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Pet Shop Boys – The 1980s Live On

Posted on April 21, 2010
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The Pet Shop Boys are an iconic British electronic band. They are widely viewed as capturing the spirit of the 1980s with their anthemic debut, West End Girls, which raced to the top of the charts in both the UK and USA in 1985. Loyal fans, or “Petheads”, attend concert after concert as Neil Francis Tennant and Christopher Sean Lowe take to the stage “with Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat”. So what is the secret of the band’s success and what does the future hold for this most iconic of 1980 acts?

The first trump card that the Pet Shop Boys is their urban sardonic cool. In Thatcherite 1980s Britain, their cutting and ironic lyrics were as razor sharp as their suits. Neil and Chris captured the spirit of the age with their lyrically audacious “West End Girls”, featuring deadpan rapping and forming a perfect portrait of mid-1980s London. Their anthemic reworking of “Always on My Mind” by Elvis Presley to mark the tenth anniversary of the King’s demise updated a tender romantic ballad and pitchforked it straight into the harsh materialism of 1980s pop culture.For three or four years the Boys could do no wrong. It was ironically only when their popularity waned a little that they produced their greatest work.

The second secret of the Pet Shop Boys is their resilience and adaptability. Uniquely for forty and fifty something creative performers, they have never been stuck in a rut but always been open to sonic experimentation. Their brave decision to work with Xenomania (record producers of “Girls Aloud” fame) for 2009′s “Yes” epitomises this spirit. While “Behaviour” (1990) is widely regarded as their masterpiece, they followed it up with the groundbreaking and supercharged “Very” which pioneered innovative videos and computer graphics.

The third formula in the Pet Shop Boys’ success is the intelligent and complex ambiguity of their music. Lyrics are poetic, music is subtle and the messages are mixed and often melancholic. This is real music, pop at its most beautiful. The Pet Shop Boys not only have music and devoted fans but a bright future for as long as they choose to entertain us.

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