CityLife

Pet Shop Boys

Pet Shop Boys

Pet Shop Boys
MEN Arena
December 20, 2009

THE echoey opening refrain from Heart, Pet Shop Boys’ 1988 number one hit, is reverberating around Manchester arena when singer Neil Tennant belatedly emerges wearing a box on his head.

It’s the precise moment you realise everyone’s favourite electro-pop duo still refuse to rest on their laurels. Little may have changed in the Pet Shop Boys’ world - Tennant the arch, camp frontman, Chris Lowe the shy, strait-laced keyboardist – but this show is so ambitious, so spectacular, so flawlessly executed that their creative restlessness and desire for reinvention sets a benchmark in how pop music should be delivered.

The stage show is the visual manifestation of the music itself. On the surface, it may seem disposable and trite, but the imaginative, ES Devlin designed set – a mountain of cardboard boxes constantly rearranged throughout the night – is sharp, poignant and calculatingly daft in equal measure.

Euphoric

And with 25 years of hits to call upon, musically they can do no wrong. One only needs to compare the throbbing intro of West End Girls with material from this year’s Yes album to see how quality control has barely wavered, impossible as it is for an unknowing ear to differentiate between old and new. 

As such, the show is unashamedly triumphant, with the varied and multifaceted hits relentlessly offered: the high camp of Go West co-exists with the beautifully paranoid Jealousy, the art-disco of Left to my Own Devices sits comfortably next to the euphoric Always on my Mind.

There was so much to admire in the sheer scale of ambition, the extraordinary presentation of sound and vision, the sage glamour and knowingly wry wit. But most of all, it was a celebration of the joys of pop music, and just how much fun it really can be when done by two people who are so evidently still in love with its endless possibilities. Pet Shop Boys are still peerless.