![]() If the duo’s penchant for satire seems less present on Hotspot, says Tennant, that’s because it was “siphoned off” on the 2019 EP Agenda, home to Give Stupidity a Chance and What Are We Going to Do About the Rich?, by some distance the angriest songs the Pet Shop Boys have ever recorded. And it’s great to walk in from daylight on to the main dancefloor, which is completely dark, there’s just a kick drum playing four-to-the-floor, and it’s really, really exciting in an alienating way.” ![]() You get the people who’ve been there all night, they’re absolutely twatted, but then there’s a fresh crowd coming in as well, and it’s a very interesting atmosphere. We treat it as pre-lunch drinks – we go up to the Panorama Bar and have a glass of prosecco. “We go on Sunday lunchtimes,” smiles Tennant, “around 12 o’clock. They are regular visitors to its notoriously hedonistic techno mecca Berghain, although their approach to the club seems impressively genteel, as befits men in their 60s. “I announced I was going to retire,” sighs Tennant, “when we played a half-empty venue in Grimsby on my birthday in 2002.”Īnd yet here they are, in 2020, roughly where they were in 1984, occasional residents of Berlin (they own a flat in the city, its kitchen converted into a recording studio, complete with “a vocoder which we never use because I don’t know how to plug it in,” says Lowe), making music at least partly inspired by the city’s nightlife. It’s a state of affairs they seem to enjoy, but it’s not without its hiccups. Now, however, they are a reliably stadium-filling, festival-headlining act – a 25-date greatest hits tour of European arenas begins in May. The duo long ago reneged on their refusal to play gigs, although, as Tennant points out, his celebrated 80s line about how he “liked proving that we can’t cut it live” was meant as a joke, on account of their inability to make their grandiose plans for shows work financially – their first US tour was both a vast success and lost half a million pounds. The first of their four shows at London’s Royal Opera House, 2016. Still close enough to the heart of pop that younger stars flock to work with them – Hotspot features Olly Alexander of Years & Years, who, Tennant dryly notes, “is of a different generation to us, sings in a different style, more R&B, whereas Chris always says I sing like Julie Andrews” – and yet sufficiently highbrow that all the ballets and oratorios and scores for silent films feel like a natural fit rather than an affectation. But while the vast majority of their 80s contemporaries have long been consigned to the nostalgia circuit or vanished entirely – “down the dumper,” as Tennant memorably put it while working as a journalist on Smash Hits – the Pet Shop Boys have become a kind of curious national institution. For one thing, the Pet Shop Boys have sold 100m records. ![]() Thirty years of the duo patiently explaining that Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) was a satire of 80s excess doesn’t seem to have dimmed TV documentary directors’ enthusiasm for playing it in the background during footage of yuppies shouting into enormous mobile phones or spraying champagne 1987’s Shopping was a withering portrait of London consumerism between the Big Bang and Black Monday, so shrewdly drawn you could imagine a City boy of the era banging the wheel of his Ferrari and bellowing along, oblivious to its real intent.Ī lot has changed since 1984, though. ![]() They began their career in 1984, working with hi-NRG producer Bobby Orlando, transforming the predominant sound of the era’s gay clubs into a very British and brainy brand of pop music, shot through with a streak of social comment so subtly done that people frequently missed the point entirely. Set against this backdrop, the Electric/Super/Hotspot trilogy does seem like a return to what you might call Pet Shop Boys basics. “Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s company produced it and I remember him saying: ‘Well, sorry guys, I guess it was a bit too much for everybody.’” “It was a very outrageous piece for 2001, loads of drugs in it, somebody dies,” notes Tennant. Its revival was also noticeably more successful than the critically savaged original production. They also provided the music for a theatrical adaptation of Stephen Frears’ film My Beautiful Laundrette and a one-woman Edinburgh festival show by actor Frances Barber, based on the character of Billie Trix, the washed-up pop star she played in the Pet Shop Boys’ 2001 musical Closer To Heaven. It is worth noting that in recent years the Pet Shop Boys have also written scores for Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin and a ballet based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale (2011’s The Most Incredible Thing), as well as premiering A Man From the Future – a kind of pop oratorio based on the life of Alan Turing – at the Proms.
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