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What Have I Done to Deserve This?

Writers - Lowe/Tennant/Willis
First released - 1987
Original album - Actually
Producer - Stephen Hague
Subsequent albums - Discography, PopArt, Ultimate, Smash
Other releases - 1987 single (UK #2, US #2, US Dance #1)

This song has an unusual history, its origins dating back to Neil's time as a pop music journalist with Smash Hits. While returning home from work one day on the bus, he came up with a "rap" that would eventually evolve into "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" But the "song proper," so to speak, was written in three separate parts by Neil, Chris, and songwriter/multimedia artist Allee Willis. Chris wrote the recurring melodic motif that opens the track and recurs throughout (the one that always accompanies "What have I, what have I, what have I done to deserve this?") as well as the music beneath the "I bought you drinks, I brought you flowers" section, Neil wrote the verses and most of the lyrics, and Ms. Willis wrote the "Since you went away…" part and possibly—at least according to her own recollections—contributed to the music of the verses as well.

The song had been written early enough to have been included on Please, but the Boys were unable to arrange Dusty Springfield's participation in time to record it for that album. (They in fact recorded an early demo of it with Allee singing the part that eventually went to Dusty.) Neil had long been a fan of the legendary and reclusive 'sixties singer—whose 1969 album Dusty in Memphis frequently appears in lists of pop music's all-time greatest discs—and she was very much his and Chris's first choice for the duet. Their record company lobbied hard for Tina Turner, then at her commercial peak of popularity, but our musical heroes stuck to their guns and were rewarded when Dusty came onboard.

The song takes the form of a dialogue between the two characters portrayed by Neil and Dusty. "I imagined the two people as an older woman who's in charge of a building site and a man who works for her," Neil once wrote. "They have an affair, they break up, … and then they both regret it." One of the most poignant lines is nearly buried in the mix toward the end of the song, but is more readily discernable when it was performed live during the "Performance" tour: "We don't have to fall apart, we don't have to fight, we don't need to go to hell and back every night."

Annotations

It's possible—though by no means certain—that the title may have been inspired by Spanish director/screenwriter Pedro Almodóvar's 1984 film ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?, the title of which translates quite literally to What Have I Done to Deserve This? Indeed, certain aspects of the song's apparent storyline do seem to parallel elements of the movie's plot, such as the fact that the husband of the film's main character pines for a woman he once worked for as a chauffeur. (Consider the part of the lyric that goes "I only wanted a job.")
Speaking of that "I only wanted a job" line, in January 2020 Neil told interviewer Janice Long of Radio Wales that he wrote it in the context of mass unemployment in the U.K. at the time, thereby lending a politico-economic slant to the song. Indeed, when you look at it that way, it adds an entirely new dimension to the title. After all, what have the vast majority of people ever done to deserve the dreadful circumstances into which they're sometimes thrust by economic and political forces beyond their control?
"How'm I gonna get through?" – Before I had actually read the printed lyrics of this song, it never occurred to me that Neil was using a contraction, "How'm." Rather, it sounded to me like a mere pronunciation elision of the words "How am." In fact, I never realized that there might even be such a contraction as "How'm." Yet I've found that, while somewhat unusual compared to much more commonplace English-language contractions as "can't," "I'll," and "wouldn't" (not to mention my own Southern dialectal "y'all," which I'll never surrender, two degrees in English notwithstanding), it's hardly unique to this song. For example, in 1981 former New York mayor Ed Koch co-authored a book titled How'm I Doing?: The Wit and Wisdom of Ed Koch. Even earlier, Billy Preston's 1973 hit "Will It Go 'Round in Circles?" includes the line, "How'm I gonna sing it with my friends?" Undoubtedly there are many more examples as well.
On her own official website, Allee Willis offered her detailed recollections about how she met the Pet Shop Boys and her role (as well as those of Chris and Neil) in writing and demoing this song. Since it's copyrighted material, I won't quote it at length. But what I found most interesting were her observations about Chris in particular: "I remember Chris being very uptight and stomping out of the room and Neil having to calm him down.… Chris played just about everything [in the demo] I think." She also asserted that she played a role in convincing Dusty (who had previously, in 1980, recorded a song she had co-written, "I Wish That Love Would Last") to work with the Boys: "she hated the music business and was reluctant to get involved again." But Neil's, Chris's, and her own combined efforts finally brought her around. Dusty would subsequently go on to record yet another song co-written by Willis, namely "Send It to Me," one of the tracks not written or produced by PSB on Reputation.
Some of the lyrics of this song make a "guest appearance," so to speak, near the end of the music video for "Always on My Mind," which is adapted from the Boys' film It Couldn't Happen Here. After Neil and Chris drop off a psychotic hitchhiker portrayed by Joss Ackland and they drive away, Ackland's character, now by himself, intones the words, "You went away. It should make me feel better. But I don't know how I'm gonna get through." These lines are of course taken (with some slight adjustment for the presumed punctuation based on his phrasing) from the part sung by Dusty Springfield in "What Have I Done to Deserve This?"

Mixes/Versions

Officially released

Mixer: Julian Mendelsohn
- Album/single version (4:23)
  - Available on Actually
- Album/single version, early fade (4:09)
  - Available on the second "corrected" edition of the Brazilian release Party

Extended Mix (6:50)
- Available on the Further Listening bonus disc with the Actually reissue

Mixer: Shep Pettibone

Disco Mix (8:08)
- Available on the bonus third disc ("Mix") with the "Special Edition" of PopArt
Shep Pettibone Mix (8:32)
Dub (6:56)

Mixer: unknown
- Reprise (from the film It Couldn't Happen Here) (1:07)

Official but unreleased

Mixers: [unknown]
- Demo with Allee Willis (timing unknown)
- Acapella - Dusty Springfield (4:13)
- Acapella - Neil Tennant (4:13)
- Acapella - Mixed Vocals (4:13)
- Demo (4:12)
Mixer: Peter Schwartz

Nightlife Tour studio arrangement for rehearsal (4:54)

Mixer: Shep Pettibone
- Shep Pettibone 7-inch Remix (3:49)
  - Appears on an official EMI reference CD by Abbey Road Studios designed for client review before determing the tracks for the 2001 reissues bonus Further Listening discs.

List cross-references

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