Artist: Pet Shop Boys
Title: Disco
Label: Parlophone
Released: 1986
Track listing: In The Night (Arthur Baker Remix) / Suburbia (The Full Horror) / Opportunities (Version Latina) / Paninaro (Italian Remix) / Love Comes Quickly (Shep Pettibone Disco Mix) / West End Girls (Shep Pettibone Mastermix)

Can a remix album ever have more cultural significance than the artist album that inspired it? These days, it would be hard to make a case, such is the cynicism that accompanies the release of most 21^st century remix albums.

Yet back in the 1980s, a handful of remix sets emerged as genuine game-changers – releases that moved the dial and sold like hot-cakes in the process. There are others, too, that still stand out decades on because they did a particularly good job at blend hook-laden synth-pop with the rhythms and dancefloor-focused arrangements of contemporaneous underground club culture. In some cases, remix albums in this latter category also signify important shifts in the role of technology in popular music culture.

Disco, Pet Shop Boys first remix album, ticks all of these boxes.

The roots of remix culture

The ‘remix album’ is, fundamentally, a simple concept: take an artist’s album, or catalogue, and present it in reworked form (there is an additional category, compilations of remixes of different artists by a sole producer or artist, but those are fewer in number and started to appear at a later date).

It’s a concept with a clear predecessor, namely the largely instrumental ‘dub’ albums released by Jamaican reggae acts from the early 1970s onwards – sets which owed more to the skill and vision of the producer (Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, whose 1973 set 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle as The Upsetters, is often cited as the first dub full-length, being a famous example) than the music being ‘dubbed’.

The remix album would not have been possible, though, without disco and the rise of the extended, club-focused remix. Much has been written about the role of the DJ and the remixer in the rise of club culture from the disco-era onwards, but it’s still worth noting; after all, it was disco that brought us the first ‘superstar’ DJs and the first ‘big-name’ remixers.

Tom Moulton, the producer responsible for many of the most celebrated and influential formative disco remixers, fits into this category. He was famed for utilising elements found buried in master tapes, frequently showcasing these elements alongside stretched-out grooves, drum-breaks for dancers and DJs, and whole songs to ten or 15 minutes. Similarly acclaimed disco-mixers who came in his wake include NYC contemporaries Francois Kevorkian (a man whose mastery of the remix made him in-demand throughout the 80s and 90s), M+M (John Morales and Sergio Munzibai), Shep Pettibone, Walter Gibbons and Larry Levan.

The birth of the pop remix album

Some of the earliest and most significant remix albums of the 1980s, the decade that first defined the remix album as a concept, demonstrate the strands of DNA discussed above. Back in 1982, Factory Records regular Martin Rushent – a genuinely pioneering and forward-thinking producer – deconstructed and reconstructed The Human League’s mega-selling Dare album, returning with a set of sparse electrofunk, dancefloor dubs and radically reworked instrumentals.

Working without a sampler, Rushent fed the multi-track tape through a mixing desk, as Jamaican dub producers would do, in order to strip back arrangements and add effects, before spending days editing the resultant recordings. The resultant set contains thousands of edits – so many that the master tape became so fragile he feared it would disintegrate.

Entitled Love & Dancing, the album ended up being created to The League Unlimited Orchestra – an alias inspired by Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra project, of course, but also one that signalled to buyers that this was something different. After all, it was just as much a Martin Rushent album as a Human League one.

The same year, leftfield pop twosome Soft Cell delivered Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing, a mini-album of alterantive club-focused reworks of material mostly featured on the Leeds band’s earlier – and phenomenally successful – Non Stop Erotic Cabaret album.

Inspired by the pair’s experiments with Ecstasy (then a little-known, sparsely used and hard-to-find drug), the mini-album was in its own way just as revolutionary as Love & Dancing. While the songs largely remain in-tact throughout (something that could not be said for the Human League’s more experimental effort), the arrangements are sparser, the grooves weightier, and the added effects pleasingly mind-bending.

These were, then, the sets that showcased the potential of the pop remix album, but there were other contemporaneous releases that are worth mentioning here. British electrofunk act Imagination’s 1983 set Night Dubbing re-imagined many of the band’s singles and back catalogue cuts as club-focused instrumental dubs (with, of course, selected effects-laden snippets of Leee John’s falsetto vocals), while Gwen Guthrie’s Padlock mini-album gave iconic NYC DJ/remixer Larry Levan the chance to turn her Sly & Robbie-produced cuts into boogie-flavoured dub disco masterpieces.

Then there’s Grace Jones’ Slave To The Rhythm, another 1985 release that’s even more artful and experimental than Love & Dancing. Created at a point when producer Trevor Horn was obsessed with the cutting-edge Fairlight CMI, a “computer music instrument” that combined a formative sampler with a digital synthesiser and prototype ‘digital audio workstation’, Slave To The Rhythm turned a single track into a suite of cuts, some of which bore little resemblance to Jones and Horn’s original material.

It’s effectively remixing taken to its logical conclusion, aided by a digital music-making tool that supercharged creativity – albeit for those music industry professionals who could afford the sky-high price tag (incidentally, you can read my detailed dive into the history and impact of the Fairlight CMI on the RBMA archive).

Catchy songs to the latest dance beat

This brings us back to Disco, the Pet Shop Boys first remix album. It, too, demonstrates much of the remix album DNA detailed so far. It was not the work of one producer, but rather all manner of invited remixers and the duo themselves. These hired hands include some of the most celebrated remixers of the age, including the 80s most in-demand remixer, Shep Pettibone, and electro pioneer Arthur Baker. There’s also a nod to Trevor Horn’s Fairlight-fired productions via the presence of one of the most trusted members of his Sarm West studio team, Julian Mendelsohn.

Released in late October 1986 on the back of the success of the duo’s re-make of early single ‘West End Girls’ and the chart-topping Please album, Disco was sold as a “mid-price” LP – thus making its mix of hard-to-find promo mixes, unreleased reworks and lesser-known extended takes available to all but the most hard-up listeners. The price was handy for Christmas shoppers, too, with plenty of copies ending up in the stockings of excited teenagers, partners and friends. The marketing worked, because to date Disco has sold well over 1.5 million copies worldwide.

Like Madonna’s later remix album, You Can Dance, Disco and the pop remix albums that preceded it effectively acted as an introduction to dance music for those who had either never stepped foot in a nightclub, whether due to disinterest or age. It showed how electronic pop music, then – like now, the dominant sound in the singles charts – could be extended and reshaped for dancefloors, in the process highlighting the debt pop music owed to dance music culture.

Aside from Madonna, no act of the last 40 years has done more to demonstrate the unarguable links between pop and electronic dance music than Pet Shop Boys. As I argued a couple of years back in a Black Sky Thinking essay for the Quietus, pop has been in debt to dance music for decades – a fact further strengthened by the current chart dominance of crossover dance-pop hits.

The unstoppable rise of dance music culture and its wider cultural influence (something not discussed often enough in my opinion) began not in the 80s, but in the prior modern soul and disco wave of the mid-to-late 1970s. Yet it was in the 1980s, when the limitless possibilities of electronic music production became apparent, that the intrinsic link between dance music and pop was established.

The previously mentioned Trevor Horn realised this, not only investing in the absurdly expensive Fairlight-CMI (he once had one delivered to JJ Jeczalik’s house with instructions to learn how to use it) but also a battery of synths and drum machines. When he later worked with PSB’s Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe on the Introspective album (effectively their acid house-inspired sequel to Disco), Horn reportedly told them that pop music was, ‘a catchy song with the latest dance beat’. He’s right.

The thing is, you can’t make brilliant dance music-influenced synth-pop – catchy songs with the latest dance beat – without two things: a deep love of dance music culture and an extensive knowledge of producers, labels, styles and sub-genres. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, and particularly the latter, have always had that.

As Pet Shop Boys began their ascent to superstardom, dancefloor culture was driving the sound and dynamics of electronic pop music – and not just through advances in digital recording and electronic instrumentation (a genuinely significant trend). Record labels, as especially the dominant majors, understood the role and significance of club promotion. The 12-inch single, pioneered within the New York disco scene in the late 1970s, and DJ-focused extended versions and remixes became an increasingly significant part of pop culture.

The popularity of going out dancing in the post-disco, pre-acid house era – in the UK and Europe at least – was still high, albeit with a much more niche and fragmented underground (spaces and events largely catering for marginalised groups) existing alongside significant subcultural movements (jazz-funk, electro and Northern Soul for example) and more commercial, pop-focused nightclubs full of boozed-up lads and lasses on the look-out for love (or a drunken fumble at least).

There were dedicated dance labels, of course, but these were niche and primarily aimed at specific music communities. Even so, it was increasingly common to find underground dance tracks crossing over into the pop mainstream, or at the very least gate-crashing the singles charts.

Tennant and Lowe’s love of dance music went far beyond hearing crossover dance-pop hits on the radio or seeing acts like Freeez on Top of the Pops. They were self-proclaimed “club kids” who fully explored London’s early 80s club scene, be it the iconic New Romantic hotspot Blitz or key LGBTQ clubs such as Heaven.

Tennant has spoken before about how his Smash Hits colleagues generally looked down their noses at dedicated dancefloor-focused releases, meaning that he had the pick of any club-leaning records that arrived in the post – quirky Italo-disco records, formative Hi-NRG outings and the camp-as-Christmas antics of Bobby Orlando’s stable of mostly made-up artists (Divine, a long-established drag artist, being the notable exception).

Lowe, meanwhile, was dedicated to dancing – a night-owl who explored London’s nightlife and later the unstoppable, E-fuelled cultural juggernaut that was the UK’s acid house and rave movement (both Chris Heath’s Pet Shop Boys Versus America and Kirk Field’s later Rave New World confirm Lowe’s presence at certain London orbital raves).

The pair’s knowledge of dance music and club culture was, for the time, highly advanced. They were particularly passionate about New York club culture (electro and freestyle included) and the sharp, arpeggio-driven club Euro-pop of Italo-disco – all sounds, along with the UK take on Hi-NRG pioneered by another exiled Northerner, Heaven resident DJ Ian Levine, that were hugely popular within the capital’s gay clubs.

The influence of New York’s clubs, DJs, producers and remixers is evident across Pet Shop Boys’ debut album, Please (1986), where the glossy, electro-with-Fairlights dreaminess of ‘Two Divided By Zero’, the deep and tactile Italo-disco chug of ‘Love Comes Quickly’ and the British answer to ‘The Message’, ‘West End Girls’, come accompanied by vibrant tribute-to-clubbing ‘Tonight Is Forever’, the bubble, bustle and shimmer of ‘Why Don’ We Live Together?’ (a chunk of tactile, life-affirming gorgeousness that deserved an extended revision but seemingly never got one), and the Hi-NRG thrust of ‘I Want a Lover’.

Dance to disco ‘cos you don’t like rock

From the start, Tennant and Lowe were dedicated to delivering proper ‘club versions’ of their songs – after all, their initial desire to work with Bobby Orlando, who produced the pair’s pre-fame versions of ‘West End Girls’ and ‘One More Chance’, was to make a club hit. They achieved that, too, with the 1984 Bobby O version of ‘West End Girls’ charting all over Europe and becoming a favourite within the UK’s dance music underground.

Once they signed to EMI’s Parlophone offshoot (a deal that reportedly included a $1 million payment to Orlando to release Tennant and Lowe from their contract with him), the duo’s dedication to dance music continued. This of course meant extended versions and ‘disco mixes’ spread across 12-inch singles, but later also additional DJ-focused remix EPs. From this point onwards, the duo’s choice of remixers and producers to work with was undeniably on-point. For the most part, it has continued to be the case, too, as I detailed in an essay for The Quietus exploring Pet Shop Boys relationship with dance music culture).

Browse their formative Parlophone singles of 1985 and ’86, and you’ll find reworks by early freestyle pioneers Ron Dean Miller and the Latin Rascals, Art of Noise’s J.J Jeczalik and Nicholas Froome, Stephen Hague and, most notably, Shep Pettibone. The latter, of course, was then fast becoming the most in-demand remixer in the world, renowned for his edit-heavy, DJ-friendly versions. He brought NYC dancefloor authenticity and style to countless pop artists in the period, though none more than Madonna and Pet Shop Boys.

He was, of course, all over Disco, the pair’s rapid follow-up to Please. It was not a “proper album”, but rather a compilation of remixes and club versions – including surprise takes on tracks originally released as B-sides. It was partially a sneaky ‘catalogue marketing’ exercise, offering a stop-gap between Please and the later, and superior Actually, but it still has an air of authenticity and underground cool. In part, that is because it leans into dancefloor influences already present in the original tracks, making these clearer and more experssive.

More importantly, it also boasts a number of mixes that should be considered the ‘definitive’ versions of the songs being revised – a genuine rarity when it comes to remix albums. For that reason, and the window into the contemporary currents of clubland it provided, Disco should be considered a far more significant set than Please.

I was only eight years old when Disco came out, so it initially passed me by. Yet by the time I was actively buying records and CDs a few years later, they frequently included remixes and extended dance takes. These releases, by a mix of pop acts (Pet Shop Boys included) and crossover dance acts (yes, The KLF and The Shamen), provided an accidental introduction to dance music.

In my case, it was a revelation that changed my life. Through remixes of acts I loved, I slowly began to understand the differences between, say, house and techno, or ambient and ‘intelligent dance music’. I’ll say it again: the role of albums like Disco and You Can Dance in providing easy routes into the complex, ever-changing world of dance music should be marked and celebrated.

Disco deconstructed

The Pet Shop Boys first contribution to the canon of great remix albums sits somewhere between Night Dubbing and Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing, with a few nods to Slave To The Rhythm thrown in. Those nods come from Julian Mendelsohn’s incredible, nine-minute rework of ‘Suburbia’. Subtitled ‘The Full Horror’, it’s a genuine beast that took a relatively sparse and underdeveloped album track and turned it into a full-blown, constantly building anthem.

Tasked with turning it into a single, Mendelsohn went to town, adding layers of atmosphere, dystopian samples, a funkier bassline and punchier beats, while wisely retaining Tennant’s vocals and Lowe’s instantly recognisable synth melody. While this inspired fusion – and particularly the panicked urgency of the middle eight – can be heard on his radio version (included on all of their various best-ofs since the early 90s), to get the full effect you have to listen to the‘The Full Horror’ 12-inch version.

Beginning with manipulated samples of dogs barking, electronic bongo-style rhythms, moody chords and a snippets of a weary spoken word vocal by Tennant, it springs into life – via what sounds like an electronic drum kit solo – 90 seconds in. What follows is a masterclass in remixing, and one whose tone, structure and length mirrors the build-release-rebuild structure of Tom Moulton’s epic disco mixes of the late 1970s.

Mendelsohn appears to have been inspired by the social commentary contained within the song itself and the spirit of the times (race riots had broken out in many British cities a few years earlier), with ‘The Full Horror’ mixing the cheery melodies and sing-along choruses of ‘Suburbia’ with layers of moodiness and a danger-is-coming structure. As it progresses, the mix alters shape several times, with Mendelsohn reaching for a freestyle-inspired tweak of the rhythm track, even more dystopian sound effects (gunfire, dogs and breaking glass) and a hard-to-decipher Tennant spoken word vocal seemingly inspired by John Bejteman poetry (his well-known views on ‘Metroland’ and commuter towns in general were hardly positive).

It’s an incredible, genuinely cutting-edge remix that would not have been possible without the tools at Mendelsohn’s disposal.I firmly believe that it should be considered the definitive version of ‘Suburbia’ – even more so than the same producer’s punchier, shorter and better-known radio edit.

The same can be said about Arthur Baker’s LP-opening version of ‘In The Night’, a remix that later became familiar to British TV viewers as the theme to BBC1’s The Clothes Show. It combines the memorable synth melodies and stuttering, razor-sharp tricks of early Latin freestyle, the effects-laden drum machine beats of contemporaneous NYC proto-house, the sequenced bassline-driven chug of Italo-disco and the sweat-soaked excitement of Hi-NRG.

Baker’s version is arranged in a club-ready (and break-dance friendly) style, with stripped back groove sections and machine-gun-edits emphasising the cut’s NYC dancefloor roots. It’s undoubtedly a classic rework; that it is of a song inspired by French 1940s subcultural group ‘The Zazous’ – young people who liked jazz, swing, fashion and discotheques – is very Pet Shop Boys.

Another that falls into the same category is the B-side opening revision of ‘Paninaro’, a song originally inspired by Italy’s ‘Paninari’ subculture – young, fashion-conscious Italians who adored American culture – and the duo’s love of the Italo-disco subgenre. Also created using a Fairlight-CMI and remixed by Tennant, Lowe and engineer Dabid Jacob, it’s a swirling ball of bubbly electronics, funky sequenced bass, restless metallic percussion hits, positive chords and stuttering, mid-80s edits.

Atop of this sit Chris Lowe’s deadpan spoken word vocals (“passion and love and sex and money, violence, religion, injustice and death”), Tennant’s hooky chorus vocals and – via samples fed into the Fairlight – snippets of a US Tonight Show interview in which Lowe leaned into his perceived grumpiness (“I don’t like rock music, I don’t like rockabilly, I don’t like rock & roll particularly… I don’t like much do I? But what I do like, I love passionately”). Throw in stylistic ticks associated with club-focused Italo-disco and NYC electro records – breakdowns, extended groove sections for the breakdancers and so on – and you have another definitive version of a PSB fan favourite.

Elsewhere on Disco, the influence of NYC’s world-leading dance music culture is even more evident. There’s the ‘Version Latina’ of ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’, a remix laid down by Tommy Boy-affiliated freestyle pioneers (and notoriously proficient tape editors) The Latin Rascals and Ron Dean Miller, a producer previously famed for his work with boogie crew Raw Silk but by then working on turning singer Vikki Love into a freestyle hero.

Compared to many of the other remixes on Disco, the ‘Version Latina’ take of ‘Opportunities’ is relatively experimental. Its creators knew the dynamics of freestyle, a style famed for distinctively swung rhythm tracks, stuttering edits, hooky synth melodies and a preference for break-dancer-friendly bursts of sharply edited drums, and responded accordingly.

The song remains in-tact, but appears surrounded by whirlwind of bustling drums, extended electronic breaks, fizzing effects, funky bass and glistening electric guitar. It sounds rather quaint in some ways all these years on, but there’s no doubting its authenticity (see also Arthur Baker’s originally promo-only ‘dub mix’ of ‘Suburbia’, which pushes this percussive wildness and obsession with tight tape edits to its logical conclusion).

That leads us neatly onto Disco’s triumphant two-track conclusion, where man-of-the-moment Shep Pettibone delivers takes on two Please singles, ‘Love Comes Quickly’ and, of course, ‘West End Girls’. In its original single form, ‘Love Comes Quickly’ was a relative flop for Tennant and Lowe, despite being one of their most beautiful, emotive and perfectly formed songs.

Quite why it failed to land with the wider public is something of a mystery, though it has a depth, warmth and tempo that differs from the more high-energy and up-tempo songs the duo became known for. It was strongly influenced by the classier end of the Italo-disco movement, a dancefloor style that was hugely influenced by British and American synth-pop, but feels fuller, thicker and more picturesque.

Pettibone’s version leans into the track’s beauty and inherent melancholia, slowly building pretty and picturesque elements around a sequenced bassline and hybrid NYC/Italian beats. It’s also bigger and more musically layered than Tennant and Lowe’s own 12-inch version, but also contains extended groove sections that successfully play around with the beats and bassline, with Pettibone throwing in plenty of subtle references to freestyle. He turned a decent pop song into a 108 BPM club classic.

It’s basically a perfect remix and once again should be considered the definitive version of one of Tennant and Lowe’s most underappreciated songs. The thing is, Pettibone’s ‘Mastermix’ of ‘West End Girls’, which delivers a fittingly rousing conclusion to Disco, is even better.

Over the years, there have been quite a few versions of ‘West End Girls’ – not just Bobby Orlando’s raw 1984 original mix and the duo’s own ‘disco mix’ with Stephen Hague, but also notable later passes by Sasha (1993) and DJ Hell (2004). Pettibone’s takes, the included ‘Mastermix’ and 12-inch-only ‘Dub’, were so loved by Tennant and Lowe that they later included snippets of the NYC remixer’s revisions in their live performances.

Famously, Pettibone’s ‘Mastermix’ takes a little time to get going, with a pause for surprise group chants of “west end girls” a minute in. We’re then all in, with echoing freestyle-influenced drum machine beats and the deliciously squelchy bassline cloaked in warming chords and loved-up synths. As the track progresses, Pettibone foregrounds restless piano riffs and solos. These, alongside looped, effects-laden snippets of Tennant’s vocal (“no-one knows your name”), carry the track until the end, offering a striking, beat-free conclusion. A song about London, inspired by a record about New York (Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’, as referenced earlier), re-formed as an NYC club classic. Like much of Disco, it’s magical.

Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat

Disco may be a remix album (and an excellent one at that) but it works just as well as an album on its own. By that, I mean that had Please not existed, it could quite easily pass as Pet Shop Boys debut album. Yes, it is rooted in the dancefloor and is full of references to what was happening within underground club spaces at the time, but it still pushes the duo’s songs to the fore. The collected remixes may be dancefloor length (several nudge nine minutes, for example) and informed by dance culture, but they’re still brilliant pop songs.

Tennant and Lowe, as self-proclaimed “club kids”, continued to periodically mine this side of their musical personality in the decades that followed. Introspective, their vibrant 1988 album, comes from a similar mindset, with epic new, club-focused productions (the sublime ‘Left To My Own Devices’ and Sterling Void cover ‘It’s Alright’, both produced by Trevor Horn) being joined by extended takes on previous singles (‘Domino Dancing’. ‘Always On My Mind’), B-sides (the late, great Godfather of House, Frankie Knuckles, tweaking ‘I Want a Dog’) and their version of a song they previously produced for Seventh Wonder (‘I’m Not Scared’).

When it came to releasing the boisterous and expansive Very in 1993, the duo bundled some CD copies with a separate dancefloor-focused mini-album, Relentless – a set of previously unheard productions influenced by formative progressive house, Italo-house and the glossier end of early 90s house music culture. (This was eventually reissued as a standalone item; it hasn’t stood the test of time anywhere near as well as Disco or Introspective).

Disco has, of course, continued as a series – albeit with diminishing returns. 1994’s Disco 2 updated the concept for the superstar DJ era by getting Danny Rampling to mix together relatively recent remixes of singles and B-sides. While there were some excellent revisions included (David Morales’ brilliant ‘Red Zone’ mix of ‘So Hard’ for example), these frequently bore little resemblance to the duo’s originals. It was a mediocre and uninspired mix, too, making it a forgettable release for all but diehard fans.

As time moved on, the Disco series morphed into something else entirely: a showcase for the duo’s remixes of their own work and tracks by other artists. Given the quality of the first instalment, which should be considered one of the most perfectly formed remix albums of all time (if not a stylistic game changer, as, say, Love & Dancing had been), this is particularly disappointing.

It’s interesting, too, that Tennant and Lowe have not chosen to reissue Disco in remastered form, as they have with most of their studio albums. This is also disappointing, as it clearly needs a proper remaster. When available to buy as a digital download, the tracks sound flat and weak, and the original vinyl pressing is naturally quiet due to the length of the tracks on show. It makes it hard to play these tracks to dancefloors today.

There is room, I’m sure, for an expanded edition, possibly to include additional mixes from the period – Ian Levine’s version of ‘Paninaro’, for example, Baker’s mad dub of ‘Suburbia’ and Pettibone’s brilliant dub of ‘West End Girls’. Disco, plus selected additions, could easily be stretched out across three slabs of wax (as was done with promo copies of Introspective) with fewer tracks on each side. Throw in detailed, contextualising liner notes and you’d have something many would be keen to own. The album turns 40 next month; perhaps the time is right to make this happen.

• Matt Anniss is a dance music historian, author, DJ and founder of Join The Future. You can read his piece exploring Pet Shop Boys relationship with dance music across the decades at The Quietus. You can find out more information about his book Join The Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music via this link.