Trivia / Pet Shop Boys

• Banned in China: "Legacy" almost got Yes banned in China, with the lyric about governments falling. This is why it appears as an instrumental on the Chinese release.
• Colbert Bump: "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" sparked a Career Resurrection for Dusty Springfield.
• Creator Backlash: Neil hates "Was That What It Was?", as he stated once. And Chris dislikes "Hit and Miss". A handful of examples of this, in fact.
• Creator Breakdown: "Love Is A Catastrophe", about a particularly awful breakup; "It's A Sin" and "This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave" about the horrible time Neil had in Catholic school.
  • Behaviour is one of their moodiest and most downbeat albums as it was written and recorded after several friends of Chris and Neil were either diagnosed with or even died of AIDS, and the AIDS epidemic had been ravaging the gay community for nearly a decade at that point. As a result the majority of the album's lyrics deal with AIDS, grief or endings of various kinds.
• Creator Recovery: The album Very was more upbeat and exuberant than their prior albums, owing to singer/lyricist Neil Tennant being in love at the time. It is sometimes referred to as their "coming-out" album, as Tennant had begun openly discussing his homosexuality for the first time during this period.
• Executive Meddling: "London" was only released as a single in Germany because EMI was wary about releasing a PSB song with the lyrics "Let's break the law!". And in "Casanova in Hell", the line "His ageing fate/To contemplate" once had another rhyme there. They never released "The Sodom and Gomorrah show" as a single as intended, because the song mentioned the word "Sodom", and the EMI feared it wouldn't be played on the radios.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: It Couldn't Happen Here, though they said in an interview they might put it on DVD. Their first four singles (from the Please album), which were only released on vinyl, although some of the songs of them were re-released in compilation albums such as Alternative and the Further listening album for Please.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: A surprising number of people believe that the band got its name from the practice of inserting hamsters and gerbils into bodily cavities. The truth is more prosaic; they simply knew some people who worked at a pet shop. Too many people think they both were lovers or a couple once in the past, but they have denied it several times — just friends and flatmates in London before they started the PSB, and since then workmates and friends.
• Promoted Fanboy: Stuart Price, the producer for Electric, Super and Hotspot was a big fan before working with PSB. He even cited them as his inspiration for getting into the music industry.
• Referenced by...:
  • Pet Shop, DIO's pet falcon and one of the Egypt 9 Glory Gods from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, gets his name from the titular band.
  • It's a Sin takes its name from the Pet Shop Boys song, which is also featured in the show's trailers.
• What Could Have Been: EMI tried to convince Lowe and Tennant to replace Dusty Springfield on "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" with a more popular of-the-moment vocalist like Barbra Streisand or Tina Turner. Luckily, the Boys stood their ground, Springfield got her first top-10 hit in nineteen years, and her career was greatly revitalized afterwards.

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