When we undertook our first ever tour in June and July 1989, we asked Chris Heath to accompany us with the idea of eventually producing some sort of picture book with a short text. For several weeks, in Hong Kong, Japan and back home in Britain,

he followed us - and the other forty-odd people on the tour - around with a notebook, jotting down everything of interest he witnessed. In the end we agreed that he would write a more detailed account than we first imagined. The book you are holding is the result.

Although we have never been keen on most of the publicity and self-promotion that inevitably accompanies a successful pop group, it seemed a worth while notion to produce a book through the close access to its subject that the normal 'official' biography gets, without the starstruck blandness that usually results. Reading the manuscript for the first time,

we were, to be honest, more or less horrified. Are we really that horrible? Is Neil really, by popular agreement, 'like a schoolteacher'? Does Chris always complain so much? Are we that self-obsessed, so frequently rude? Do we discuss money, snipe about other pop stars quite so much? Apparently, yes.

Perhaps we will learn as much as anyone else who reads this book about the Pet Shop Boys.

Neil Tennant Chris Lowe