Pet Shop Boys

"We were never being boring--we were never being bored."

Pet Shop Boys are a British pop duo formed in 1981, when Blackpool native Chris Lowe and Newcastle native Neil Tennant met by chance in an electronics store. Singer Neil and keyboardist Chris rocketed to fame with their first international hit, "West End Girls", in 1986, and dominated the #1 spot in the pop charts in Britain for another two years.

The two became famous for their unique sound, which they famously described as "Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat". Behind the intensely danceable beats lie Chris Lowe's subtly skilful compositions and Neil Tennant's poetic lyrics. Tennant, a former editor and a professed bibliophile, gives a lot of the songs a literary bent.

Despite popular misconceptions due to Tennant's typical dry delivery, their music is not inherently ironic. While they have done a few ironic songs ("Opportunities"), a surprising proportion of their songs are honestly emotional. Another interesting bit about their music is that Neil often plays a character in their songs, and not necessarily a male character. "I Made My Excuses and Left", for example, is him playing Cynthia Lennon walking in on John and Yoko and realizing her marriage is over.

They are also successful producers and collaborators, having produced Dusty Springfield's Reputation and Liza Minnelli's Results, and having co-written or produced songs for Tina Turner, David Bowie, Robbie Williams, Electronic, Girls Aloud, Kylie Minogue, and The Killers. Many other artists are fans and have publicly cited them as influences, including Madonna, The Killers, Coldplay, George Michael, Belle and Sebastian, and, curiously enough, Axl Rose and Trent Reznor.

Since "West End Girls", the duo have released ten studio albums and in 2009 received the "Outstanding Contribution to Music" award at the BRIT Awards.

Discography:

• Please (1986)
• Actually (1987)
• Introspective (1988)
• Behaviour (1990)
• Very (1993)
• Bilingual (1996)
• Nightlife (1999)
• Release (2002)
• Fundamental (2006)
• Yes (2009)

They have also co-written and produced a musical, 2001's Closer to Heaven, starred in a film, 1987's It Couldn't Happen Here, written a new score for the classic movie "Battleship Potemkin" in 2004, and plan to premiere a ballet, The Most Incredible Thing in March 2011.

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Pet Shop Boys provides examples of the following tropes:

• Age Progression Song: "Being Boring". Snippets of Neil's life in his teens, twenties, and forties.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: Officially, the band is "Pet Shop Boys", no "the". However, they don't mind if it's included, and they even refer to themselves as "the Pet Shop Boys" during live shows.
  • Closer to the trope, I Am Not Shazam below.
• Animated Music Video: "Liberation" (and actually, all of the Very album singles), "Love etc." and the background of the second version of "Opportunities", so retro and pixelled!
• Anti-Love Song: "I'm With Stupid", "Pandemonium", "Rent" ("I love you, you pay my rent..."), "So Hard", not to mention "Love is a catastrophe".
• Anti-Christmas Song: "It Doesn't Often Snow At Christmas". The verses are about how the Christmas message is getting lost and it never snows like it's supposed to, but the chorus is about enjoying it anyway because you're with someone you love.
• Attention Whore: Brutally satirised in "Shameless". Also: "Flamboyant". Or ""How can you expect to be taken seriously".
• Back to Front: "One Thing Leads To Another": The song begins with a man dying after a car crash, and ends with the man's girlfriend moving out. In between, the man falls into depression and loses his job, goes to a bar, gets drunk, picks up a woman and gets her in bed only to find she's a pre-op transsexual, tries to drive home in drunken confusion, and wrecks.
• Banned in China: "Legacy" almost got Yes banned in China, with the lyric about governments falling. They agreed to release the song as an instrumental.
• The Beard: "Can You Forgive Her?", "Bet She's Not Your Girlfriend".
• Big Applesauce: "New York City Boy".
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: Neil and Christ sported these as part of their Nightlife getup.
• Break Up Song: "I Get Along", "I Made My Excuses And Left", "The Way It Used To Be," "You Choose".
• Cold War: Oh, so many. Touched on by "West End Girls", "It's Alright", "My October Symphony", "Go West", "London", "Building a Wall"... Neil is a history major, and Russian history is one of his favorite subjects. Once Chris ironically mentioned one of their songs as "the only PSB song which is not about Russian history".
• Coming Out Song: Very, very thinly veiled in "Was It Worth It?", three years before Neil publicly came out. The official coming out song is "Metamorphosis". Nevertheless, they had given thin hints all over their career: that whispering of East End boys in "West End girls", the lyrics of "Later tonight" going about "that boy never cast a look in your direction / never tried to hook for your affection"...
• Concept Album: A good number of their albums have some unifying theme to it--Actually is about yuppies and Thatcherism, Bilingual is the story of a hapless businessman soul-searching in a foreign land, Fundamental is about life in the Blair years, and then Nightlife, which is about, well...
• Conscious Hip Hop: "West End Girls", one of the first rap songs to hit #1 on the Billboard chart (and possibly the only time a couple of nerdy white Brits have made it onto the US R&B charts), which drew heavy influence from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message".
• Continuity Nod: The 2006 video for "I'm With Stupid" had the guys from Little Britain parodying the 1993 videos for "Go West" and "Can You Forgive Her?"
• Cool Shades: Chris Lowe, usually.
• Cover Version: "Always On My Mind" (Willie Nelson), "It's Alright" (Sterling Void), "Where The Streets Have No Name/Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" (mashup of U2 and Frankie Valli), "Go West" (Village People), "Losing My Mind" and "Somewhere" (Stephen Sondheim), "If Love Were All" and "Sail Away" (Noel Coward), and "Viva La Vida" (Coldplay). Some music bits of "Se a vida é" were famously taken from a previous latin song.
  • The Cover Changes the Meaning: "Go West", released in 1993, added another layer of meaning to the original--the video makes it clear that it's also addressed to the former USSR.
  • Also, their cover version of "Always On My Mind" ends with the line "Maybe I didn't love you.", completely changing the original song's meaning.
  • The Cover Changes the Gender: notably averted in "Try it (I'm in love with a married man)", "If love were all" and "In private" (the version they made in 2006 with Elton John), giving the three of them a heaping helping of Ho Yay.
• Creator Backlash: Neil hates "Was that what it was", as he stated once. And Chris dislikes "Hit and miss".
• Creator Breakdown: "Love Is A Catastrophe", about a particularly awful breakup; "It's A Sin" and "This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave" about the horrible time Neil had in Catholic school.
  • Their performance at Glastonbury 2010. Wow.
• Deadpan Snarker: "Shopping", "Shameless". In Real Life, both of them. Also, "I'm with stupid".
• Deconstruction: The covers of "Go West", "Where The Streets Have No Name" and "Always On My Mind", as well as deconstructing an entire genre with "How I Learned To Hate Rock And Roll".
• Dark Reprise: "Dreaming Of The Queen"-- The chorus starts off as Her Majesty and Lady Diana discussing how fleeting love is. It ends with the narrator waking up alone in a cold sweat and realizing he has AIDS.
• Distinct Double Album: The Greatest Hits album PopArt was structured in this style; one disc called Pop with the more poppy stuff and one disc more experimental and arty, called Art. The limited edition version carried a third disc called Mix - no prizes for guessing what that consisted of.
• Epic Rocking: The entirety of Introspective, especially "Always On My Mind/In My House"(9:05) and "It's Alright"(9:23). Also, some of the Disco remixes, eg "It's A Sin"(7:40).
• Everything Sounds Sexier in French: "In the Night", "Legacy", and the French version of "New York City Boy", retitled "Paris City Boy". A lot of songs on Bilingual have Spanish or Portuguese.
• Executive Meddling: "London" was only released as a single in Germany because EMI was wary about releasing a PSB song with the lyrics "Let's break the law!". And in "Casanova in Hell", the line "His ageing fate/To contemplate" once had another rhyme there. They didn't eventually release "The Sodom and Gomorrah show" as a single because the song mentioned the word "Sodom" and the EMI feared it wouldn't be played on the radios.
• Fan Service: Reportedly, Chris Lowe once posed as a centerfold in a teen mag. Also the entire point of the video to "Domino Dancing"--while there was a lot of Ho Yay with the two shirtless wrestling boys, the girl they are fighting over is definitely something to look at too.
• Glory Days: All their career since Neil came out, really. Or since teenage-oriented radio stations (ie Radio One in the UK) decided they were too old to be popstars. A few songs about that: "Young Offender", "The way it used to be", "Hit and miss".
• Gold Digger: The narrator of "Rent" ("I love you / You pay my rent...").
• Grief Song: "Your Funny Uncle". It really, really shows in the vocals, and they only did one take because Neil broke down crying afterwards.
• Heavy Meta: "All Over The World" is a pop song about pop songs. And an interesting case in "We're The Pet Shop Boys"--originally written by My Robot Friend, they were so amused by it that they recorded their own cover.
  • Oddly, "Hit Music" is a subversion--it's not about hit music at all, but about going to the club as a form of escapism.
• Instrumentals: Most of the "Chris tracks", namely "Music for boys", most Relentless album, and most their Battleship Potemkin score for that film.
• The Invisible Band: The videos for "Liberation", "Home And Dry", "Miracles", "I'm with stupid", "Numb", "Integral", "Love, etc"... As they get older, they appear less on their own videos (and record sleeves). For the "Yesterday, when I was mad", Chris was completely replaced for CGI images from him.
• Isn't It Ironic?: "Shopping" gets used a lot in scenes where characters are shopping. It's a socialist-influenced criticism of privatization during the Thatcher era.
• I Was Quite a Looker: The narrator in "Gin and Jag".
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: It Couldn't Happen Here, though they said in an interview they might put it on DVD. Their first four singles (from the Please album), which were only released on vynil, although some of the songs of them were re-released in compilation albums such as Alternative and the Further listening album for Please.
• Larynx Dissonance: In the songs where Neil plays a female character, he sings in his normal voice. Odd, because his falsetto is very convincing.
• Last-Note Nightmare: Inverted with the single mix for "Suburbia", which opens with dogs barking, an eerie tribal drumbeat, ominous synths, and foreboding speech, before segueing into an upbeat dance-pop song.
• List Song: The last half of "I Want A Dog" is just Chris reading off a list of dog breeds. "Paninaro" rants about passion, love, sex, money, violence, religion, injustice and death, all mentioned as a list in the song. And "We're The Pet Shop Boys" ends with a list of their song titles.
• Long Title: "Where The Streets Have No Name/Can't Take My Eyes Off of You", "I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Anymore", "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk", "This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave". Inverted with the album titles, which are always one word.
• Lyrical Dissonance: Many PSB songs are a good example of this. They are well-known for their upbeat, hi-nrg music populated with sad, melancholic or pessimistic lyrics.
  • "The End of the World" is a really upbeat song, despite all the interpretations of the lyrics.
  • "It's a Sin" is also quite upbeat, with lyrics about the repeated sins he has committed in his life.
  • "What have I Done To Deserve This" is about acquiring a job and falling in love with someone there, then getting dumped and losing his money.
  • "Go West" sounds so poppy and optimistic. But it's about AIDS, dead friends, lost gay utopia, and the fall of the communist dream.
• Madness Mantra: The title line in "I Want To Wake Up", eventually morphing into "I want to wake up with you" as the narrator sounds increasingly terrified.
• Man On Fire: The sequence to "King's Cross" in It Couldn't Happen Here.
• Mating Dance: "Tonight Is Forever", "Hit Music", "We All Feel Better In The Dark", and "The Boy Who Couldn't Keep His Clothes On" are all pretty much metaphors relating dancing to sex.
• Mind Screw: It Couldn't Happen Here. The whole movie.
• Money Song: Subverted in "Rent", "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)," "Shopping." Sadly, for some listeners who didn't get the joke, these songs cemented them falsely as amoral children of the profit-loving 80s.
• Nice Hat: Chris Lowe. Always. See page picture (he's the one with the feathers). Also, the famous cone hats for the "Can you forgive her?" video.
• Non-Appearing Title: "Postscript", "The Night I Fell In Love", "Love, etc", "Legacy".
• One of Us: In his days as an editor, Neil worked at the UK branch of Marvel Comics, and is a professed fan of Action Man and Captain Britain.
  • They're both big Doctor Who nerds, but that's not too uncommon considering its popularity. Chris did say that Sonic the Hedgehog music inspired "Young Offender" and can be seen playing an arcade game in the "So Hard" video. Neil is a big fan of the Simpsons.
    • In turn, David Tennant, who played the Tenth Doctor, is a Pet Shop Boys fan. His real name is David MacDonald, but since the actors guild already already have a David MacDonald, he took his stage name from Neil Tennant.
• Oop North: Chris is from Lancashire, Blackpool, and Neil is from Newcastle. Also the subject of "Sexy Northerner"--"Don't you dare imply/that it's grim up North"...
• Pachelbel's Canon Progression: "Go West", in which the progression is more prominent than it was in the Village People original.
• Protest Song: "Shopping" is about Thatcherism. "This Used To Be The Future" is about Iran and nukes. A lot on Fundamental is meant to protest the Iraq War and Tony Blair, especially "Integral", which is about the proposed national ID cards in the UK. It's the only song they've ever done where Neil sounds genuinely pissed off, and one of their very few songs where the video correlates to the message of the song. See Surreal Music Video below. Not to mention "I'm With Stupid," which is a satire of the relationship between Tony Blair and George W. Bush done as a gay love song.
• Real Life Writes The Song: The exuberance of Very is a direct result of Neil being in love at the time. "Your Funny Uncle", "Being Boring", and "Postscript" were all inspired by and dedicated to friends who had died of AIDS. "So hard" is about an unfaithful couple they knew at the time.
• Red October: "My October Symphony" is all about the parade held in remembrance, and is the story of a Russian composer wondering whether it will be canceled since the Soviet Union fell. See also Cold War.
• Refrain From Assuming: "Opportunities" gets this a lot, and is often referred to by its subtitle, "Let's Make Lots Of Money".
• Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll: Mocked in "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" and "How I Learned To Hate Rock And Roll".
• Significant Anagram: Likely unintentional, but "Pet Shop Boys" is an anagram of "They boss pop". Also, music producer Shep Pettibone named a mix for a PSB song as "Shop Pettibone mix".
• Single-Stanza Song: They've done a few. "The Samurai in Autumn" comes to mind.
• Shout-Out: To name a few, The Beatles, Disco-Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes, Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Dmitry Shostakovich, Che Guevara, Debussy, Harold Pinter, Gerhard Richter, Yevgeny Zamyatin...
• Song of Song Titles: Second half of "We're The Pet Shop Boys", in an interesting self-example (which as pointed out above is actually a cover of My Robot Friend's Shout-Out to them).
• Soprano and Gravel: More like "countertenor and baritone", but anytime Chris appears in a track this happens. Interesting is the Dusty Springfield duet "What Have I Done To Deserve This?", where her voice is actually lower than Neil's.
• Spelling Song: "Shopping", "Minimal". Mashed up together wonderfully during the 2006 tour.
• Spoken Word in Music: Done a couple of times, but most notably in "It's A Sin", where they sampled a NASA countdown because it sounded cool. Also: the intro for "DJ Culture", their extended mix for "Somewhere", their italian mix for "Paninaro" (sampling Chris Lowe's words from a TV interview), and some TV snippets on "Electricity".
• Stealth Insult: The verses of "Yesterday, When I Was Mad" involve some rather mean insults dressed up as compliments being delivered to the subject:

Then we posed for pictures with the competition winners
And argued about the hotel rooms and where to go for dinner
And someone said "It's fabulous you're still around today.
You've both made such a little go a very long way!"

• Stepford Suburbia: "Suburbia" which discusses the endless boredom and consequent potential for trouble inherent in suburban life.
• Invisible to Gaydar: "The Truck Driver And His Mate". Possibly Chris Lowe himself--he's never confirmed or denied one way or the other.
• Surreal Music Video: Several of theirs, but most so, the video to "Can You Forgive Her?". The song is about a guy with a girlfriend who knows more about his sexuality than he does. The video? Two guys in traffic cone hats and orange jumpsuits riding tandem bicycles, feeding geese, playing psychic air hockey with a spiky blue potato, turning into human drills, walking on a miniature Earth with a couple of emus, and burping orange bubbles. And no, they don't do drugs.
  • The video for Home and Dry also has to be seen to be believed...
  • And the video for Love etc. looks like some Monty Python-esque video game.
  • Yesterday When I Was Mad is supposed to actually represent a madman's hallucinations.
• Take That: Two notable examples.
  • U2: PSB mashed up their very poppy cover of "Where The Streets Have No Name" with the very poppy "I Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You", and released it as a double A-side with "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?". U2 reportedly said "What have we done to deserve this?" But after that, U2 stopped taking themselves so seriously, and we got the wonderful Achtung Baby.
    • "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously" is itself a Take That to pompous-but-shallow pop acts with a tendency to self-righteously spout off about various social issues without a great deal of understanding of them. Given the nature of the single the Take That to U2 is clear, but it also references a then-popular boy band double-act called Bros.
  • Eminem: Due to Mr. Mathers' rampant homophobia, they recorded "The Night I Fell In Love", a sweet Affectionate Parody about a college kid having a one-night stand with an Eminem Captain Ersatz. (It could be about any rapper, but the guy says, "Hey, man/Your name isn't Stan, is it?/We should be together!") Eminem responded rather less maturely than U2, and ran them over with his car in one music video.
  • A more minor example in "The Theatre" clearly shows their opinion of Andrew Lloyd Webber: "I was only hoping for a bit of cash/From a patron of the arts--or at least The Phantom of the Opera..."
• Title-Only Chorus: "I Want to Wake Up", "How can you expect to be taken seriously?", "Saturday Night Forever", "You only tell me you love me when you're drunk", "I don't know what you want but I can't give it anymore"...
• Totally Radical: From "I Want To Wake Up": "Turning in my sleep, you called me a fool/To fall in love, is it so uncool?" Really breaks the mood in an otherwise haunting Sanity Slippage Song.
  • Averted in "The Night I Fell In Love"--for a 48-year-old singing the part of a maybe 19-year old, he sounds incredibly natural.
• The Eighties: Too many people still relate them to The Eighties, mainly because they started their career then and enjoyed worldwide success then, although their career spans more than three decades, up to now, and still were successful from the 90's onwards (although noticeably less mainstream).
• The Movie: It Couldn't Happen Here was intended to open in cinemas instead of their going on tour. It didn't work out.
• The Not-Secret: Neil Tennant's sexuality, which isn't a Transparent Closet because he never really was in the closet before officially coming out in 1994.
• Uptown Girl: "West End Girls" ... probably.
• Urban Legends: A surprising number of people believe that the band got its name from the practice of inserting hamsters and gerbils into bodily cavities. The truth is more prosaic; they simply knew some people who worked at a pet shop. Too many people think they both were lovers or a couple once in the past, but they have denied it several times - just friends and flatmates in London before they started the PSB, and since then workmates and friends.
• Zeerust: Commented on in "This Used To Be The Future", and combined with I Want My Jetpack.