The third Pet Shop Boys studio album was released in October1988. The Pet Shop Boys had a particular concept in mind from the start. At the time, it was usual to record songs which were the length of a pop single, three or four minutes, and then to expand them subsequently, either by yourself or by commissioning someone else, into longer, more elaborate and complex dance versions. Is was in the days when dance remixes typically expanded on the original song, instead of merely using it as the reference point and source material for rhythmic reinterpretations far removed from the original.)

The Pet Shop Boys decided to turn this process back to front. They would map out these new songs as seven or eight minutes long, and then later edit them down to singles. 'It was quite exciting to plan the songs as long,' says Neil,

'because we had been so disciplined at making four-minute pop singles, with the exception of 'It's a sin', which is five minutes. The idea also was to have an album where every track was a single. And in fact five out of the six of them were, because 'I'm not scared' was a single for Patsy Kensit, or rather for her group Eighth Wonder. 'I want a dog' is the exception to the music because it was someone else's remix of a shorter song we had already recorded; we put it on because Frankie Knuckles had done such a fantastic remix. 'Always on my mind' was also an exception to the strict rule, but it hadn't been on an album.'

The Pet Shop Boys had begun making the album in their heads at the beginning of 1988, and notionally the first song they thought of for it, and the first they recorded, was a new version of a song they had recorded with Bobby '0' years earlier, 'I get excited You get excited too)', but then they needed a b-side for the 'Heart' single in March 1988 and used 'I get excited...' for that. Over the next few months they recorded the songs which would appear on Introspective. Trevor Horn, one with producer Lewis Martinee in Miami, and one by themselves and David Jacob produced two. 'I think this is our

Imperial album,' Neil reflects. 'The one where we felt, making it, that we understood the essence of pop music and so we felt we could do what we liked. And this was what we wanted to do. It's our best ­selling album overall.'

The title came quite late in the day. 'Originally the album was going to be called Bounce,' says Neil, 'which was some reference to people saying we had bouncy baselines. We'd also written a song called "Bounce" that we've never recorded properly. Finally we decided to call it Introspective because were all the songs were quite introspective, and also the word "introspective" sounded a bit ravey.'

The sleeve was designer Mark Farrow's idea. 'He had some book explaining how colours go together,' says Neil. 'There were pages and pages of stripes. That was probably the first sleeve we designed thinking of it as a CD rather than as a record sleeve.'

'Didn't Tom Watkins think that whenever people saw the test card they'd think, "Oh, I must go out and buy that Introspective album?"' remembers Chris. 'Our biggest-selling album has not got a picture of us on the cover. That's interesting, don't you think? I think we actually put people off our records.'

They were pictured on the inner sleeve and in the CD booklet, photographed in yellow t-shirts dyed to match a yellow background ('no expense spared,' Chris notes) and they were shot with Booblies, a friend's Yorkshire terrier. Around this time, Booblies also appeared with them on Going Live, the Saturday morning children's TV show, where he attacked the puppet character; Gordon the Gopher.

This new version of Introspective does correct one error. The original sleeve states that the total length of the album's songs is 50.03; in fact it is 48.03. 'I added the times up wrongly,' Neil confesses.

'Neil didn't realise there were sixty seconds in a minute,' Chris notes.

Neil nods. 'I forgot that,' he agrees.