“Rent” by Pet Shop Boys

"Rent" was the third single from Actually, Pet Shop Boys' second album, released in October 1987, though Neil Tennant had written it back in 1984. It's a song about a relationship that runs on money, and the title was picked to provoke, with its whiff of rent boys. Tennant, though, pictured a kept woman: the secret mistress of a powerful American politician, tucked away in a Manhattan flat, the two of them genuinely in love.

Chris Lowe wrote the music with Tennant, taking a cue from Gazebo's Italo disco hit "I Like Chopin", and an early version was a Hi-NRG track cut with Bobby Orlando. The finished record is all cool, sad elegance, with Lowe and Andy Richards on keyboards, Julian Mendelsohn producing and Stephen Hague on the mix.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.