Pet Shop Boys
The Smiths you can dance to. By Andrew Harrison.
Like all the most distinctive artists – Bowie, The Smiths, The Beatles, The Fall – Pet Shop Boys offer a fully-formed and self-contained world. Once attuned, you can discover pretty much anything you’re looking for in the PSB catalogue, from sweet pop songs to raucous dance music to show tunes to avant-garde experiments. Get sucked in and it’s possible to listen to nothing else, for days. Though Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are fond of playing up to the caricature of the emotionally blank singer and the sulky keyboard player (you’ll search long and hard for a picture of Lowe smiling), their detached, supposedly ironic image has provided stealth cover for some of the richest and most affecting songwriting of the past 30 years. From the witty psychodramas of the late ’80s when commercially they could do no wrong (West End Girls; It’s A Sin; Rent; Domino Dancing) via diversions into Latin pop (Bilingual), indie rock (Release), musicals (Closer To Heaven) and ballet (The Most Incredible Thing) to their current status as elder but still-in-the-game statesmen of electronica, Pet Shop Boys have evolved but essentially stayed the same. Just as the dance music they draw on has cycled through hi-NRG via piano-driven rave to sleek garage and back to blowtorch electro – see the splendid new album Super – the same principles that bonded journalist Tennant and architecture student Lowe at their chance meeting in a King’s Road music shop in 1981 still apply. Pet Shop Boys are still about proper songwriting powered by the ever-changing excitement of club music, and a rejection of fake rock passion in favour of something more understated and thus more penetrating. The biggest irony is that they’re not ironic at all. They mean it – all of it. Perhaps that’s why they’ve lasted so long.