Early titles for Pet Shop Boys songs*
*or at least for steps in their evolution
Quite often the title by which a Tennant-Lowe song is released wasn't its original title. In fact, sometimes a song 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. The released songs listed 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.
In case you're wondering, I've included as a "bonus" at the bottom of this page a short list of early titles for PSB albums.
| Final title | Early/working title(s) |
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1These early versions of subsequently retitled and released Tennant-Lowe songs later also saw release under their original titles.
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.
And as a little bonus, 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:
| Final title | Early/working title(s) |
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5Lower-case f is the symbol in musical notation for the musical term forte, Italian for "loud."
6The Boys have actually listed more than a dozen titles that they had considered for Release—including one, Position, that Neil singled out as "a good one"—but apparently these were the only two that they considered "seriously" (as they themselves put it) before settling on Release at the suggestion of Wolfgang Tillmans. It's worth noting that Never Anyone But You, the earlier 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."
7Neil 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.
Plus a few other "PSB works" that underwent name changes pre-release:
| Final title | Early/working title(s) |
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All text on this website aside from direct quotations (such as of lyrics and of other nonoriginal content) is copyright © 2001-2023 by Wayne Studer. All Rights Reserved. All lyrics and images are copyright © their respective dates by their respective owners. Brief quotations and small, low-resolution images are used for identification and critical commentary, thereby constituting Fair Use under U.S. copyright law. Billboard chart data are copyright © their respective dates by Nielsen Business Media, Inc.