(Credits: Far Out / Pet Shop Boys)
Thu 2 October 2025 1:00, UK
Misinformation, and the complete misinterpretation of decent information, are not new phenomenons of the social media age. Nor is the idea of exploiting a misunderstanding for one’s own benefit.
Pet Shop Boys singer Neil Tennant was already well aware of this back when he was just a snobby music journalist in the early 1980s. By the time he’d switched sides and become one half of a chart-topping pop juggernaut in 1986, he was well equipped to deal with critics and reporters getting their facts wrong.
“I read in ID magazine that we’d written a new song called ‘Paninaro’, which is the name of an Italian youth cult in North Italy,” Tennant told Rolling Stone in November of 1986, clarifying, “Well, the fact was we hadn’t [written that song]. But after we read that, we thought, ‘That’s not a bad idea’. So we did it.”
Sometimes leaning into bad information, if it’s innocuous enough at least, can be easier than correcting it.
Pet Shop Boys were faced with a somewhat similar conundrum as they toured America in 1986, riding high on the success of their cross-Atlantic hits ‘West End Girls’ and ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’. The latter song, it seemed, had been embraced by an unexpected segment of the American music listening public, specifically the slick-haired, briefcase-carrying, cocaine-snorting, Gordon Gekko-quoting guys in the country’s high-rise financial offices.
Tennant’s ridiculous chorus, ”I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money”, was paired with an equally silly MTV video for the re-release of the single, which had initially gone overlooked a year prior. The over-the-top new video featured Tennant wearing Uncle Sam’s stars-and-stripes tophat while bags of cash literally fell from the sky. It was a satire, a send-up, but in Reagan’s America, it felt like a reasonable motivational jam.
“I think it’s quite funny that people in America take it seriously,” Tennant told Rolling Stone, “It’s totally obvious that the song is ironic. It was meant to have the feel of a punk song, in that I was singing something horribly crass that would obviously get up people’s noses.”
The irony, as with a lot of British comedy, didn’t cross the pond intact, leaving Tennant and bandmate Chris Lowe to answer questions, for years to come, about their apparent cocky attitudes toward becoming rich pop stars.
“[‘Opportunities’] is a very sad-sounding song to me,” Tennant further explained, “I don’t think you get the impression that the people in the song are going to make any money. It’s kind of obvious that some kind of crass yuppies would think it’s a yuppie song, and good luck to them.”
35 years later, ‘Opportunities’ suddenly returned to the US charts after it was featured in a 2021 Super Bowl commercial for life insurance. Irony upon irony, the brainy Neil Tennant had once again taken advantage of the oft-misunderstood meaning of the single, making lots more money in the process.
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