Please is the debut album by English electronic music duoPet Shop Boys, released on 24 March 1986 by Parlophone Records in the United Kingdom and by EMI America Records in the United States. According to the duo, the album's title was chosen so that people had to go into a record shop and say "Can I have the Pet Shop Boys album, 'Please'?". Please spawned four singles: "West End Girls", "Opportunities ", "Suburbia", and "Love Comes Quickly"; "West End Girls" reached number one in both the UK and the US.
Background and composition
Please is musically simpler than, but lyrically just as rich, as Pet Shop Boys' later work. The instrumentals are comparable to other technopop of this period. As with many early PSB albums, the lyrics were considered androgynous. The stories they contain being equally applicable to gay and heterosexual relationships. Tennant, in particular, enjoyed this ambiguity and refused to comment on his own sexuality until he came out shortly prior to the 1993 release of Very. The tiny cover photograph enclosed by a sea of white has been seen by some design observers as a reaction to the traditional album cover. With the new CD cases of the time being necessarily smaller than designs seen on 12" albums, the passport-sized photograph is far removed from standard cover artwork. The actual size of the image is the same size as a 35mm photographic negative. Although some commentators have remarked that "Two Divided by Zero" samples a Texas InstrumentsSpeak & Spell toy from the 1980s, this is a myth. Neil Tennant stated in an interview in the BC Radio documentaryAbout Pet Shop Boys that the sample used on "Two Divided by Zero" was in fact a talking calculator he had bought for his father. The calculator was a Sharp Elsi Mate model EL-640. Please was re-released on 4 June 2001 as Please/Further Listening 1984–1986. The re-released version was not only digitally remastered but came with a second disc of B-sides and previously unreleased material from around the time of the album's original release. Yet another re-release followed on 9 February 2009, under the title of Please: Remastered. This version contains only the 11 tracks on the original. With the 2009 re-release, the 2001 2CD re-release was discontinued. On 2 March 2018 a new remastered edition of Further listening was released, with 2001 edition content. "Suburbia" was dramatically remixed for the single release. "Violence" was later re-recorded by the Pet Shop Boys for a charity concert at The Haçienda nightclub in the early 1990s. This version, known as the 'Haçienda version', was released as one of the B-sides to "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing" and was then made available on the B-sides album Alternative and the 2001 2-disc re-release of the Very album. The Pet Shop Boys later sampled the Please version of "Love Comes Quickly" for their song "Somebody Else's Business", which appeared on the Disco 3 album. "Tonight Is Forever" was later covered by Liza Minnelli on the Pet Shop Boys-produced album Results.
Track listing
All the songs were written by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe except "Two Divided by Zero" written by Neil Tennant and Bobby Orlando and "Love Comes Quickly" written by Tennant/Lowe & Stephen Hague
"Two Divided by Zero" – 3:32
"West End Girls" – 4:41
"Opportunities " – 3:43
"Love Comes Quickly" – 4:18
"Suburbia" – 5:07
"Opportunities " – 0:32
"Tonight Is Forever" – 4:30
"Violence" – 4:27
"I Want a Lover" – 4:04
"Later Tonight" – 2:44
"Why Don't We Live Together?" – 4:44
''Further Listening 1984–1986''
"A Man Could Get Arrested" – 4:11
"Opportunities " - 4:36 *
"In the Night" – 4:51
"Opportunities " – 7:00 *
"Why Don't We Live Together?" - 5:14 *
"West End Girls" – 6:39
"A Man Could Get Arrested" – 4:51
"Love Comes Quickly" – 6:50
"That's My Impression" – 5:19
"Was That What It Was?" – 5:17
"Suburbia" – 8:58
"Jack the Lad" – 4:32
"Paninaro" – 8:38
Track #4 is a previously unreleased mix - different from the actual 12″ version released in 1985 and which reappeared again in 1986.
