Classic Album: Pet Shop Boys – Introspective

Neil and Chris were dancefloor-bound for album number three, Pet Shop Boys’ Introspective, an expansive set that housed some of their best-loved tracks and remains one of their best-selling collections…

It’s August 1988, and Chris Lowe is on the phone to Smash Hits talking about what’s next for the Pet Shop Boys: “Well, we’ve got this new dance album coming out in October. We haven’t quite decided upon the title for it but we’ve had a few ideas…

“One of them was ‘At Home’ – because it’s a house record, hahahaha. I think we’ve rejected that one though. Another one was ‘Hello’. We had a whole list at one time, but probably the likely one at the moment is ‘Bounce’, simply because if you go out to a club these days, everyone seems to be bouncing instead of dancing.” Neil Tennant would later confirm that ‘Bounce’ was in contention for a title as “…some reference to people saying that we had bouncy basslines. We’d also written a song called Bounce that we’ve never recorded properly.”

Hitting The Dance floor

While ‘Bounce’ as a title never happened, approximately seven weeks later, Introspective did. The title was chosen after dismissing further ideas such as ‘f’ and ‘Dogmatic’, Neil and Chris reckoned Introspective sounded serious, like an art exhibition: “Nick Rhodes,” said Chris at the time, “will be so jealous.Finally we decided to call it Introspective because we felt all the songs were quite introspective, and also the word introspective sounded a bit ravey.”

The six-track follow-up to 1987’s Actually was initially seen, by outside observers at least, as a sort-of follow- up to 1986’s incredible Disco which featured various reswizzles, but Introspective was more than that. While it did feature a remix of Always On My Mind, the previous year’s Christmas No.1, as well as Frankie Knuckles’ luxurious re-do of I Want A Dog first heard as a B-side to 1987’s Rent, Introspective was a whole new thing.

The idea of recording songs almost as long tracks first and then editing them down for single release was not a new idea – Soft Cell’s 12” versions were always the priority before the demands of radio edits were required – but it did seem a trifle odd that Pet Shop Boys were possibly mucking with their formula.

Get Excited

Since 12” singles became chart-eligible in the mid-80s (previously they were seen as promotional sales tools rather than something in their own right), a series of producers and remixers such as Shep Pettibone and Ben Liebrand were seeing their credits on records get increasingly bigger. Speaking in their Further Listening sleevenotes, Tennant said that, “It was quite exciting to plan the songs as long, because we had been so disciplined at making four-minute pop singles, with the exception of It’s A Sin, which is five minutes.

“The idea was to have an album where every track was a single. In fact, five out of six of them were, because I’m Not Scared was a single for Patsy Kensit, or rather her group Eighth Wonder. I Want A Dog is the exception to the rule because it was someone else’s version of a shorter song we had already recorded. We put it on because Frankie Knuckles had done such a fantastic remix. Always On My Mind was also an exception to the strict rule, but it hadn’t been on an album.”

The Pet Shop Boys began working on Introspective, at least in their mind, at the beginning of 1988. The first song recorded was a new version of I Get Excited (You Get Excited Too), which ended up as a B-side to the single release of Heart in March instead.

Orchestral Pop

As 1988 wore on, Neil and Chris set about working on Introspective. The opener, Left To My Own Devices, was one of two tracks they decided to work on with Frankie Goes To Hollywood producer and former Buggle Trevor Horn. “We had asked Trevor Horn to do a song with us but we hadn’t written it,” said Tennant, and so the song started off as a demo completed by Lowe in EMI’s studio at Abbey Road. “We’d always liked his productions,” claimed Lowe. “Slave To The Rhythm particularly,” added Tennant. “The Look Of Love by ABC,” said Lowe, “and The Art Of Noise. I’ve always liked big orchestral pop music [such as] Phil Spector’s records and the big Beatles records like A Day In The Life.”

Trevor Horn also, handily, lived near Abbey Road, in a flat he’d use for making demos. “The demo was much more moronic. It was slower than the finished record,” said Neil. When he first played it to Horn, it was an instrumental which was so loud it nearly blew his speakers, but he didn’t want to judge it as it had no words, so Tennant sat down at his typewriter a couple of days later, grumpily thinking, “I’ve got to write this bloody song”, and then listed his morning routine with some flourishes: “I didn’t get out of bed at half past ten”.

“I used to get out of bed at half past nine, as I still do,” he explained. “But I just thought it sounded better.” And from there, Left To My Own Devices took shape, with the second verse based on childhood experiences, and the third taken from one of the first songs the duo ever wrote together called It’s Not A Crime.

Cinematic Style

Horn also had the idea that they would program everything, commission an orchestral arrangement and record everything together in one day. Six months later, it was finished. Partly because Horn had other work on with Simple Minds and Paul McCartney, but also the first orchestral arrangement sounded terrible. “We were quite shocked,” said Tennant, but Horn calmed their worries by saying he would edit bits out they didn’t like.

Domino Dancing had begun life in their Wandsworth studio 18 months previously, but they couldn’t think of a chorus to go with it. “We wanted to write something Latino because we used to go to America and hear all these Latin hip hop records,” said Tennant. They recorded the demo in Los Angeles after a holiday in Antigua, and approached Lewis Martineé, the man behind freestyle vocal group Exposé, flying to Miami to record it.

I’m Not Scared had already been a hit for Eighth Wonder earlier in 1988, finally giving the Patsy Kensit-fronted band the success they were after. First written in 1985 in Camden, the demo was entitled ‘A Roma’. The sample at the start of the Introspective version was lifted from 1968 news footage from a counter-revolutionary rally in Paris: “We did it in a much more Europop way with Patsy, but we felt we could do it in a much more luscious film soundtrack way because the melody line is very string-based and romantic,” claimed Tennant.

End Of An Era?

Always On My Mind/In My House was a case of having had a No.1 single – a Christmas one at that – but being aware that it hadn’t been on an album. “One of the 12” versions had been a mix by Phil Harding and Ian Curnow, and a new riff replaced the brass riff,” said Neil, “The ‘in my house’ section at the time, was, believe it or not, supposed to be acid house.”

Having first heard It’s Alright on a House Sound Of Chicago compilation, the duo loved it and suggested that Trevor Horn use it with girl harmony outfit The Mint Juleps, and so after they’d completed Left To My Own Devices with Horn, they listened to what he’d done with It’s Alright and decided to work on it themselves. Although never fully happy with the outcome, they re-recorded it with Horn for a single release, and left the producer to make a third version when they were busy working on Liza Minnelli’s Results album, which became the actual single.

Introspective arrived just after Neil Tennant’s remark that the Pet Shop Boys’ Imperial Phase had ended after the first single off it, Domino Dancing, only reached No.7 in the charts. “I remember driving back from my house in Rye and listening to the radio when it entered the charts at No.9 and I thought, ‘That’s it then – it’s all over’. I knew then that our imperial phase of No.1 hits was over.”

Imperial Album

To be fair to Tennant, it probably is slightly harrowing to stop having No.1s, but the Pets Shop Boys were by no means anywhere near the dumper, with Neil saying at the time: “I think this is our imperial album. The one where we felt, making it, that we understood the essence of pop music and so we felt we could do what we liked. And this was what we wanted to do. It’s our best-selling album overall.”

The album’s sleeve was their designer Mark Farrow’s idea. “He had some book explaining how colours go together,” said Tennant. “That was probably the first sleeve we designed thinking of it as a CD rather than as a record sleeve.” Completed with a photo session featuring their friend’s Yorkshire terrier Booblies, who became something of a mascot around the time, the aesthetic of Introspective was complete. To connect with the full-length nature of the tracks, the album was also released as a triple 12” set.

Released on 10 October 1988, it had to settle for runner-up position behind U2’s Rattle And Hum, but that wouldn’t matter in the long run, as Introspective would go on to become Pet Shop Boys’ biggest-selling album internationally, and far more fondly remembered as a masterpiece rather than the blustering old nonsense offered by Bono and chums.

The Songs

Left To My Own Devices

“I liked the idea of writing a really up pop song about being left alone,” reckoned Neil Tennant. And the not-quite-autobiographical lyrics detail a stylised day in the life, taking in several references to Che Guevara and Debussy, plus a verse from one of the duo’s first compositions, It’s Not A Crime. Recorded with Trevor Horn, they went back in the studio later in the year to polish a 7” version which went to UK No.4. “I think we improved it,” said Tennant. Which would be a task in itself, having been one of their greatest ever songs.

I Want A Dog

Originally released as a B-side to Rent, Neil and Chris handed this one over to Frankie Knuckles to reswizzle, with four mixes which “sounded fantastic… It sounded really Black and so there was this incredible contrast with my voice,” said Neil. To celebrate, the duo drove around NYC in a limo playing the mixes and, upon arrival back in London having played it to Trevor Horn, Neil remarked “See? Cheap gear sounds better.”

Domino Dancing

The first single to be taken from the album, Domino Dancing was produced by Lewis Martineé, and was a nod to the Latin freestyle sound that had cultivated through the 1980s with its patient zero being Shannon’s classic Let The Music Play. Indeed, its follow-up Give Me Tonight was one of Neil’s favourite ever singles. Peaking at No.7, Domino Dancing was, Neil claimed, the end of their Imperial Phase.

I’m Not Scared

Written for Patsy Kensit in order for her to have a hit with her chart-allergic outfit Eighth Wonder, who finally scored a Top 7 smash with it in early 1988, the Boys wanted to portray Pats as a strong-willed woman rather than the celebrity bimbo she’d been known as up to that point. “We liked the idea of making Patsy a European pop star,” Neil told interviewer Steve Pafford. “I wanted the song to sound as though it had been translated from French.” The duo recorded their version to be more cinematic than the Europop-flavoured original.

Always On My Mind/In My House

Dismayed that EMI had given Always On My Mind to a NOW compilation, rather than let them include it on an album first, Neil and Chris remade their festive chart-topper with an extra bonus of In My House which consisted of a pitch-speed rap that Neil tried to tie in with the first half. The fireworks at the end were recorded at JJ Jeczalik’s bonfire party that Julian Mendelsohn made a tape of for them.

It’s Alright

Originally by Sterling Void and featuring on FFRR’s superlative House Sound Of Chicago compilations, which brought acid house and techno to the homes of people who couldn’t afford, or indeed be bothered to track down, the original 12”s that were flooding out of America at that time. It’s Alright was issued as a single in June 1989 and became a UK Top 5 smash.

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