"The Loving Kind" was actually supposed to be for Pet Sho...

The recording process involved the Pet Shop Boys writing a hit single (The Loving Kind) for Xenomania's most famous charges, Girls Aloud, and, more bizarrely, having their own songs marked out of five by Xenomania's shadowy mastermind, Brian Higgins.

Xenomania and Pet Shop Boys wrote the song in sessions for the latter's album Yes.

Pet Shop Boys wrote four songs with the Xenomania team. Three were used on Yes: "Love Etc.", "More Than a Dream", and "The Way It Used to Be". The fourth song, "The Loving Kind", was given to Girls Aloud because Lowe felt it didn't add anything to their own album. Of the songs the duo wrote themselves, two were holdovers from earlier projects: "Pandemonium" was originally intended ...

It was produced by Pet Shop Boys ... worked with them on their first album and had subsequently made records with OMD, New Order and Erasure. The other singles from Very, "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing", "Liberation" and "Yesterday, When I Was Mad", continued the theme ...

This partnership yielded "The Loving Kind" as one of the first compositions, with Tennant and Cooper co-writing the lyrics during studio sessions at Xenomania's base in Kent. The song's melancholic synth-pop ballad structure, evoking themes ...

It is a song co-written by the Pet Shop Boys and Girls Aloud's regular producers, Xenomania, the British production team led by Brian Higgins, and was originally written in sessions for the next Pet Shop Boys album.

This reissue of ‘Yes’ includes — alongside the remastered original album — Pet Shop Boys’ previously unreleased monitor mix of ‘The loving kind’, a song which became a Top 10 hit for Girls Aloud, as well as previously unreleased demos of songs from the 2010 Young Vic theatre ...

It was inspired by artist Gerhard Richter's design of the windows in the cathedral of Cologne, Germany, which the Boys apparently saw on the cover of a catalogue for a Richter exhibition at London's Serpentine Gallery. Richter gets a corresponding nod by being mentioned in the lyrics of the album's first single, "Love etc." ... Pet Shop Boys etc.

There are lots of opportunities, if you know when to take them. The Pet Shop Boys’ long-overdue ‘outstanding contribution to music’ nod at this year’s Brits, coupled with vicarious chart success courtesy of Girls Aloud single ‘The Loving Kind’, has seen their stock in the ascendancy ...