. The award is presented to them by Mikail Gorbachev, whose daughter later tells them that she used to play their records as a teenager living in the Kremlin.
Dallas, Texas, is tonight’s stop on the Fundamental Tour.
The Boys continue work at the Xenomania studios on their next album. Today they record background vocals with a small chorus of at least a dozen singers, among them Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne.
Having spent five days in Peru, Chris and Neil board a flight at the Lima Airport, ending their 2009 tour of South America. This was to have been the date of the Pet Shop Boys’ Pandemonium Tour concert in Caracas, Venezuela. Unfortunately, it had been canceled a little more than two weeks beforehand, with the promoter formally citing ‘razones de logística que afectan la realización del espectáculo’ (‘reasons of logistics that affect the actualization of the show’).
The Pet Shop Boys are guests on Ken Bruce’s BBC2 radio show this morning for the ‘world radio premiere’ of their new single, ‘Together.’
They perform this evening in Salt Lake City.
To mark the forthcoming publication of his book One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem, Neil takes part in a live onstage conversation, simulcast over the internet, with writer Michael Bracewell at Evolutionary Arts Hackney (EartH, formerly the Hackney Arts Centre).