Never ask a DJ at a wedding why he doesn’t play a certain song. You will always get the answer that he knows exactly what he is doing. And that’s true too. Anyone who observes a playlist manager at such events realizes that his work essentially consists of knowing in which emotional direction the celebrants are currently moving. If you fail to appreciate this achievement, just watch what happens when you play “Dance Me To The End of Love” at the wrong moment. Everything has its time, even at weddings.
I actually wanted a specific Pet Shop Boys song, but I didn’t get it. As far as I can tell, the use of other songs didn’t have any effect. But I was still sad. A beautiful moment is always made even more beautiful by the music of the Pet Shop Boys.
For many years, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have accompanied me through life like good friends who are always there. They don’t always have the right advice, but they always have a different way of looking at things. Their sweetener tunes are a resounding nutritional supplement in bad times. Who can avoid “Go West”? Who doesn’t feel transported to another time dimension for four minutes when “West End Girls” starts? And then you only really discover this duo once you leave out all their hits. And there are many! They could have played twice as many pieces on their best-of tour recently.
Music for the masses? Yes but…
The Pet Shop Boys, that’s what makes it so easy, are there for everyone. They are the fulfillment of every promise ever made by pop music. At the same time, their songs want to be a warm coat for those who are existentially cold, but also to get bohemians dancing whose musical taste is otherwise limited to five records from Father’s collection. Her songs have an almost erotic tension between polished emotions and intellectual distance. For them, grandiosity and artificiality are part of a world theater fueled by camp and irony, in which the melancholy of big city life finds just as much appeal as queer desire.
In short: Tennant and Lowe make music for people who feel hurt but are elegant enough not to show it. As exemplified in “Being Boring”. An Oscar Wilde story painted with chrome. Silent tears. So with the Pet Shop Boys it’s even more about WHY there are people who need these songs.
Anyone who has the pleasure of speaking to the two musicians will experience two dignified, aging British gentlemen in hoodies who politely and charmingly invite you to take part in a salon conversation that you have not previously attended but has probably had at least two people for a long time. Before the first question comes out, the men in turn ask where the interviewer lives. Tempelhof. They immediately blurt out memories of flights to the former airport there. They add that this is now an adventure playground for adults who don’t want to grow up.
So you take a seat in one of these conversations with the Pet Shop Boys. Actually, these are also an art form in themselves, a necessary addition to their often intertwined work. Since 1981, Tennant/Lowe have been conducting a dialogue, sometimes with guests, sometimes without. If ever there was a musical equivalent of the beautiful British lexicon term “sophisticated,” it is the music and also the performance of the Pet Shop Boys.
Great songs follow terrible songs
You also experience the curiosity of two artists who have continued to refine, chop up and reassemble their work with glue since the first written number “Jealousy”. It speaks volumes that this little melodrama about hurt feelings, improvised in 1982, only appeared in 1990, on “Behaviour”, perhaps their most sensitive, but definitely most wistful album. It was the first one where they allowed guitars too. Everyone has their time, including the Pet Shop Boys.
“How I Learn To Hate Rock ‘n’ Roll”. That was the attitude in the 80s. Some carried it on, others became weak. You don’t have to share them to follow the sound of this band. Incidentally, this is also the title of one of the many terrible numbers that Tennant/Lowe produced along the way. Keep going, don’t miss a remix. When they married U2 and Frankie Valli with “Where The Streets Have No Name (I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You),” it wasn’t just Bono who asked: “What Have We Done To Deserve This?”
As with all artists who are not concerned with the perfect work but with the possibilities of expression, this is to be accepted. There are Pet Shop Boys numbers that I don’t want to hear a second time. With other songs, like “Left To My Own Devices,” I hear more nuances with each new listen. How do you write lines like “I was faced with a choice at a difficult age/Would I write a book? Or should I take to the stage?/But in the back of my head I heard distant feet/Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat” and why do you put such a drama at the beginning of a record called “Introspective”? The Pet Shop Boys are a band for people who like to ask questions. It’s not important whether you know Debussy, but it helps.
The first time I consciously noticed a song by the duo was in a place that was definitely not built for their music, but even there it found its way effortlessly. I went to a Hertha BSC game with my father at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. At that time, the club was only in the second division, as it is currently, but played even less attractively than today. I hadn’t yet developed the interest in football that my father brought with him, who can develop a taste for even the dullest of games, so out of boredom I jumped over the countless empty benches at halftime. A spontaneous pleasure that I suddenly stopped when I heard “It’s A Sin” for the first time from the stadium speakers. The goosebumps that hit me as part of the operatic synth pads and the monumental marching song never wanted to go away afterwards.
How inappropriate might this public confession of Catholic guilt socialization seem in a sports cathedral? But wait, it’s not just a biographical piece of music with a powerful rhythm (“It’s A Sin wants to accuse – and uses pop as a weapon), it’s much more. The words of the song work like a stamp. The choir doesn’t want to connect, it executes. You dance to the song, but under duress. Suddenly you find a closeness to what is happening there in a stadium with the athletes and, above all, the spectators.
Anyone who listens to the Pet Shop Boys, not just casually while visiting a shopping mall or on the car radio – even if that is exactly how these songs are initially intended to be consumed – will quickly lose themselves in them. Because there is always a sparkle: a seemingly hidden level of meaning, a crooked beat, a stumbled vocal line, an outrageous production detail. You can hear this music like everyday music, intended only for a moment (a wedding!). Or you can use it as a compass for the excesses of pop music, which the two musicians influenced and accompanied with wit.
Controlled drama
It’s not difficult to get lost in this maze of symbols and allusions. The Pet Shop Boys have always been their own performers. Maybe that’s a bit of vanity. The former critic Tennant knows what it means to passionately reject something. The band has reissued their albums several times and turned them into exemplary experimental arrangements of their musical work. You get the hits, but also the output and excess. In addition, for each song there are background stories, harsh or tongue-in-cheek judgments and lyrics in black and white that may resist being literature, but as poetic flights of sparks they live primarily from HOW they are sung by Neil Tennant.
This voice is an argument in itself. Of course, it is not a natural phenomenon, but, like everything with this duo, it is consciously constructed. It is reminiscent of news anchors and tones from chansons. Tennant mostly stays in a comfortable baritone range. He avoids big leaps and registers of pathos. High tones are not sung heroically, but are taken lightly, almost thinly or ironically. The result is a marzipan mixture of monumentality and intimacy. Of course it’s also very British, a controlled drama.
Colleague Sassan Niasseri once said that the Pet Shop Boys have great songs, but not a single great album. But I think there are some who are close. “Yes,” for example, which has an irresistible tendency towards rushing anthems. And with “Love etc.” a song you want to take with you on vacation. You won’t quickly find anyone with whom you can agree on what’s best or worst about the duo. Their art is also one of trying out and remixing things; The atmospheric is placed above the final. This will soon also be available in “Pet Shop Boys Volume”, a book that collects all the visual impressions that belong to the musicians’ entire oeuvre. You can hear, see, smell, taste and feel the Pet Shop Boys.
It has often been the case in my life that I understand something when I can discuss it over and over again about a specific subject. A good way to get closer to the cinema is to have a never-ending discussion about Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Francois Truffaut reflected this with his title “How did you do that, Mr. Hitchcock?” exactly this method for the famous interview volume with Hitch. And so I and others who also play this game often ask myself how they did it, the Pet Shop Boys. Or: How it feels, Pet Shop Boys music. Somehow these thoughts always lead to the question of what drives Tennant and Lowe’s pop machine.
Quite simply: their music is the radiant atomic nucleus of all designs of pop music. Neither more nor less.
At this point, ROLLING STONE author Marc Vetter writes about his personal experiences with pop culture. Also recently published:
