“What Have I Done To Deserve This?” by Pet Shop Boys with Dusty Springfield

"What Have I Done to Deserve This?" went out in August 1987 as the second single from Actually, the Pet Shop Boys' second album, and it hands half the song to Dusty Springfield. It was the duo's first major team-up with another recording artist, and it had been waiting years for her: Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe first wrote and demoed it around Christmas 1984 with the American songwriter Allee Willis, meant it for Please, and got stuck on who should sing the other part.

Springfield turned out to be the answer. Her smoky, wounded voice slides against Tennant's arch deadpan over Lowe's lush, sweeping keyboards, and Stephen Hague's production gives the whole thing the gloss of a Hollywood weepie. It was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic and put Springfield back on the map; the Pet Shop Boys went on to write and produce "Nothing Has Been Proved" and "In Private" for her album Reputation.

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