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)
  • I'm Not Crying, I'm Laughing
  • Tomorrow
  • Electric
  • Turn It On
  • The Grind 2
  • London Theme
  • A Wall
  • Nu Sleaze
  • You Got Me All Wrong
  • You've Got Me All Wrong
  • The News
  • Casanova in Love
  • The Cloud
  • You're the Exception That Proves the Rule
  • Decision
  • Divide
  • Do We Want To?
  • Give Me the Moonlight
  • Moonlight
  • The Sad Dictator
  • Why Do I Love You?
  • Friendship
  • One Day We'll Be Free
  • Break His Heart, Not Mine
  • It Would Be a Disaster
  • Only Lovers
  • Anno Domini
  • If There Was More
  • Flourescence
  • Every Little Moment
  • Forever
  • Paradise Lost
  • Suicide Bomber
  • Unbelievable Scenes
  • Youth
  • The Day Before Tomorrow
  • Introduction
  • Moronic
  • House Piano
  • Heartbeat
  • Balkan Beats
  • Fruit and Flowers
  • The Out Crowd
  • Home
  • Le Touquet
  • If Anyone Can, the Action Man Can
  • Rewind
  • I Heard What You Said
  • Can't Take No for an Answer
  • A Roma
  • Slow Motion
  • Poptasm
  • A Dream
  • Collector's Item
  • Punk
  • Dead of Night
  • Loop #125
  • Baby Come Back to Me
  • It Couldn't Be More Tragic
  • King of Pop
  • Sooner or Later
  • Heaven
  • Heaven Is a Playground
  • I'm Leaving
  • It's Not a Crime
  • Get Over It
  • I Will Listen
  • Bourgeois
  • Can I Be the One?
  • Do It
  • An Apology
  • The Pardon
  • Sick
  • Dreaming
  • Revelation
  • Where the Wild Things Are
  • New Boy in Town
  • New Life, New Love
  • How Lucky Am I?
  • How Lucky I Am
  • The Night I Met Eminem
  • Public Disgrace
  • Am I the Only One?
  • Distraught
  • It's Up to You
  • Rock Me 2
  • Say Goodbye
    One-Track Mind
  • The Track That Wasn't
  • I'm in Love with a Woman
  • Circo Loco
  • Munich
  • Gorgeous
  • Bilingual
  • Latino
  • The Living Daylights 3 (or "The Living Daylights 1")
  • Over
  • Thursday Night Special
  • It's Very Nice But It's Not What I'm Used To 4
  • Shame
  • All the Way
  • I Will Love You
  • Indie
  • We All Look Better in the Dark
  • Married
  • The One
  • The One I Want

There are also two special cases of remakes—songs recorded by the Pet Shop Boys that had been written, recorded, and previously released by other artists—that underwent very slight title changes:

  • "It's Alright," which in its original 1987 version by Sterling Void was titled "It's All Right" (which, technically, is more "correct"), although many copies of Void's rendition were also released as "It's Alright" even before the Boys got their hands on it.

  • "The Last to Die," which in its 2007 original by Bruce Springsteen was titled "Last to Die," without the initial definite article "The."

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)
  • Jealousy
  • Jollysight
  • Bounce
  • Dogmatic
  • f 5
  • Hello!
  • Hit Music
  • Besides
  • Flippantly
  • That's the Way Life Is
  • Early
  • Home
  • Never Anyone But You 6
  • Fundamentally
  • Concert
  • After Life
  • Deep 7
  • HappySad
  • Dance
  • Berlin

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)
  • A Hard Day's Shopping
  • Nightlife