Hotspot was released, again to great critical and fan acclaim, on 24 January 2020, entering the album charts at #3. Ticket sales were incredibly healthy for the proposed European and UK tour, the plans and rehearsals for which were at an advanced stage.
Six days later, the World Health Organisation declared the COVID-19 virus as a public health emergency of international concern, and by 11 March 2020, it was officially referred to as a pandemic.
The world changed forever, and clearly not in a positive way. The tour was cancelled, put off for at least 12 months. As it turned out, the plans for 2021 were also shelved, and Dreamworld wouldn’t take place until 2022.
The latest edition of Pet Shop Boys Annually was already at the printers, ready for publication on 12 April 2020. This time around, it came with an additional EP on CD, consisting of 21 minutes of music that had been written by Neil and Chris for a 2019 stage version of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had originally been made as a film in 1985.
The CD was never given a commercial release outside of it being packaged with the hardback book, and copies on Discogs have an asking price on the other side of £50. In May 2021, the music was released in digital form.
The release consisted of mostly instrumental pieces, but there were two tracks with vocals, one of which, No Boundaries, had been previously made available as a b-side with the Dreamland single in October 2019. Here’s the other track with vocals delivered by Neil:-
mp3: Pet Shop Boys – Angelic Thug
As it turned out, there would be one more single lifted from Hotspot, albeit there was no tour with which to have a tie-in. But that’s for next week.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 