Please (Pet Shop Boys album)

Please is the debut studio album by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, released on 24 March 1986 by Parlophone 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 (Let's Make Lots of Money)", "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 techno pop 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 in a 1994 interview in Attitude magazine.

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 Instruments Speak & Spell toy from the 1980s, this is a myth. Neil Tennant stated in an interview in the BBC Radio documentary About 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 were most of the duo's studio albums up to that point) 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 two-disc 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 Further Listening 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.

Critical reception
Writing in 1986 for Billboard's "Dance Trax" column, Brian Chin described the album as an "amusingly complete compendium of recent dance music styles. It should be a long-running hit for clubs if the remixes keep coming."

Personnel
Credits adapted from the liner notes of Please.

Pet Shop Boys

 * Chris Lowe – sequencer, synthesizer, keyboards, samples, programmer, drum programmer (track 3, 4, 7–9, 11), piano (track 3), electric piano (track 6), lead vocals (track 13)
 * Neil Tennant – vocals, keyboards

Additional musicians

 * Stephen Hague – keyboards, programmer
 * Andy Mackay – saxophone (track 4)
 * Helena Springs – additional vocals (tracks 2, 8)
 * Ron Dean Miller – guitar (track 11)

Technical

 * Stephen Hague – production
 * David Jacob – engineering
 * J. J. Jeczalik – production (original recording) (track 3)
 * Nicholas Froome – production (original recording) (track 3)
 * Ron Dean Miller – New York overdubs (track 3); production (original recording) (track 11)
 * Pet Shop Boys – production (original recording) (track 9)
 * Blue Weaver – production (original recording) (track 9)

Artwork

 * Eric Watson – cover photograph, inner sleeve photographs
 * Paul Rider, John Stoddart, Brian Aris, Joe Shutter, Ian Hooton, Chris Burscough – inner sleeve photographs
 * Mark Farrow – sleeve design
 * Pet Shop Boys – sleeve design