West End Thrills: Why nobody does poker-faced pop better than The Pet Shop Boys

The song that changed everything for the Pet Shop Boys was not “West End Girls”, their 1985 number one and a track widely considered one of the greatest British singles ever. The most important four minutes, four seconds of their career would arrive 11 months later with their second big hit, “Suburbia” – a spectacular dirge that cradles Neil Tennant’s vocals in crystalline synths and a chorus of sampled dog barks.

“Suburbia” trumps “West End Girls” because, by the duo’s own telling, it saved Tennant and musical foil Chris Lowe from the humiliation of one hit wonder-dom (one-and-a-half hits if counting their stalled “West End Girls” follow-up “Love Comes Quickly”, which peaked at 19 and then nosedived). In so doing, it set the foundations for one of the most glittering journeys in pop. It is a glorious procession that continues this year with a beautifully plaintive new single, “Loneliness”, and an accompanying album, Nonetheless, arriving 26 April. Judging by that taster release, the LP will again shine a spotlight on an under-appreciated side of the Pet Shop Boys – which is that, beyond the irony, they are among the most heartfelt writers in pop and that this is the true theme of their 40 years in the public eye.

“We were on a classic trajectory,” Tennant told Classic Pop magazine of those early years. “Our first single: No 1 everywhere around the world. Next single: No 19 in the UK. Now, the logical trajectory is that the next record goes to 29, the one after doesn’t make the Top 50, and then you’re dropped.”

“Suburbia” gave them space to breathe. It reached the UK top 10 and, just as significantly, was a blockbuster all over the continent. With one bittersweet bound, the Pet Shop Boys were free of the one-hit-wonder curse. “I thought: ‘Now, that is a hit record,’ and it was huge, particularly in Germany and France,” Tennant would say in the same interview. “‘Suburbia’ led to ‘It’s A Sin’ [their 1987 number one] and everything that followed.”

But the significance of the track went beyond its commercial impact. Where “West End Girls” had been tough and tart, “Suburbia” was a bleak rumination on urban decay with a documentary-like texture. It is at least partly inspired by JG Ballard’s vision of modern cities as future-shock hellscapes. But it is also informed by the Brixton Riots of 1983 and 1985, which Tennant had witnessed having moved to London from Newcastle in the early Seventies. The lyrics are raw and have the quality of reportage – “Break the window by the town hall/ Listen! A siren screams” – and are complemented perfectly by Lowe’s ennui-filled synth refrain.

We don’t often think of the Pet Shop Boys as serious-minded chroniclers of urban decline. Across their career, they are usually heralded as pop’s arch-ironists. An eyebrow perpetually cocked, tongue inevitably lodged somewhere in cheek. “Tennant’s lyrics are clever and direct, chronicling the lives and times of urban, lonely, and bored yuppies of the late Eighties,” goes one typical review (from All Music) of their second album, 1987’s Actually. “This brand of pop music, sung in a deadpan manner with a heavy emphasis on money and all the nice things it can buy, is a tad soulless,” said the Los Angeles Times of the same record.

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Deadpan, yes. But soulless? Absolutely not. Scratch that ironic surface, and underneath, the Pet Shop Boys are much more complex. You can hear it in the ache of Tennant’s voice in “Suburbia”. And in that new tune, “Loneliness”, where he observes that “the struggle against loneliness is tearing you apart”. Separated by four decades, together the songs confirm that, despite sardonic imagery and droll photoshoots – Tennant yawning, Lowe looking grumpy – the Pet Shop Boys have long brimmed with vulnerability.

Consider Actually – the one dismissed by the Los Angeles Times as “a tad” soulless and which is best known for smarty-pants smashes such as the Dusty Springfield duet “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” It’s a classic pop album. But it’s so much more than that, too. Side two opens with Tennant painting a devastating portrait of the impact of the Aids crisis on the UK gay community with “It Couldn’t Happen Here”. The tone turns even bleaker as the record closes with “King’s Cross”, a lament for all who had fallen between the cracks of Thatcher’s Britain.

“King’s Cross is the station you come to when you come down to London looking for opportunity from the North East, the most depressed part of England,” Tennant explained in the liner notes to a reissue of the LP. “I just thought that was a metaphor for Britain – people arriving at this place, waiting for an opportunity that doesn’t happen, waiting for the dole queue or some documentation for the NHS. It’s about hopes being dashed.”

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So why do we think of the Pet Shop Boys as pop’s perpetually poker-faced jokers? Supreme satirists for whom wearing weird headgear and not smiling is all part of the daily grind? The answer is that this is how they have chosen to present themselves. As a former Smash Hits editor, Tennant is versed in the shorthand of pop. He understands, in particular, the potency of an easily understood image.

“Particularly in our earlier records, there’s a lot of iconography of ourselves,” said Tennant in his conversation with Classic Pop. “There’s a lot of imagery for Pet Shop Boys: pointy hats, yawning, wigs.”

Those personas were not a fabrication. In the flesh, Tennant is, by all accounts, wry and Wildean. Lowe’s reputation for introversion is equally well-deserved. On one occasion, I was due to conduct a phone interview with him, only to be told he had refused to take the call. An assistant had begged him accept the handset: he demurred. I pictured him scowling in a corner, potentially wearing a ridiculous hat. I should have been insulted; instead, I was cheered. To paraphrase one of their own album titles – it was Very Chris Lowe.

Yet that side of their personalities is contradicted by their streak of sincerity rippling through their catalogue. Earnestness was front and centre of their 1990 masterpiece, Behaviour, where they paid tribute to friends claimed by HIV with heartbreaking single “Being Boring”.

The desire for human connection was likewise the driving motivation behind 2002’s Release, a downtempo affair that drew on a period of professional struggle – specifically a disastrous 1999 arena tour and the failure of their 2001 musical, Closer To Heaven. The tour, in particular, pushed them to the brink. “We were playing to half-empty arenas, losing a fortune,” Tennant revealed in 2018. “It came to a head one night at Sheffield Arena. I said to Chris, ‘Why don’t we just pack it in?’”

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Release also tapped into challenges in Tennant’s personal life, which he poured into the nakedly vulnerable “Love Is A Catastrophe”. “There are more personal lyrics on this album than on the previous album,” Tennant said. “It reflects how I was feeling about a particular situation in my own life. You can hear that quite clearly.”

Whether Nonetheless will lock into a similarly profound groove remains to be seen. But with Tennant now aged 70 and Lowe 64, the recording is likely to arrive steeped in autumnal melancholy. That is certainly the vibe of “Loneliness”, which touches on the epidemic of isolation facing older people.

There will be droll moments, too, of course. For example, the song “Bullet for Narcissus” is from the perspective of one of Donald Trump’s bodyguards. He goes to work each day knowing he might die for a man he loathes. There is also an insight into Tennant’s private life (of which he is zealously protective) – on “Why Am I Dancing?” he celebrates his love of grooving alone through lockdown (in a recent interview with The Guardian, Chris Lowe revealed that Tennant keeps up to date on all the latest dances, even learning Kylie’s “Padam Padam” steps).

This, then, is the Pet Shop Boys in a bittersweet nutshell – simultaneously sincere and caustic. It’s just a shame they are known for their scathing wit while their more plaintive side too often goes unheralded. After 40 years of us celebrating the duo as flamboyant cynics, perhaps it is time to praise the full breadth of the Pet Shop Boys – two men in silly hats whose music encompasses life in all its joy and tragedy.