Early titles for Pet Shop Boys songs and albums*
*or at least for steps in their evolution
Quite often the title by which a Tennant-Lowe song or album is released wasn't its original title. In fact, sometimes a release undergoes multiple title changes during its writing and recording process. And sometimes one or more aspects of an unreleased song—a portion of its lyrics, part of its melody—is "repurposed" to become part of a different song altogether. Below, songs are listed first, followed albums. The released songs below appear in alphabetical order, and if there are more than one early/working title for it, those preliminary titles are then "sub-listed" alphabetically as well. Incidentally, many of these early titles also appear in my list of unreleased PSB songs because I'm frequently able to provide there some enlightening information about the evolution of the song(s) in question.
Again, a short list of early titles for PSB albums appears after the list of songs. Unlike the songs, albums are listed in chronological order.
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1These early versions of subsequently retitled and released Tennant-Lowe songs later also saw release under their original titles. In some cases, such as "No Excuse" for "Up and Down," they are probably completely different songs in which Neil and Chris decided to repurpose an earlier title and lyric for a new, completely different song.
2A most unsual case in that "Rock Me" was not a preliminary title chosen by the Boys themselves but rather by Bobby "O" Orlando, who composed the original backing track on which "One More Chance" was based.
3Not to be confused with a completely different officially unreleased track often labeled with the same name that has often seen unauthorized "bootleg" release through the years.
4It's not so much that "Time on My Hands" was previously titled "It's Very Nice But It's Not What I'm Used To," but rather that Neil once described how he debated between these two titles before settling on the former.
Here are early titles—or at least prospective titles to which Chris and Neil had given varying degrees of serious consideration—for some of the Pet Shop Boys' albums:
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5Lower-case f is the symbol in musical notation for the musical term forte, Italian for "loud."
6The Boys listed more than two dozen prospective titles for Behaviour in Issue 4 of their fan publication Literally. Quite a few of them were multi-word titles, so here I'm limiting them to the one-word candidates, which (as history has demonstrated) were far more likely prospects.
7Apparently inspired by the fact that album co-producer Harold Faltermeyer made his own sausages, which seems to have greatly impressed the Boys.
8Clearly intended as a takeoff on the title of the classic 1895 Oscar Wilde comedy The Importance of Being Earnest.
9As with Behaviour, they've cited more than a dozen titles that they had considered for Release—including one, Position, that Neil singled out as "a good one"—but these were the only two that they considered "seriously" (as they themselves have put it) before settling on Release at the suggestion of Wolfgang Tillmans. It's worth noting that Never Anyone But You, the earlier Carry On, For Heaven's Sake, Off the Record, and That's the Way Life Is, and the later After Life (quite pointedly not the single word "Afterlife") are among the rare cases of Neil and Chris seriously considering a Pet Shop Boys album title (as opposed to their distinct "Tennant-Lowe" albums like Battleship Potemkin and The Most Incredible Thing) consisting of more than a single word. "And that," as Neil once asserted, "would never do."
10Neil is quoted as saying of this album, "When we were trying to think the title I kept saying if we were George Michael we'd call this album Deep, because he tends to give things a direct title." So while Deep may never actually have been an early title for Elysium, it seems very likely that they at least gave it serious consideration.
11The Boys have cited at least a dozen other titles that they at least considered for the album that became Elysium. Of those others, they particularly called out Interstate as one that they "quite liked," probably because it referred to the U.S. highway system, perhaps apropos an album that was recorded mostly in Los Angeles, with its notorious "car culture," and also probably because it could lend itself to other interpretations as well.
Plus a few other "PSB works" that underwent name changes pre-release:
| Final title | Early/working title(s) |
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