Not For Me, Baby: Pet Shop Boys have tried to remix a Tina Turner leftover… with tepid results

“It’s like giving someone your dog to take out for a walk, and they bring back a different dog”, once remarked Blur bassist Alex James, sardonic glint and all. 

The lanky cheesemaker was, of course, referring to a certain retooling of the Britpoppers’ irresistibly louche Bowie-down-the-disco strut from 1994. 

In one of those great gestalt moments, the resultant Girls And Boys — for it is they — was the very first time the Pet Shop Boys agreed to rework an existing single for a third party (i.e. an act they hadn’t already produced*), and which, notably, also marked the debut of the band allowing one of their tracks to be handed over to outside remixers. 

Three decades on, and mixmeisters Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have built up a considerable catalogue of side hustles. Everyone from The Killers and MGMT to Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher to Lady Gaga and Madonna have opted to have Team PSB sprinkle some stardust on their contemporaneous choons.

Indeed, in the spring of 2025 alone dancefloor rejigs for Primal Scream, The Hidden Cameras and Tina Turner were unveiled, with the latter pair both debuting on 25 April, the same day as listeners could witness Neil Tennant turning in an extended cameo, as the core vocalist on Sleep Of Reason, a new classical album by Neneh Cherry’s erstwhile Rip Rig + Panic cohort Mark Springer.

Whereas Innocent Money could be described as claustrophobic, and How Do You Love? Balearic, how on earth to describe Hot For You Baby.

Opportunistic, perhaps?

The Tina tune is remarkable for many reasons, sadly not all of them good. It’s certainly something of a first, in that PSB have never remixed a track from a dead person’s archives before, or from the distant past. 

The closest comparison, I guess, would be the remodelling of Yoko Ono’s eighties electro classic Walking On Thin Ice in 2003, but even that sported new vocals specifically for the project, and at the time of writing John Lennon’s muse is still wheeling around on terra firma, close to Bowie’s widow Iman in the Catskills region of upstate New York.

With Tina’s passing on 24 May 2023, no such option was available Hot For You Baby, a rediscovered vault track left languishing for decades, and one of a number of try outs laid down circa ’82-’83 at the iconic LA landmark that Sinatra effectively built, Capitol Studios in Hollywood. 

Produced by the American Capitol-EMI label’s own A&R man and resident Turner supporter John Carter, none of these pre-comeback sessions would end up on the primarily London-recorded Private Dancer, though a raggedy quintet — I Wrote A Letter, Rock ‘N’ Roll Widow, Don’t Rush The Good Things, When I Was Young, Keep Your Hands Off My Baby — did appear as the flipsides of the first five singles plucked from the same multi-platinum album that lit the fuse for Turner as a bona fide far from overnight sensation (Let’s Stay Together, Help, What’s Love Got To Do With It, Better Be Good To Me, and the title track Private Dancer itself).

A sixth, a so-so cover of The Motels’ Total Control was given to the various artists’ We Are The World charity LP in 1985.

That left just one known outtake, Hot For You Baby, which in 2025 was the carrot included on an inevitable 40th Anniversary deluxe expansion of Private Dancer, and marks the first time the Tina Turner estate has authorised an unreleased song to be rescued from the archives.

Hot For You Baby is what could be blithely described as a cover of a late ’70s Aussie pub rocker from the Sydney trio that spawned Love Is In The Air: singer John Paul Young and the pen and production duo behind the Easybeats and Flash And The Pan, George ‘No Relation’ Young and Harry Vanda.

If you aren’t sure who they are, well, they’re the power-pop pair whose most enduring third party successes were arguably when Walking In The Rain (FATP) kicked off the first side of Grace Jones’s Nightclubbing, while Friday On My Mind (Easybeats) opened the second side of David Bowie’s Pin-Ups.

Hot For You Baby was chosen as a John Paul Young single in early 1980, though it was nowhere near as melodic as the earlier two. Both the JPY and Tina takes are fairly unremarkable uptempo rockers full of over-amorous bluster rooted in Chitlin’ Circuit blues.

As if there wasn’t enough showboating guitar chords already, the Turner version replaces a hideous sax solo for yet more squally axe grinding. The rhythm is underpinned by an organ I assumed was a Jimmy Destri-style Farfisa, though another veteran keyboardist, Mott The Hoople’s Morgan Fisher, tells me it “sounds like a Hammond though a Leslie speaker with a fast rotor.” 

In summation, it’s no wonder the song was never in contention for Private Dancer because even though it sounds a bit like Better Be Good To Me (the first Tina single we had in our house, trivia fans, circa September ’84), it’s much worse than Better Be Good To Me and adds little to Tina’s legacy.

It begs the question, what were the Pet Shop Boys thinking of?

“We had the joy of working with Tina in the mid ’90s on our song Confidential and now it’s a pleasure to be able to remix this funky song from the ’80s with an awesome vocal from Tina.”

One just can’t imagine Neil and Chris were sitting down with their tea and biscuits one cold day in January when Hot For You Baby was made available to the public and thought, “Wow, what a great song. We must remix it!”

I’d put a thousand smackers on it that the approach came from Team Tina, though if I’d been PSB I’d have wondered very loudly if the stems to Let’s Stay Together might be available instead. By way of its structure and synth-based arrangement, the Heaven 17-produced corker would have been a much more pleasing proposition all round.

At least the song that kickstarted her second wind has a resonance, too, not only for Tina but also for Tennant/Lowe. The boys stated that the Al green cover was the Tina track they’ve “always loved” and cited listening to that and We Don’t Need Another Hero when writing the pretty ballad Confidential in 1992, “to get the idea of her voice.” 

Sadly, it was the discordant jarring of Tina’s vocal track and the Boys’ made to unmeasure reimagining that has been very much a talking point the past month. Even their erstwhile collaborator, celebrated composer Richard Niles — arranger for Left To My Own Devices and Go West, among others, as well as one of writing team on Tina’s last LP before Private Dancer, 1979’s Love Explosion — wasn’t pulling his punches, in communication with me this week:

“PSB did an awful remix of it for reasons only known to their psychiatrists. It’s a weird decision for them to do this because it’s not a great song in the first place. On top of that, what they did was not their usual brilliance. And why do this anyway? Was the original song a hit? Maybe it was, and that’s why you’re writing about it.”

Alas, I’m writing about it to try and make sense of this head-scratching curio and trying to tie it in with the second anniversary of Tina’s passing. But every time I want to like it, the incongruous, almost arrhythmic accompaniment comes back to slap me in the visage. I find myself wondering if the great lady would have signed off on this if she was still around. 

Somewhat unusually for a PSB remix, there aren’t any detectable additional Tennant vocals, instead they’ve made more of a feature of the existing “hot for you baby” refrain from the lusty bathhouse backing singers to provide a dissonant cacophony. 

Even more of a surprise is PSB chose not to modulate the speed and pitch of Tina’s coruscating, caterwauling vocals, and it’s this element of the track that is ultimately its undoing. 

Don’t get me wrong, while some of her material could be a tad bland, Tina Turner was a formidable performer: a little bitty powerhouse possessed of a raw, raspy range (mezzo soprano, precis) that could do belt-it-out-at-the-top-of-your-voice bangers (Nutbush City Limits) or a more mellow timbre that smoothed out over time and focused on emotion over edge (GoldenEye).

Sadly, due to the constraints of the source material there’s little of the light and dark that PSB injected into meisterwerks like Bowie’s Hallo Spaceboy for instance.

Case in point: the Dame’s 1996 single also started out as a fast and furious rock track — a pulverising piece of NIN-esque noise, I wrote in Record Collector magazine at the time — which Tennant/Lowe brilliantly transformed from brash flash into an exhilarating example of intergalactic Eurodisco. 

However, the dynamic duo were only successful in their radical reworking because the artist was available and agreed to re-record his vocals. Neil Tennant has oft-repeated the story that the reason Bowie decided to come into the studio was because he was concerned that Ver Boys had “had the impudence” to “cut-up the lyrics to Space Oddity” to create a second verse.

That’s only half true, though. The main reason was rather more mundane: he was simply responding to their request for vocal assistance, as Tennant recounted to this writer in my first interview with him, in April 1996:

“Chris [Lowe] did a new rhythm track and we sampled David’s vocal and time-stretched it, because the track’s incredibly fast, 152 beats per minute. I think we took it down to 128 bpm. We’d actually phoned up [Bowie’s PR] Alan Edwards and said, ‘David needs to come in and sing the vocal again. Because it’s time-stretched and some of it sounds a bit weird’.”

As with the Spaceboy, for the new Baby the duo have created an unexpected and abstract electronic setting — a wash of synthesized keyboards and sequenced percussion replacing the roll call of power chords, drums and bass.

It’s the sound of rock ’n roll Tina remade in Divine’s filthiest person alive image, of being being dragged into the backroom of a seedy underground New York club so she can growl over a raw early ’80s Bobby Orlando style sleazefest, replete with percussive dogs of lust barking over the cacophony of the meatrack. It’s just a shame this is more dog‘s dinner than canine classic.

Woof, geddit? 

It’s absolutely no coincidence that in 1982 Bobby ‘O’s very Human League-aping first release — and from where PSB’s early sound famously originates from — was called I’m So Hot For You. Though

Indeed, the backing track is a good deal more sweatily atmospheric and less generic than some of the mixes the Pets have had their paws in in recent years, though the main complaint is how the music seems to have little relation with the source material: a rather weak song that doesn‘t really lend itself to remixing. 

Consequently, Neil and Chris have transposed the chords so it’s sort of discordant and unsettling at the same time, yet they’ve shied away from playing around too much with Tina’s vocals, with the result sounding oddly off-key and out of sync, like two different songs were playing at the same time.

One uncharitable comment on a Pet Shop Boys Community forum asked aloud, “Did Chris have a stroke? That’s the only possible explanation.”

The whole dissonant detritus made me wonder if the Boys deliberately shied away from time-stretching after abandoning the same idea for the Bowie track. 

However, the creative force behind NRG Remixes, DJ Colin Balmer, tells me:

“Pretty much every remix requires time-stretch unless you’re sticking to exactly the same tempo as the original. I think the male backing “hot for you baby” samples sound wrong — the timing is definitely out, and I remember thinking the PSB mix was dreadful and the vocals sound pretty awful.

“Because there’s no actual tune in the instrumental, Tina’s lead vocals could go almost anywhere. I don’t know if they’ve stretched them or not but they will have sliced them up. I just think the whole thing is rubbish. For this type of singing Tina’s voice is best accompanied by a loud rock track. I must say the PSB instrumentation sounds much better without her.”

Sadly, at the time of writing, and unlike, say, the PSB remix for Primal Scream, for instance, no dub or instrumental mixes of Hot have been made available, which makes the whole shebang even more perplexing.

In other words, file it under lukewarm affair.

Steve Pafford

*Officially, the first remix Pet Shop Boys completed for a track they hadn’t produced was actually a Cicero’s Heaven Must Have Sent You Back To Me in July 1992. 

Credited with “additional production”, Tennant/Lowe beefed the song up, giving it more of a signature PSB sound. The original version issued the previous year was the debut release on Ver Boys’ short-lived vanity label Spaghetti. 

Alas, Dave Cicero was their young Scottish pop protégé who wound up having a handful of other tunes helmed by the duo, so he hardly qualifies as a third party.