There’s a brilliance and a genius at the heart of the Pet Shop Boys that for whatever reason some people didn’t like to acknowledge. In the music, the art and artifice, the act (or apparent lack of it). To be witty and articulate while at the same time come across like some musical Buster Keaton. To release a single called “Being Boring”, having already recorded songs called “Rent” and “Shopping”, and to offer up titles of such benign understatement as “I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing”, and “Left to my own devices” - with its payoff “…I probably would”. To somehow cover Village People, U2, and Elvis (and take them all into the top 5), and get away with it all, every single time.

Always On My Mind was a christmas number one in 1987, spending four weeks at the top before being displaced by Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is a Place on Earth.