The Pet Shop Boys have revealed that their track ‘Feel’ was originally offered to The Killers‘ frontman Brandon Flowers.
While speaking to Record Collector in an interview, duo Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant shared that the second track from their latest release ‘Nonetheless‘ was offered to Flowers while he was working on his solo album.
“We sent it to him when he was making his solo album with Stuart Price, but we don’t know if it reached him – and then, during lockdown, I read a book about the spy, George Blake, escaping from prison,” he said. “For some reason, it inspired me to return to this, so now it’s about visiting a loved one in prison.”
The Killers frontman teamed up with Price back in 2010 for his debut solo LP ‘Flamingo’. Price also served as an engineer for song ‘The Way It’s Always Been’ on his 2015 album ‘The Desire Effect’.
(Photo by Marc Pfitzenreuter/Redferns)
Elsewhere in the interview, the Pet Shop Boys also shared another time in which they offered a track to an artist and they turned it down.
The duo once pitched a track to Bananarama, with Lowe recalling: “They were always going to be difficult, were’t they?”
Tennant added: “They asked us many times to write a song. And Sarah [Dallin] said, ‘You’ve just picked something off the shelf, haven’t you, and given it to us?’ She just knew. She’s clever.”
The Pet Shop Boys recently released their 15th LP last week (April 26). In a four-star review of the album, NME wrote: “‘Nonetheless’ unfolds like a 10-song short story collection, peppered with richly-drawn characters, and esoteric cultural references. The woozily romantic ‘Feel’ – originally earmarked for a Brandon Flowers solo album – paints a picture of somebody counting down the days until they can visit their lover in prison and aches with longing. The electroclash ‘Bullet for Narcissus’, meanwhile, combines New Order guitars with the inner-monologue of a bodyguard tasked with protecting a Trump-like tyrant who’s “so banal he’s made of mainstream”.
Speaking to NME in a recent interview, the duo described their new album as their “queer album” and Tennant, who came out as gay in 1994, discussed how things have changed for the queer community in pop culture since then.
“What I think now is that what you might call gay culture has become mainstream,” Tennant said. Several years ago, I went to see Jake Shears in Kinky Boots on Broadway. It was an essentially straight audience, and when the drag queens came on, they all went ballistic. I thought: ‘Wow, this whole thing’s just gone totally mainstream’ – and I think it’s ‘cause of RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
“It’s like with the It’s a Sin TV series,” he continued, referencing the 2021 Olly Alexander-starring Channel 4 drama that cribbed its name from the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 chart-topper. “You feel the straight community finally faced up to the AIDS crisis.”
In other news, Tennant recently revealed that the duo’s performance at Glastonbury in 2022 was the “worst moment” of his life.