Pet Shop Boys Community

Very good article summing up their carrer. Starts talking about Obscure and ends with fashion and Volume. A few mistaken facts in the middle, like their legendary chronicle about touring China in the 90s (lol). But good article, all in all. This a very prestigious newspaper in Spain.

https://elpais.com/icon/2026-04-15/40-a ... mundo.html

Pet Shop Boys
40 Years of Hits, Reinvention and Risky Decisions: How Pet Shop Boys Became the Best Band in the World

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are nearing seventy, but show no signs of slowing down. After the Obscure event celebrating their forty years in the business, they will return to Spain this summer.

Pet Shop Boys — that is, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant — pose in New York in April 1991. By then, they were already one of the biggest pop duos. They still are.

Joaquín García
15 April 2026 – 04:30 WEST

In 1986, the first album by a British duo called Pet Shop Boys was released. Its title, Please, was an inside joke: the two musicians found it amusing that, to buy it, their fans would have to say the album’s title and be very polite when asking for it. “Do you have the new Pet Shop Boys album, please?” Very English. Very ironic. Forty years later, record shops have all but disappeared, but they are still going strong — more active than ever — and have become the most successful duo in English history and one of the most successful in the world. And they have not lost that fine sense of humour.

Last Monday, 5 April, the first of five concerts celebrating this 40th anniversary took place at the Electric Ballroom in Camden Town, London. Two hours before the doors opened, the queue waiting to get in already stretched around the block. The average age of those attending was well over forty, and almost all were wearing band T-shirts from albums and tours long past.

The setlist they have performed throughout the week — five concerts in total, all sold out from the very day tickets went on sale — is a highly sophisticated selection of what Tennant himself described as some of the fans’ favourites, but which also sums up, very efficiently, the duo’s main interests and defining traits.

“I don’t know anyone who has that many hits”

At first glance, it is striking how active they have been lately, considering that they are a duo edging towards their seventies (Tennant is 71, Lowe 66), have been together for more than four decades in the fiercely competitive music industry, and have earned enough millions to have retired to play golf or pick and choose the occasional event they felt like taking part in. But they have chosen to keep going — in the studio, at festivals, and on the road.

In 2022 they began their Dreamworld tour, fittingly in Spain, with concerts in Madrid and Barcelona as part of Primavera Sound, and they will return to the country this coming summer, with tickets for Valencia and Santander already almost sold out. Dreamworld begins with “Suburbia” and ends with “West End Girls”, two of their earliest songs, both included on that Please which now turns 40. In between come two hours of classics: anthems such as “Left to My Own Devices” and “It’s a Sin”; their great reworkings of others’ songs — “Where the Streets Have No Name” (legend has it Bono was dumbstruck to hear his rock classic turned into a dance anthem) and “Always on My Mind”; house-style classics like “So Hard”, “Heart” and “It’s Alright”; ballads such as “Jealousy” and “Love Comes Quickly”; and dancefloor stormers like “Vocal”. As Noel Gallagher said after seeing them at Glastonbury: “I don’t know anyone who has that many hits.”

The Pet Shop Boys’ numbers are staggering: 42 songs in the UK Top 30, 22 in the Top 10 and 4 number ones. “West End Girls” also reached number one in the United States and, officially, is the first rap-influenced song to do so.

And during these recent years of nonstop arena touring, they have still found time to release a new album — the fifteenth of their career. Nonetheless, written during lockdown, proves that their sound and worldview can adapt to what global society has gone through since the outbreak of COVID: loneliness, incomprehension and isolation, but also the certainty that love can overcome everything, and the conviction that in life, everything gets better when you dance.

Melancholy, irony: Englishness

One day in 1981, Neil Tennant, originally from Newcastle, who had been living in London for some years and worked for the music magazine Smash Hits, went into an electronics shop in Camden Town looking for a cable he needed for his newly bought synthesiser and there he met Chris Lowe. Lowe was an architecture student, newly arrived from Blackpool. After discovering their shared love of music and the fact that both wrote songs, they began meeting to compose together. There was no project yet — just the pleasure of making things.

During a work trip to New York to interview Sting, Tennant met Bobby Orlando, a musician and producer with whom he and Lowe were obsessed at the time. What was meant to be a fan encounter and tentative approach turned into a deal to record the demos Tennant had brought on a cassette tape. Among them was “West End Girls”.

The first commercial version of that song did not work, but a few months later they tried again with a new producer, Stephen Hague, who suggested a bassline — today almost a standard — and a slower tempo. And that strange song, inspired by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and half-rapped in an exaggeratedly British English accent, became the song of the year around the world.

That success — so quick, so absolute — led them to make rapid decisions that would become recurring themes on which they built the rest of their career. Because the first LP title, Please, had been a joke, from then on all their albums would have one-word titles: Actually, Introspective, Behaviour, Very, Nightlife… And because they were both very shy and uneasy on stage, they ended up turning that stiffness into their signature.

Everything, all at once, everywhere

From the beginning, Pet Shop Boys enjoyed undeniable critical and commercial success, but mixed with a certain disdain: they were accused of being both commercial and elitist at the same time, of mixing high culture with music for the masses. They were admired for their exquisite musical taste, yet they only used machines to make music. They had a reputation for superficiality, yet they consistently produced songs with political themes. As they sing in the autobiographical “Left to My Own Devices”: “Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat.”

They have always refused to acknowledge any radical, absolute division of labour in their songwriting, though they admit that Tennant writes most of the lyrics. A couple of years ago they published a book containing a collection of their lyrics together with a text, One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem. There have been scholarly theories written about their linguistics and the politics of pop, as well as hugely entertaining accounts of their first tour of China in the 1990s. They have written at least three musical theatre works — apparently another is on the way — which are periodically revived, as well as a ballet for the Spanish choreographer Javier de Frutos. Their songs appear in films and television series. They have collaborated with David Bowie, Madonna, Robbie Williams, Liza Minnelli, Rammstein, Dusty Springfield, Soft Cell, Shirley Bassey, Boy George, The Killers and Lady Gaga.

Your Funny Uncle and the rats in the underground

“Your Funny Uncle” tells a real story from Neil Tennant’s life, when he attended the funeral of a friend who had died of AIDS — the same friend who had inspired one of their most famous and important songs some years earlier, “Being Boring”. In it, an older man dressed in military uniform receives condolences for the death of his nephew from the nephew’s gay friends, and it is suggested that the military man may himself be a closeted gay man, shaped by his time and circumstances. The English duo’s commitment to making visible the pandemic that marked gay men at the end of the twentieth century was both early and consistent. It began on their second album, Actually (1987), with “It Couldn’t Happen Here”, which speaks of the disbelief they felt when the first deaths from the disease began to occur.

Although they have always maintained an almost absolute privacy about their personal lives, in 1994 Tennant gave an interview to the gay magazine Attitude in which he spoke publicly for the first time about his sexuality. As with the rest of their personal positions, this is something they have tended to express through their records and performances more than through interviews or statements. For example, they recently released a song dedicated to the Russian activist and politician Alexei Navalny, murdered on Putin’s orders, and in 2006 they released “I’m With Stupid” about the “special relationship” between Tony Blair and George W. Bush.

Among the events with which they are celebrating their 40th anniversary, one of the most special is the publication of the book Volume, which brings together the visual history of the duo. They were among the first to work with cult film directors such as Derek Jarman or photographers such as Bruce Weber, who shot the soft-core gay fantasies of the videos for “Being Boring” and “Se a Vida É”. They also worked with Wolfgang Tillmans, who documented the rats living in the London Underground for the daring — and divisive — video for “Home and Dry”. MTV refused to show it.

Despite Chris Lowe’s very British fondness for tracksuits, the duo have always paid attention to what they wear. Issey Miyake and Hedi Slimane have dressed them for videos and tours, they have been the face of Dior campaigns, and they have turned certain items into icons: Lowe’s famous Boy London cap, the legendary Miyake Shade glasses, and the JW Anderson knitted hat Neil Tennant has worn recently. From their fascination with the Italian labels favoured by the 1980s paninari — to whom “Paninaro” is dedicated, mentioning Armani and Versace several times — to the immaculate tuxedos they wore in “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”, perhaps to appear prim and proper alongside Dusty Springfield.

But if there is one thing that distinguishes them at first glance, it is the graphic design of their records, created in collaboration with the British designer Mark Farrow. The seed of their style is already in the cover of that first album, Please, now turning 40. Horrified by the trend of the time to fill sleeves with giant close-ups of singers’ faces, they decided to make theirs smaller and smaller until it became a tiny square lost in the middle of a minimalist white field. That ironic elegance perfectly summed up the duo’s interests. Ever since, they have kept turning the same idea over without any sign of fatigue. One of their covers — Very, with its raised bumps like Lego — even hung in New York’s MoMA. Few artists can say they are art in the most literal sense.