Background and recording
For their follow-up to Fundamental (2006), Pet Shop Boys approached the songwriting and production team Xenomania, who were among the top pop producers at the time. [17] Neil Tennant was impressed with their electropop hits, in particular "Call the Shots" by Girls Aloud, and Chris Lowe said he "liked the idea of making a shiny pop record with the producers du jour". [18]
They met with head producer Brian Higgins in April 2008. [19] Higgins intended to turn them down because of a difficult experience with another group who were used to writing their own material, Franz Ferdinand. He changed his mind after meeting the duo and hearing the songs they had already written, including "Did You See Me Coming?" [18] [20]
Recording began in May and the album was completed on 27 November 2008. [21] Most of the work took place at Xenomania's studio in Westerham, Kent, in a large house with people working on multiple projects in different rooms. [22] Orchestra and brass arrangements for "All Over the World", "Beautiful People", and "Legacy" were recorded by the London Metropolitan Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios. [18]
Pet Shop Boys wrote four songs with the Xenomania team. Three were used on Yes: "Love Etc.", "More Than a Dream", and "The Way It Used to Be". [15] The fourth song, "The Loving Kind", was given to Girls Aloud because Lowe felt it didn't add anything to their own album. [19]
Of the songs the duo wrote themselves, two were holdovers from earlier projects: "Pandemonium" was originally intended for Kylie Minogue, [19] and "Beautiful People" had been conceived as a potential theme song for the 2008 television series. [22] The last song written for the album was "All Over the World". It was inspired by "Que Calor" by Supermerk2, which the duo had heard in South America during the Fundamental Tour. [18] To take the song in a new direction, Lowe incorporated the fanfare from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite . [23]
The album was sequenced in two parts, with upbeat pop songs at the beginning, opening with the lead single "Love Etc.", and more experimental ones at the end, closing with the poetic and stylistically unusual "Legacy". The one-word title sums up the positive theme of the album according to Lowe, who noted: "It's almost an answer to the question, 'Is that the Pet Shop Boys?' 'Yes!'" [24] Tennant also mentioned Yoko Ono's Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting as an inspiration. [25]
Release
Yes was released on 18 March 2009 in Japan. [13] In the United Kingdom, it was released on 23 March [14] and debuted at number four on the UK Albums Chart with first-week sales of 27,639 copies, the duo's highest-placing album since Bilingual (1996). [26] Early sales figures predicted that the album would enter at number one, [27] but its release was beset by distribution problems and Yes proved unable to hold onto its midweek position. The download version erroneously went on sale through the iTunes Store three days before its official release date, rendering 2,500 sales ineligible for the chart, while, the following week, a number of suppliers of the physical album reported stock level problems. [28]
The closing track "Legacy" was subject to censorship in China for political sensitivity reasons, as it contains the lyric "governments fall". The song was changed to an instrumental. [29]
The album was released in multiple formats, including a digital version that included a 48-minute track-by-track commentary on the album, and an 11-disc vinyl version limited to 300 copies, with each disc containing a different album track on the first side and a corresponding instrumental version on the second. [30] The double CD edition of the album incorporated a bonus disc titled Etc., which featured mostly instrumental dub mixes of six album tracks, as well as a new song called "This Used to Be the Future", which features guest vocals by Philip Oakey of the Human League. [14] A standard, single-disc vinyl LP was also issued, but did not coincide with the international CD and download release.
Yes produced two further singles to follow "Love Etc." On 1 June 2009, "Did You See Me Coming?" was released worldwide on a number of physical and digital formats, backed with three new B-sides. [31] A limited release of "Beautiful People" followed in October. [32] In addition, the five-track Christmas EP was released on 14 December 2009, [33] with "All Over the World" acting as the principal radio promo and gaining a music video.
The album was nominated for Best Electronic/Dance Album at the 2010 Grammy Awards. [34]
Yes was supported by a comprehensive world tour that stretched across 2009–2012. A recording of the tour made in London in December 2009 was released in a CD/DVD package on 15 February 2010 as Pandemonium .
Yes was re-released on 20 October 2017 (along with Elysium ) as Yes/Further Listening 2008-2010. This reissue was digitally remastered and contained two bonus discs of B-sides, demos, remixes and rarities from the era.
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