Rent (song)
song by the Pet Shop Boys
"Rent" is a song by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys from their second studio album, Actually (1987). It was released as the album's third single on 12 October 1987.
Background and recording
"Rent" was written in 1984. The song is about a transactional relationship between two people. According to lyricist Neil Tennant, the title was chosen for its association with rent boys with the intention of being provocative, but the story he envisioned for the song was about a mistress of a powerful man.
I've always imagined it's about a kept woman, and I always imagined it set in America. I vaguely thought of one of the Kennedys, for some reason, and imagined that this politician keeps this woman in a smart flat in Manhattan, and he's still got this family, and the two of them have some sort of relationship and they do love each other but it's all kind of secret...
The original inspiration for the music was the Italo disco song "I Like Chopin" by Gazebo. According to Chris Lowe, an earlier version of "Rent" was a Hi-NRG track, which they recorded with Bobby Orlando. For the album version, producer Julian Mendelsohn decided that they already had enough uptempo songs for Actually, so keyboard programmer Andy Richards reduced the tempo by half.
The public source identifies “Rent (song)” as song by the Pet Shop Boys. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Rent, song and Shop.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3932990. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rent (song)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.