PET SHOP BOYS

"In the back of my head I heard distant feet / Ché Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat"

Years active: Genres: Related artists:
1981 - Present Synth pop, dance n/a

Line-up: Neil Tennant, Chris Lowe. Tennant takes care of the lead vocals while Lowe pipes in on the occasional song; both are responsible for all the instruments, synths, keyboards, programming, etc.

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe met by chance in 1981 while browsing for synthesizers, and a quick conversation on a shared interest turned into a lifelong friendship as well as one of the most influential careers in all of music. While it took nearly half a decade for them to start as recording artists in earnest, the duo (who named themselves after the nickname they had given to their friends who worked at a pet shop) quickly established themselves as one of the definitive names in the increasingly prevalent synth pop field and took the world by storm. Their longevity has earned them the title of Grandfathers of Synth Pop, their back catalogue of hits contain a number of era-defining classics, and the artists who have claimed to have taken inspiration from them transcend genres; their influence even exceeds music itself, as Tennant once described their do-no-wrong years of seemingly infinite success as their "imperial phase", a phrase which is now part of standard music journalist (which Tennant himself was as well before making music instead of writing about it became his full-time job) lexicon. They are, by and far, one of the most important acts to feature in my site.

So how come all that ever seems to get discussed about them is their first couple of albums from the 1980s?

This particular bugbear of mine admittedly isn't as much of an issue in Europe, where the duo continued to have huge hits and significant presence well beyond their first decade. It still happens though: they're synonymous solely with "West End Girls" and "It's a Sin", you'll be shocked to find anything but Actually ever appear in any ranking lists, and many who adore those early works and are aware there's more to them have still barely scratched the surface beyond the first couple of albums. This isn't meant to be a creed against early Pet Shop Boys - you'll find my opinions on them below but (spoilers) they're pretty positive and it's impossible to deny their stature and influence all things considered. But in my opinion the part where Pet Shop Boys go from a great act to an legendary one, well that lies further down their career as they became more adventurous and experimental.

One of the most exciting facets of Pet Shop Boys is just how devoted they are to the overall presentation around their music. Both Tennant and Lowe have always been theatrical individuals with larger-than-life visions and a desire to throw themselves fully into their whims where possible. After the learning curve of the first couple of records and especially the increase in both clout and recording budget that their success brought with them, the duo began to push themselves further artistically in more than just their music. These days we talk about artist and album "eras" like it's a given thing, with so many pop artists in particular immersing themselves in particular aesthetics for their album cycles and banking on it to hype up their releases; and that's also something that Pet Shop Boys arguably influenced. From the early 1990s onwards each Pet Shop Boys album became a miniature universe into itself, with emphasis on particular design and sound to guide each album, interlinking aesthetics between the various covers (albums and singles) and music videos, and even signature looks for the duo themselves for the era. This has a clear musical impact: it allows each album to let loose in its own way and they all become their highly distinct entities, revealing different sides of the duo's songwriting and inspirations. Many of the reasons why I rate Pet Shop Boys so highly is because of the music released after their "imperial phase" of late 1980s, because of how wildly varied and creative it got.

But this dedication to the wider picture also makes each era so damn fun to dip into, where each different release is like a trip to a different place. I started my PSB journey with PopArt and then picked my way through their back catalogue in line of what resonated the most with me across the compilation: each new album was always a surprise that you couldn't really prepare yourself into by just sampling some of its songs. This whole affair was admittedly aided by two additional products: one being the PopArt DVD which featured all of their (mostly excellent) music videos to date and which pushed through the visual side of each album, but I also had the benefit of then-recent start of the Further Listening reissue series and their extensive liner notes which taught me all about the context and intentions behind each album and song. You couldn't ask for a better crash course because it made it clear just how deep the rabbit hole went with each album, and everything I learned about the surroundings of each record just made me appreciate them more. In hindsight, maybe this is where my love for artistic context truly begins?

Pet Shop Boys didn't take too long to become a big favourite of mine. Their highly melodic and immediately identifiable sense of songwriting ensured that each song almost immediately latched onto me, and Tennant's soft voice was a particularly charismatic and charming narrator across those lush soundscapes; his lyrics, too, frequently reveal his past as a writer by their use of clever turns of phrase and iconic lines, not to mention the myriad of sources he took inspiration from is exciting in itself. There's also a plethora of incredible material outside the main albums themselves, not only in the form of their vast quantities of oft-excellent b-sides which firmly places in them in the list of my favourite b-sides acts, but the A-sides themselves have often been tweaked as well, with some of the single remixes practically passing as new songs. It's a deep, wide world that feels like an endless treasure trove when you first begin digging into it. Now that I'm a seasoned veteran, it makes up for one of the richest back catalogues in my shelf.

A quick word on the aforementioned Further Listening reissues, which first began in 2001 with the first six albums and which then continued in 2017 with the next five. For me, they are the gold standard when it comes to standard reissues. Each of the packages comes with the original album faithfully remastered, as well as a disc (or two) with all the b-sides, additional studio tracks and various alternative takes and versions which have all been chosen for being interesting in one way or another, rather than to simply fill a disc. Often the non-album cuts are also presented in slightly different versions to the original releases, so that the separate b-side compilations still remain relevant in their own right. Besides the musical goods, the packaging is faithful to the original designs but with a clear design tweak to indicate they're a uniform part of the same reissue series (housed in slipcases, covering both the jewel case and the separate booklet), and they all come with thick booklets explaining the context and recording process of the album, both Tennant and Lowe's extensive commentary on every single song (includes the bonus material), the lyrics and vast amounts of photoshoot material and additional artwork to establish the visual vibe of the era. They're wonderful, nearly all-comprehensive packages. The reason I mention them separately here is that for the first six albums, that's the only version I own - and for the albums afterwards, I've been collecting the series at a steady pace. This makes the "Physically" section of each review very repetitive, and so rather copy/paste the same sentences over and over again I'll just refer to this one. I've also utilised the covers for the original albums for each of the review entries below, even though technically the copies I own look different - that just looks nicer visually.

Main chronology:

Other releases:

(Discography gaps: Disco 1/2/4, couple of the live albums, the Tennant/Lowe soundtracks.)

>> Leave a comment <<

PLEASE

Release year: Album rating: Extras rating: Key tracks:
1986 7 6 "West End Girls", "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)", "Love Comes Quickly"

1) Two Divided by Zero; 2) West End Girls; 3) Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money); 4) Love Comes Quickly; 5) Suburbia; 6) Opportunities (Reprise); 7) Tonight Is Forever; 8) Violence; 9) I Want a Lover; 10) Later Tonight; 11) Why Don't We Live Together?
CD2: Further Listening 1984-1986: A Man Could Get Arrested (12" Version); 2) Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money) (Full-Length Original 7" Version); 3) In the Night; 4) Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money) (Original 12" Mix); 5) Why Don't We Live Together? (Original New York Mix); 6) West End Girls (Dance Mix); 7) A Man Could Get Arrested (7" Version); 8) Love Comes Quickly (Dance Mix); 9) That's My Impression (Disco Mix); 10) Was That What It Was?; 11) Suburbia (The Full Horror); 12) Jack the Lad; 13) Paninaro (Italian Mix)

A tale of two halves: one already mastered, another still learning.

Please took a while to pull together. Between the start of Tennant and Lowe's collaboration and when they started to think about putting together their debut, they had already written an impressive back catalogue full of songs they were confident in - so many in fact that they started to intentionally hold back some of them and there's a good number of now-established classics from the later albums that trace their way to these early days. The Boys' original plan was to record the album with Bobby Orlando, a dance music producer whose works the duo had been massively inspired by, and they spent a lot of time in Orlando's studio putting together an album's worth of songs. But something just didn't sit right and the sessions were eventually restarted back in the UK with Stephen Hague sitting in the producer's seat. The point here is that the material the duo had with them got assessed and reassessed a number of times across the whole journey, and they had a veritable armoury of incredible songs waiting to be released ("It's a Sin" was originally recorded for Please!). This should be the recipe for one of music history's all-time great debut albums, especially knowing the duo's legacy - which is why it's incredible just how lopsided Please is.

It's honestly impossible to overstate just how fantastic the first half of Please is - side one is more or less one of the most iconic singles runs of the 1980s. "West End Girls" remains immediately arresting and chillingly magical no matter how many times you hear it, Tennant's dry "brit-rap" cadence, the backbone of a bass groove and the ever-more-epic choir synth pads making it one of the boldest classics of the decade; "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" bursts through with both confidence and cheek, full of sly charm but with serious musical chops and many of the album's strongest hooks; the understatedly gorgeous dance ballad "Love Comes Quickly" has in time become possibly even better than the earlier two singles, shuffling onwards with a knife-cuttingly thick mood that's equal parts bittersweet and warmly romantic. The fourth single "Suburbia" isn't quite there in the form it appears on this album: they finished writing the song at the last minute of the sessions but on account that it was was too promising to leave out, the duo effectively just cleaned up their original demo. The fully re-recorded single version is fully on equal footing to the three other singles, but even this obviously less polished version (the production is miles away from the rest of the album) still contains the heart of a grand anthem and you can completely understand why they wanted to include it on the record. The only non-single of the first half, the opener "Two Divided by Zero", could just as easily have been an equally sized hit as the rest: the snappy digital voice sample hook is an immediate catch and the song rolls in with the boldness of an artist who's completely assured of their own skill and talent, and then goes on to prove how right they are in form of a veritable pop giant. Sometimes it feels downright mad just how timelessly great all these songs are and how they all come in one after another, like a merciless barrage of 80s synth pop at its best.

The second half, in the meantime, is basically what you would expect from a brand new act still learning their tricks. This isn't really a dismissal - it's simply that the gap between what's before and after "Opportunities (Reprise)" (a short 30-second bridge of an earlier version of the song now repurposed as an interlude) is bewildering in how different it is in composition, production and just in plain confidence. They are mostly good songs but come across still wet behind their ears, for a variety of reasons too. "Tonight Is Forever" sounds like an attempt to intentionally write something that could match what appears on the first half but it comes across a little too forced to naturally have the same impact; meanwhile "I Want a Lover" tries too hard to be a "cinematic" atmospheric experience and its myriad of overbearing sound effects only hammers in how undercooked the rest of the song is, and how awkward its attempt at uncharacteristic horniness sounds from Tennant's mouth. The sophisticated slow jam "Violence" and the sparse piano ballad "Later Tonight" both unveil a different side of Pet Shop Boys to the rest of Please and serve an important role in that regard, but have the impression of a first draft or a demo of something in the vein of the tropes they represent (they'd in fact revisit "Violence" nearly a decade later and, indeed, improved it with experience). "Why Don't We Live Together?" closes the album off admirably and with exuberance (Neil's falsetto yelps in particular brighten up the day whenever they appear) and briefly returns to the overall tone the album started with - so much so that it's now strangely abrupt after the otherwise more scattershot set of songs right before it.

It is, quite literally, a tale of two halves. One which displays the triumphant entrance of a musical act that started off with a bang and who would obviously go on to have an impressive career afterwards; and another which reveals that the duo were still in the process of learning both about writing songs together as well as about the recording process to bring them to life so others could hear them. It's such a whiplash that it must be a record of some sorts - a curveball which never ceases to surprise no matter how aware you are of it. It leaves Please in that slighly frustrating "good, but..." territory, where its excellent parts are obvious and practically pull you to listen to it more, but the imperfections make it enough of a bumpy ride that it's never quite as satisfying as you'd think or want it to be. You could perhaps consider it a proof of the raw talent that Tennant and Lowe's collaboration could result in, but one that's still caught in the relative inexperience of the two as a musical act beyond their practice space. Nonetheless, it's impressive in its own right that a debut album which is so easy to find these slight flaws from still contains material which other artists would kill for to feature as part of their opening statement.

The Further Listening 1984-1986 bonus set is arguably the least of the whole series. Like mentioned, the duo were reserving many of their best outtakes for the later albums, so the additional studio tracks and b-sides are a little all over the place and mostly lacking in real keepers (Tennant describes "Was That What It Was?" in the booklet as a "very minor work" which is politely scathing). Similarly either due to lack of rights or lack of interest, the disc is largely absent of many of the leaked early demos or Bobby O session takes, and the various extended mixes aren't honestly that exciting. For anyone wanting a peek at any true archeological treasures, there's going to be some disappointment. But all in all, amidst this slightly repetitive set of familiar songs, there are some real highlights too. The original pre-album single version of "Opportunities" is good to have around (a little scruffier but also quite charming), and the re-recorded single version of "Suburbia" (here in its extended "full horror" mix) is essential. Of the non-album tracks, the original version of "A Man Could Get Arrested" which opens the bonus set is atypically aggressive and muscular for Pet Shop Boys and really leaves an impression, emerging as one of the best songs in this set; the re-recorded version a few songs later is a lesser take, but interesting on the account that it's largely played with live instruments which definitely gives its own vibe to this era of the Boys. The fan favourite and all-around excellent "Paninaro" (once again presented as an extended version) closes the disc with as much of a banger as it opened: it's the first appearance of Chris Lowe's lead vocals, his dry listing of fashion brands and destinations on top of a hypnotic high-energy dance track setting the stage for great many "Chris tracks" to come.

Physically: Part of the Further Listening set, so refer to the end of the intro segment.

[Reviewed: 11/10/2024]

Back to beginning