# 1972        Pet Shop Boys -        BEFORE
    commentators
  it comes knocking at your door
 Before you know for sure
this is what you were waiting for
     


   
           Bilingual, Atlantic Records, 1996
BILLBOARD CHART ACHIEVEMENTS:
Dance Club Play:  # 1
Hot 100 singles:  # 107

                 INTERNATIONAL                CHART ACHIEVEMENTS:
      Finland -  # 4         Netherlands - # 4
Latvia - # 4     Singapore - # 5     UK - # 7
        Sweden -  # 9           Italy -  # 16
   Switzerland - # 31           Germany - # 45 
     
               top 10 hit at MATT RADIO
 This is a MATT RADIO core artist.

  This massive dance hit originated in the clubs.
NEIL TENNANT and CHRIS LOWE free-associate about "Before,"                      their 24th Top 20 British hit.

NEIL: "(This song has) the same message as (our 1986 single)'Love Comes Quickly,' really, but from a slightly different point of view. When you're feeling down about love, when you're in a difficult situation, suddenly things can straighten out. Suddenly the right person comes into your life."

CHRIS: "I love this. There's nothing extraneous on it. There's no unnecessary musical things happening."

NEIL: "We set out to make it for America. This is the song described by Atlantic Records, our American label at the time, as a 'straight out of the box smash.'  It wasn't a (radio)hit there."

CHRIS: "I love Neil's vocal style on this."

NEIL: "It's very smooth. I sing like a girl."

CHRIS: "Maybe you should sing like a girl more often."

NEIL: "It sounds like no other record we've made. It's a very gorgeous,loving record. We wanted to work with Danny Tenaglia, whom Tom Stephan had recommended to us. We didn't really know Danny's work. We were going to work with David Morales in New York, and David Morales's agent cancelled two days before we were going. The studio was booked. And Tom said, 'You should be working with Danny Tenaglia anyway,' so we phoned him up and he, now to my astonishment, just dropped everything. Danny was a hip, in-crowd thing at that point, but he wasn't the world's most famous DJ. Now, of course, it would be a big event."

CHRIS: "And we discovered that Danny, unlike most DJs, can bloody play the keyboards. Imagine our surprise. He did a great production job on this. When he put the bassline on I thought, 'wow,' because he didn't make the bassline follow the root note of the chords."

NEIL: "We did it there in the studio."

CHRIS: "We deliberately didn't arrive with anything."

NEIL: "It was based on two bits of songs Chris had written that he put together, very reluctantly."

CHRIS: "I'm always reluctant. It's two different songs being shoved into one. It's a waste."

NEIL: "Danny had programmed some drums, and we put these bits in, and then in the studio I started singing the 'before' thing and Chris said, 'Go and sing that immediately,' because it's good to sing immediately because you get the nuances. I forget nuances terribly easily. I went back to the hotel and wrote all the words, and I sang it the next day. The vocal sounded great and then the engineer wiped the third verse by mistake. I think the three girls' vocals on it are lovely. At first Danny didn't like it where they go 'before…before…before,' but we realised it was the hook of the record.

"The middle bits - 'there's a story of a man who loved too much' - are slightly different. I think they're about O.J. Simpson, because that was on the telly the whole time then."

source:  www.psb-discography.com