Actually

For their second album Pet Shop Boys still had songs from their earliest days, among them It's a Sin (1982), Rent (1984) and One More Chance, which they had recorded with Bobby Orlando. What Have I Done to Deserve This? was written with Allee Willis at the suggestion of their manager Tom Watkins. They had hoped to put it on Please but were waiting for Dusty Springfield to answer. She travelled to London late in 1986 to record it, the first track made for Actually, and the duo had been warned that she was difficult and could no longer sing. Heart was a song they had thought of giving to Madonna, and to Hazell Dean, before keeping it. Shopping began as a joke about spelling out the word and turned into a song about the privatisation of national industries under Margaret Thatcher, with the Tell Sid advertisements for British Gas as a source. King's Cross, the closing track, Tennant called an angry song about Thatcherism.

Ennio Morricone shares the writing credit on It Couldn't Happen Here. The duo had asked him to arrange strings for Jealousy and he sent an Italian song instead, so they used the music from its chorus and wrote a new verse. Angelo Badalamenti contributed an orchestral arrangement, which Blue Weaver programmed into a Fairlight in place of an orchestra. The title refers to an early belief, which Tennant discussed with his friend Christopher Dowell, that AIDS would not greatly affect Britain. By the time Tennant wrote the lyrics Dowell had been diagnosed, and he died two years later. Recording took place at Sarm West and Advision. Julian Mendelsohn produced half of the ten tracks, including It's a Sin. Hague produced a few, including What Have I Done to Deserve This?, and the duo worked on each track for only a few hours at a time before switching to another, to keep everything fresh.

The title was simply a word they say a lot. Lowe joked at the time that they had considered calling it Jollysight, after an Italian hotel. The cover photograph by Cindy Palmano shows Tennant yawning and Lowe scowling. It was taken for a Smash Hits cover during the video shoot for What Have I Done to Deserve This?, and Mark Farrow cropped it tightly against white after the duo shelved a planned painting by Alison Watt. Lowe was unhappy with the cover and remains so, yet it has come to be seen as the defining image of the duo.

Actually debuted at number two on the British chart behind Michael Jackson's Bad, spent 42 consecutive weeks in the top 40, and is the only Pet Shop Boys album certified triple platinum by the BPI. In the United States it reached number 25 and went gold. Chris White of Music Week called it well worth the wait, and Robert Christgau of The Village Voice praised it as actual pop music with something actual to say. Q placed it at number 22 on its 2006 list of the 40 best albums of the 1980s, and Rolling Stone ranked it number 435 on its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums.