Happy Anniversary: Pet Shop Boys, “It’s Alright”

26 years ago today, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe - known collectively as Pet Shop Boys - released a cover of a song by Sterling Void and Paris Brightledge as their final single of the 1980s.

How Pet Shop Boys came to cover “It's Alright” is an easy enough mystery to solve: Neil and Chris heard it, dug it, and decided that they wanted to tackle it themselves. The original version was more of a cult classic than a proper hit (it certainly never charted in the US), making it easy enough for Pet Shop Boys to make the song their own, but they had a great deal of hope from producer Trevor Horn, who not only shaped the album version but also helped transform the original 9:26 version of the track into a version more manageable for radio.

In fact, there are a number of different mixes of the song floating around: a single version (4:18), an alternative mix (4:46) and an extended dance mix (10:34) which appear on the 10” single, and no less than three different versions spread across two different 12” singles, including an extended version (8:47), a Tyree mix (8:55), and a Sterling Void mix (5:34). Let it never be said that the Pet Shop Boys are afraid of making the most of a song.

Regrettably, “It's Alright” failed to find a US audience as a single - as has all too often been the case, sadly, but that's a complaint for another time - but in addition to hitting #5 in the UK, it also went top-5 in France, Germany, and Ireland, and hit the top-20 in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. We'd like to attribute that success to the lyrics, which find the Boys preaching hope, which something everyone should have. May the music play on forever, that's what we say…