The joyous, life-affirming dreamworld of the Pet Shop Boys

Their Dreamworld greatest hits tour is still going strong, still pulling in the ecstatic crowds, after two long years. It returns to Glasgow’s OVO Hydro on Tuesday evening [June 4] on what will be the duo’s fourth Scottish appearance since May 2022.

Tennant and Lowe have also been enjoying a spate of promotional activity in relation to the new album, being interviewed not just for magazine cover interviews (everything from Record Collector to Classic Pop) but also for Pet Shop Boys … Then and Now, a 90-minute-long, behind-the-scenes documentary in the BBC’s ‘imagine …’ strand, presented by Alan Yentob.

What’s more, their extensive catalogue of songs looks like reaching a new generation of fans through exposure in such acclaimed recent films as Saltburn and All of Us Strangers. Yes, it really is a good time to be the Pet Shop Boys, or a fan.

The Pets may have diversified in recent years into providing music for ballets, films and theatre, but their forte remains first-class pop music - erudite, witty, tender, utterly compelling pop music. The exceptionally well-read Tennant as said he is always jotting down notes and phrases and that every Pets album is a picture of the world as they experience it at that time; “so you have that, which is sort of the Neil side, but then you have the Chris side, which is sort of simply about euphoria”.

As the explanatory text beneath the Yentob documentary on the BBC's iPlayer puts it, their songs “have often commented on Britain and the world around them with wit, sensitivity and intelligence driving the stories they want to share through some of the most memorable synth-pop music ever created”.

The quality has remained formidably high ever since their debut album, Please, which was released in March 1986. As Tennant himself told The Herald's Teddy Jamieson four years ago, “ … I think with the Pet Shop Boys you have to admire the quality of the song writing, the way it’s been maintained over the years. To blow our trumpet a little bit. I don’t think many people have done that”.

"I prefer to be Neil Tennant, man of mystery"

The Pet Shop Boys are also renowned for their innovative visual presentation, as reflected in their stage shows, CD artwork and groundbreaking videos. When you factor in their abiding interest in theatre and ballet, you realise the validity of a question that surfaces early in the Yentob documentary: are the Pet Shop Boys art, or arty?

Arty, responds Tennant. Both, in the view of Mark Farrow, the band's long-time designer, who says on camera, "They suck up everything cultural - art, opera, dance, ballet whatever it is, they just take all that in and distill it”. Es Devlin, who has designed some of their stage shows, pointed out that Tennant and Lowe do not discriminate between high and low culture, and are “erudite and precise” in their enquiries.

You don't have to look too far online to see videos of the duo’s lavish Dreamworld stage show. Indeed, a film of a recent concert in Copenhagen was screened in British cinemas earlier this year, with a DVD release to follow at some point.

As anyone who has seen the tour knows, the show features the band’s trademark visuals  – imaginative staging that extends to Tennant’s changes of costumes and dazzling, fast-moving computer graphics. It is a joy to watch. The band are, as a review of their recent gig at the London venue, Koko, in intoxicating form.

The tour, like so much else, was delayed by the lockdown. It wasn't until May 10, 2022, that it finally got underway, in Milan’s Teatro degli Arcimboldi. “In this theatre”, Chris Lowe remembered later, “the handrails were falling off the stairs and things. I thought, oh we’re going to get stuck in a lift here. It was a strange venue”.

There have not, needless to say, been too many places like that since. Between now and then the Pets have played around 80 arena dates across Europe and Latin America. En route they have starred at Glastonbury and other festivals, and even headlined New York’s Madison Square Garden during the 13-date ‘Unity’ tour of North America with New Order.

The Dreamworld set-lists cover every stage of their glorious career, from what Tennant has referred to as their “imperial phase” through to the present day. Thus there are the early, much-loved hits, such as: Suburbia, Rent ("one of our best songs", notes Tennant), Domino Dancing, Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money), Love Comes Quickly, and Paninaro; songs from their undoubted masterpiece, Behaviour (1990); and more recent selections, from Can You Forgive Her? to Dreamland (from their 2020 album, Hotspot), and a clutch of new songs from Nonetheless.

Not Fade Away 1990: Being Boring, Pet Shop Boys

On Tuesday night they return to Glasgow’s OVO Hydro, which they last played on May 29, 2022 (at the end of that year they were the main attraction at Edinburgh’s rain-lashed Hogmanay celebrations, and last summer they played Aberdeen’s P&J Live venue). It will be, as all Pet Shop Boys concerts are, a life-affirming event, one that leaves you with a pleasurable buzz that lasts for days. This leg of the tour will end with five sold-out nights next month at London’s Royal Opera House, the venue where they recorded their Inner Sanctum DVD in 2018.

It’s a diverting thought that it’s all of 40 years since the release of the very first Pet Shop Boys single - West End Girls, a modest underground hit until it was re-recorded with producer Stephen Hague for their debut album, Please, and, eventually, went to the top of the singles charts. The single has become the duo's most-streamed song, with 70 million streams in the UK alone.

Forty years. That they are still with us, still making irresistibly good, stylish, literate, euphoric, thought-provoking music is something to be grateful for.

Not that the Pets ever get too carried away by their success. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, the journalist put a question to them. How did it feel to headline Madison Square Garden? “Just to get that in perspective”, responded the ever-laconic Chris Lowe, “Billy Joel’s done it a hundred times. A hundred Madison Square Gardens! Harry Styles had just done 16. And we managed to scrape together one. Eventually”.

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