Please

Pet Shop Boys signed to Parlophone in March 1985 after more than three years of writing together. The album draws on their life in London, and on Italian disco, the new American hip-hop and Bobby Orlando's lo-fi electronic dance music. They wanted Stephen Hague, who had produced Malcolm McLaren's Madame Butterfly and the World's Famous Supreme Team's Hey DJ, while their record company first wanted Stock Aitken Waterman. Hague was given West End Girls as a trial. He suggested slowing it down and making it moodier, with a filmic intro of street sounds. Recording took ten weeks at Advision Studios in London, with David Jacob engineering.

The duo sequenced the songs as a loose storyline. They run away in the first song, arrive in the city with West End Girls, want to make money in Opportunities, fall in love in Love Comes Quickly, move to suburbia, go clubbing, and meet violence and casual sex before the closing Why Don't We Live Together?. Two Divided by Zero, which Tennant wrote with Orlando, carries the voice of a talking calculator he had bought in New York as a Christmas present for his father. Opportunities had reached only 116 on the British chart when first released in July 1985, so Hague reworked it from the single and the 12-inch mix, and the new version reached 11 in Britain and 10 in the United States. Later Tonight was recorded live in the studio with Tennant singing and Lowe on piano, and Lowe played trombone on I Want a Lover.

Mark Farrow designed a minimalist white sleeve with a small Eric Watson photograph of the duo in the center. Please was released on 24 March 1986 and debuted at number three on the British chart. In the United States it reached number seven and is the only Pet Shop Boys album certified platinum by the RIAA. Reviews were mixed. Chris Heath of Smash Hits gave it nine out of ten for ten thoroughly catchy songs, the Trouser Press Record Guide panned it, and Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic later called it a collection of immaculately crafted and seamlessly produced synthesized dance-pop.