Literally complete

Between July 1989 and December 2014, the Pet Shop Boys ran a club. Not a conventional fan club with a flimsy newsletter limping through your letterbox twice a year, but a fully fledged, band sanctioned operation. Members received gifts, photographs, Christmas cards, posters and regular opportunities to buy exclusive merchandise. There was even a free CD at one point, which felt like winning the lottery, if the lottery paid out in shiny plastic.

For most of us, though, the real reason to join was the club magazine, Literally. Packed with news, interviews, letters and features, and written by professional journalist and long term collaborator Chris Heath, it felt substantial and thoughtfully put together. Better still, you could tell the band were properly involved, which gave it that rare fan club quality: it didn’t feel like it had been assembled at 2am next to a photocopier with a staple gun and a prayer.

I didn’t join when the club first launched, because at the time the cost felt a bit, shall we say, aspirational. By summer 1991, though, I’d somehow scraped the funds together and my membership began with issue six of Literally. Early editions were usually about twenty pages, although depending on how often they came out, some ballooned to fifty or even sixty pages, which is the fan club equivalent of being served a Sunday roast when you only ordered chips.

At the outset, membership promised three issues of the magazine over a twelve month period. In practice, Literally always ran to its own mysterious timetable, and memberships often lasted far longer than a single year. Join in October 2003, for example, and it would be more than two years before your three magazines arrived. By issue 36 in December 2010, the stated aim quietly shifted to two issues a year, which was an equally optimistic target that was not really met either. In theory, there should have been around seventy one magazines released over the lifetime of the club. The fact it only reached issue forty one tells its own story, mostly involving calendars being treated as decorative rather than practical.

Another long running quirk was timing. Issues were rarely delivered in the month printed on the cover, a tradition that carried on right to the end. The final club exclusive edition, dated October 2014, did not arrive until two months later, judging by the postmark on my copy. After the club closed, Literally became an annual publication available through the band’s website, but this only extended to one edition before it was replaced by the hardback book Annually.

Over my twenty three years as a member of the Pet Shop Boys Club, I somehow ended up with a few irritating gaps in my Literally collection. Early on, back issues were occasionally offered for sale, but availability was patchy and I could never get issues 2, 3 or 5. Fast forward thirty years and those gaps had started to nag at me. Because I owned most of the magazines, I had never really clocked which ones were rare. That changed when I realised my missing three were, of course, the notoriously hard to find ones. This is how collecting works. The universe sees your shelf and immediately chooses pain.

For several years I tracked their sale prices on eBay, only to watch them creep steadily upwards. Issue 3 typically went for anywhere between £80 and £125, while issue 5 would frequently fetch an eye watering £200. Issue 2 seemed the most attainable at around £50 to £60, but even that felt like a lot of money for a thirty year old magazine that barely runs to twenty pages. At that price you want at least a pull out poster, a signed apology, or Neil Tennant popping round to read it to you.

In December 2025 I finally took the plunge and bought a copy of issue 2. Almost immediately I felt I’d overpaid, and my optimism about ever completing the collection began to wilt. I even stopped checking auctions for a while, because I was not prepared to spend more than £300 on two magazines just to fill a gap on the shelf. Then a little miracle happened.

One Sunday evening my phone pinged with alerts for new listings of issues 3 and 5. At first, I barely paid them any attention. Auctions usually run for seven days, so there is rarely any urgency unless you enjoy panic as a hobby. But for reasons I still can’t quite explain, call it luck, intuition, or pure boredom, I checked again a minute or two later. That’s when I noticed something different. Both listings had a “Buy It Now” price that was very reasonable. After a few minutes of deliberation, I bought both magazines and I now have a complete collection. So never give up on your collecting ambitions. You never know when they might be fulfilled. Literally.