Pet Shop Boys Community

It would be dishonest to these musicians to say everything is recorded — both for the keyboards and the percussion, part of it is live. What remains to be seen is what percentage.

sharky wrote: Sat 04 Jul 2026, 4:54 pm It would be dishonest to these musicians to say everything is recorded — both for the keyboards and the percussion, part of it is live. What remains to be seen is what percentage.

I'd be fascinated to find out how Chris and Clare work out which parts they are going to play, and what's left for the multitrack because from what I've observed from watching them play, Chris doesn't always take "the good stuff". And both of them are frequently using all ten digits so it's not a matter of being lazy. There are a LOT of layers in their songs so to bring them to life it's either use a multitrack or have a much bigger band on stage, and the multitrack doesn't need its own hotel room.

I like that the songs that I love to listen to at home actually sound familiar or have been creatively retooled and I'm glad that technology now exists to make this happen. I remember too many gigs in my youth where I was very frustrated because my favorite parts of songs, particularly the effects-driven bits, could not be replicated live, either due to lack of personnel or reliable technology.

greenmile wrote: Thu 18 Jun 2026, 6:34 pm

TallThinMan wrote: Wed 17 Jun 2026, 10:32 pm They have a rack of MacBook Pros running Apple MainStage, which is a sort of version of Logic optimised for live performance. I’m pretty sure it’s all plugins nowadays and that there are no hardware synths or samplers in the rig anymore.

Pete started programming the Obscure shows back in mid-October.

I'm sure I read an interview with Pete during one of their festival shows maybe mid 2010's? where he said that that particular show was the first one they were going to try running the entire show software based. Which would make sense for a festival show I suppose in terms of getting the gear setup quickly. May have been in Literally or one of the Annually's.

But I think they still run hardware based with their own shows.

Pete posted this image to his Instagram story the other day. You can see six MacBooks running Apple MainStage: