Pet Shop Boys Volume

Marking the fortieth anniversary of the release of their first album, Please, in 1986, Pet Shop Boys Volume is the definitive retrospective and complete visual record of the duo’s career, presented year by year in a contemporary literary format.

236remaining £95.00

Overview

Three-time Brit Award winners and six-time Grammy nominees, Pet Shop Boys have sold more than 50 million records worldwide, including No. 1 hits ‘West End girls’, ‘It’s a sin’ and ‘Always on my mind’, and platinum-selling albums Please, Actually, and Very. Uniquely spanning the worlds of music, art, film, theatre, design, and fashion, Pet Shop Boys have forged an identity as unforgettable as their sound. From the seminal graphic design of their record sleeves to their groundbreaking videos and innovative stage shows, they have set the bar for the visual presentation of pop.

Expanding upon Pet Shop Boys Catalogue, published two decades ago, this book presents their entire visual output to date year by brilliant year. Sleeve artworks and packaging, stills from every video, film, and performance, stage sets and costume designs, photoshoots, publications and even Christmas cards all feature, as does every collaboration with luminaries including Mark Farrow, Wolfgang Tillmans, Martin Parr, Bruce Weber, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Scott King, Zaha Hadid, Tom Scutt and Es Devlin.

Concise commentaries by Chris Heath and Philip Hoare provide illuminating insights into the genesis of each project. Hoare’s original introduction is accompanied by a new introduction from Libby Sellers, who considers the importance of Pet Shop Boys within the history of design, while a new foreword by Jeremy Deller reflects on the enduring impact of their music and image.

With a cover and slipcase designed by Farrow and a brand-new conversation between Heath, Tennant and Lowe, Pet Shop Boys Volume is a visual feast and a sumptuous tribute to four decades of creative innovation.

To mark the book’s publication, Pet Shop Boys will be playing five intimate live shows from 6–10 April 2026 at London’s Electric Ballroom. Register by 12:00 PM GMT on Tuesday 18 November via the link here to receive priority ticket access. Priority ticket access presale commences at 10:00AM GMT on Wednesday 19 November.

Specification

234 × 156 mm
592 pages
Hardback
Slipcase
Limited edition of 750 copies

Book and slipcase bound in bright orange buckram material with blind debossed typography

Slipcase lined in two-colour Electric patterning

Inset label numbered and signed by Pet Shop Boys on backboard

How it works

A general release edition of this book will be published 7 April 2026. This signed, numbered, and slipcased edition is available only from Volume and will ship in March 2026.

Estimated delivery

March 2026

Shipping

Tracked worldwide

Limited to only 750 signed and numbered copies, this special edition features a hardback cover and slipcase designed by Farrow. Both book and slipcase are encased in orange buckram material featuring blind embossed typography details.

The signed and numbered bookplates are affixed to a debossed area on the backboard of the slipcase. The liner of the slipcase is printed in two colours in an extended electric shock pattern also used on the endpapers of the book and reflecting the design of Electric, released in July 2013.

No matter where you have come from, no matter to whom you are attracted, you can find and lose yourself in their world. They are a broad church.

Jeremy Deller

Beginning with the release of ‘West End girls’ in April 1984, Pet Shop Boys Volume displays and discusses every aspect of the duo’s visual output year by year up to the 2025 edition of the hardback magazine Annually. Every album and single sleeve design, every stage set and costume design, every live performance and video, every photoshoot and publication is presented and reviewed to reveal the genesis and development of each project.

In each instance, every element of the visual design is pictured alongside a listing of key facts and informative, illuminating, and engaging commentary by Chris Heath and Philip Hoare replete with insightful recollections by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe and their key artistic collaborators. A total of 2,857 images and 96,500 words combine to create a lavish and comprehensive visual retrospective.

We were mainly driven by a desire to do things differently from anyone else…. We’ve managed to do something that has our imprint on it. That’s just us, unique. That says as much about us as our music does.

Chris Lowe

Pet Shop Boys have collaborated with a wide range of artists, photographers, designers, and film makers in the creation of their visuals. Graphic designer Mark Farrow has brought an elegant minimalist aesthetic to the vast majority of their record sleeves. Derek Jarman conjured a flamboyant theatrical production for the 1989 MCMLXXXIX tour while Es Devlin combined lasers and digital circuit boards with Minotaur headpieces in the stage production for the Electric tour of 2013–15.

Eric Watson created an urbane, existential image for the duo with the video for ‘West End girls’ in 1985, while Dutch artist Han Hoogerbrugge drew on a computer games aesthetic for the animated video for ‘Love etc’ in 2009, and the 2019 lyric video for ‘Dreamland’, combined photos of Alexanderplatz station with graffiti and public signage to give a social media vibe.

I admire the artifice of performance, the creation of a persona through costume. Extreme is part of our iconography.

Neil Tennant

Exclusive priority ticket access for live performances

To mark the book’s publication, Pet Shop Boys will be playing five intimate live shows from 6–10 April 2026 at London’s Electric Ballroom. Register by 12:00 PM GMT on Tuesday 18 November via the link here to receive priority ticket access. Priority ticket access presale commences at 10:00AM GMT on Wednesday 19 November.

Meet the authors

Chris Heath is the author of the recently re-released books Pet Shop Boys, Literally and Pet Shop Boys versus America, two best-selling biographies of Robbie Williams, and No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust. He currently writes for The Atlantic, GQ, Esquire, Vanity Fair, New York, and the Smithsonian magazine.

Philip Hoare is a writer and curator. His books include acclaimed biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noel Coward, Leviathan or, The Whale, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, and William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love.

Libby Sellers is a design historian, curator, and writer. Formerly a curator at the Design Museum in London, she ran her eponymous design gallery for a decade. In 2014, she was awarded Woman of Achievement in the Arts by the Women of the Year awards.

Jeremy Deller is a Turner Prize-winning artist. He is also the author of Art is Magic.