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'It was originally very Euro and had a different tune, very French-sounding', the singer said. Later, an incarnation by Bobby O didn't pass muster, and when the track was nominated for production by Stock Aitken Waterman for Please, Pete Waterman decided he wasn't a fan.

Getting Dusty In Here
Mendelsohn's production finally did the song justice. 'I was listening to a lot of ZZ Top', he told Classic Pop magazine in 2017. 'So I sort of sent it in that direction a little bit – the insistent heaviness of it.'

Another key track on the album features the Pet Shop Boys' first guest vocalist – one of the great British soul voices. And once again, it was a song that had been in development since before their debut album. 'What Have I Done To Deserve This' was always conceived as a duet, but after the song was demo'd with American session singer Allee Willis at the end of 1984 (who also wrote the 'since you went away...' passage of the song), the group's imagination was fired up when Tom Watson's assistant Nikke Slight suggested they try Dusty Springfield – whose Dusty In Memphis album is among Tennant's all-time favourites.

Career Revival
She said 'no' to the then-unknown British duo, and after suggestions by their record company that included Tina Turner and Barbra Streisand were rejected by the band, the song didn't make it onto Please. Happily, though, Springfield later heard 'West End Girls' on the radio and liked it. Remembering the earlier approach from the Pet Shop Boys to duet on 'What Have I Done...', she asked her management to get back in touch.

Here it's worth remembering that in the mid-1980s Springfield was far from the revered name in the British pop pantheon she is now, and her career was faltering to say the least. 'When we actually met Dusty, she was living in a pay-by-day Hollywood motel', Tennant told Classic Pop. 'She was really at rock bottom.' Yet the pair were thrilled to have one of their musical heroes singing on their record, and when it became the second single from the Actually album to hit the charts, it helped revive Dusty Springfield's career.

Heart Beat
That track's blend of sung-spoken, English-accented narrative and melodically enhanced dance pop is classic Pet Shop Boys. It's a combination found elsewhere on this album, not least on the opening track 'One More Chance' and its evocation of a lonely urban landscape where 'strangers in overcoats hurry on home'; the chalk-dry electro takedown of consumer culture on 'Shopping'; and the faux-haughty meta-pop of 'Hit Music'.

There's something undeniably warmer about the other two hit singles this album spawned, though, even when 'Rent' creates a sense of melancholy-laced romantic devotion in a yearning torch song paean. And once again, this wasn't its first go around the Pet Shop Boys' songwriting fair, having originally been penned as a Hi-NRG disco number. Andy Richards, the group's keyboard programmer and engineer, had the idea of slowing it down, with captivating results.

While Tennant and Lowe are often regarded as arch-ironists, they deal in emotional resonance as successfully as any great pop songwriters, and 'Heart' would give them Actually's second No 1 single when it followed non-album cover 'Always On My Mind' to the top 40 summit in early '88.

Written – you guessed it – a couple of years previously, 'Heart' is one of their more conventional pop moments, a song sufficiently un-Pet Shoppy for them to consider offering it to female singers including Hazel Dean and Madonna. But they eventually decided on it as the penultimate track on Actually, and it's another sublime highlight.

End Of The Line
The album closes with one of the great PSB deep cuts. 'Kings Cross' – a faintly dreamlike ode to those refugees from the provinces who wander around the titular London transport hub in search of solace – is a thoughtful, atmospheric ending to one of the great British pop long players, and acts as a snapshot of what Tennant has since described as the band's 'imperial phase'.

His tongue was in his cheek as he said that, no doubt, but that's the Pet Shop Boys: a band who have always managed to take the mick, slightly, while also being impossible not to love, actually.