The album to start with
Actually
Released in 1987, Actually opens with a seemingly disparate drum roll, Dancing Queen glissando and the squeal of car tyres, and rockets into a succinct 10 songs that bring the lecture hall to the club. Anchored by Neil Tennant’s deadpan delivery, highbrow doesn’t so much meet lowbrow as invites it in and spends a very pleasant evening debating socioeconomic issues with it before taking it out for a sweaty make-out sesh in a high-NRG club.
Rather than sticking to mindless hooks and vapid lyricism as some of their contemporaries did, the Pet Shop Boys elegantly delved into big issues. It’s a Sin picks apart the dichotomy of being Catholic and gay, mixing monastic chanting, reverential echo and house-felling drops. It Couldn’t Happen Here was one of three songs Tennant wrote about the Aids crisis and its specific effect on and subsequent passing of a friend. It has the feel of a quivering lip in a stoic face, a reasoned argument when all you want to do is rage. (The strings were arranged by Angelo Badalamenti, but recorded on a Fairlight when nobody remembered to book an actual orchestra).
But amid the soul-searching, there’s the pure pop adrenaline of Heart, the wonderful silliness of Shopping and the utter perfection of What Have I Done to Deserve This?, a duet with a mid-slump Dusty Springfield. The beauty of the Pet Shop Boys, and of Actually in particular, is the deftness with which they manoeuvre from all-out pop to elegiac melancholy and back again. They understood, instinctively, that pop music was not to be underestimated, revelling in it rather than sneering or cynically exploiting it for commercial gain. The result is an album that barely feels like it’s aged in the era of 80s revivalism. Sparklingly clever and skirting naff like a strobe light on a dancefloor, Actually is that rare thing: a second album that pleased everyone.
The three to hear next
Behaviour
“It’s fundamental that what we do only exists in our own universe,” Tennant told Melody Maker around the release of 1990’s Behaviour. “When you like Pet Shop Boys, you are in our world.” That world, which had been all camp-couture and adrenaline-surging pop, was about to graduate into something more sombre.
The melancholy Behaviour marked the end of the Boys’ imperial period – the age when that secret recipe for hits was infallible – as they entered a more reflective era. Being Boring, which Tennant and Lowe had been sure was a hit, flopped in the charts but has long been a fan favourite, not just because of the petulance of the title (coined after they were accused of “being boring”) and the indignant hook but also because of its subject matter, namely the same friend whose death Tennant sang about in It Couldn’t Happen Here. Being Boring tracks the move from adolescence to adulthood and, in parallel, from health to death.
Behaviour has come to be seen as a gateway from the 80s Pets into 90s Pets. It saw them experimenting with musical arrangements that hinted at their future theatrical aspirations, albeit under woozy synthscapes. “Also it probably didn’t have irritatingly crass ideas in it,” Tennant later said, “like our songs often do.” Which is quite something for an album that includes songs titled How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously? and My October Symphony.
Electric
On 2002’s Release, sad-lad guitar music had infiltrated the Pets’ world. Thankfully they’d got that out of their system and by 2013’s Electric, Johnny Marr’s six-string was out and thumping dance and vocals beamed in from another planet were in. With the weight of 11 studio albums behind them, they were wary of making something that sounded like a carbon copy of what they’d done before. The brief producer Stuart Price received was: Electric was to be a dance record. Every track, even the down tempo ones, were to have “that euphoric, fresh feel”.
It is near impossible to listen to Electric without closing your eyes and feeling the dancefloor around you; the lights swirling behind your eyelids, the feel of bodies pressing against you from all angles. The searing joy of dance underpins the entire album; lyrics are sparse and Lowe’s arrangements given space to shine. In some ways, the yearning romance of Love is a Bourgeois Construct is peak Pet Shop Boys: the music is based on a Michael Nyman piece, which in turn was based on a Henry Purcell piece, while the lyrics tell the story of an intellectual abandoned by their lover, based on a passage in David Lodge’s 1988 novel Nice Work. It’s also a huge, incomparable banger.
Disco
The Pet Shop Boys love remixes. Having another artist rework their songs is the only way for Tennant and Lowe to hear their music as fans do – and this first remix record was something of a screw you to anyone who’d ever described any of their songs as radio-unfriendly. Some tracks from Please and some B-sides were reworked by the Pets themselves and frequent Pets producers Julian Mendelssohn and Shep Pettibone, among others. The result is a short album that speaks to the unending versatility of song and the Pets Shop Boys’ view of their music as a living entity that can be set free rather than be closely guarded.
One for the heads
The Birthday Boy
It’s almost impossible to pick a deep cut from the Pets’ vast back catalogue: their love of remixes, their host of albums, collaborations, covers, gorgeously inventive live performances, entire musical shows … so I’ve picked a deeply sad one. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the poppers o’clock hits because the Pets are peerless in that arena but they’re also masters of the tragic – and this moving Christmas ballad about Jesus’s return to Earth only to be murdered in a racist attack is about as lushly tragic as it gets.
The primer playlist
Spotify users, use the playlist below or click here. Apple Music users, click here.
Further reading
Literally, by Chris Heath
In possibly the greatest music book ever written, journalist Chris Heath joins the Pet Shop Boys on tour in Japan in the late 80s and spends hours talking with them about absolutely everything. (There is a lot of shopping.) Incredibly detailed, thoroughly entertaining – and the ending is a peerless kiss-off to everyone’s favourite troll, Piers Morgan.
One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem, by Neil Tennant
As author of some of the silliest, cleverest and most impressively intellectual lyrics in the game, Tennant’s anthology is worth poring over. His brief but entertaining anecdotes on each of the songs he’s chosen are entertaining and illuminating in equal measure.
Imperial, by Tom Ewing
Neil Tennant was the man who coined the term “imperial phase”, namely the period when a pop star simply cannot put a foot wrong. In this contemporary examination of the phrase and how it relates to both the Pet Shop Boys and modern pop, Ewing tracks not only the group’s own imperial phase but also the band’s legacy.
