“Tonight we’re going Dreamworld,” says Neil Tennant from the stage of London’s Royal Opera House, “Our world – a world of music and memory. In which West End girls dance dominoes with boys from New York City… and being boring is a sin.” Who wouldn’t want to live in Pet Shops Boys’ world? I wonder this as I walk through the West End to the venue, the crowds of tourists on this sweltering Saturday evening bolstered by Union Jack adorned flotsam from the day’s earlier Stephen Yaxley-Lennon-led march in Trafalgar Square. What kind of world do they want to live in?
Not the one that Pet Shop Boys have created I’d wager. Impervious to both the ravages of time and the vagaries of fashion, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have inhabited a singular position in pop music for four decades now. Arch, knowing and wry, yes, but also melancholy, uplifting, and righteous, the songs of the Pet Shop Boys have transcended whatever decade they were recorded in to create a timeless catalogue, one that they delve deeply into tonight.
This is third time they’ve held a residency at the Royal Opera House, and these five nights are ostensibly winding up their Dreamworld tour, a greatest hits presentation now in its third year. As unlikely as it would have seemed back in their early 80s pre-touring ‘Imperial Phase’, Tennant and Lowe are now hardened road hogs, and this show in particular is as tightly choreographed as a West End musical. In this relatively intimate and ridiculously opulent setting, Pet Shop Boy’s Dreamworld is as immersive a piece of theatre as the best Punchdrunk experiences. Because be in no doubt, this is a piece of theatre.
Which may be why the show feels a bit airless in places. There are no off the cuff interactions with the audience (apart from Tennant shushing someone who interrupts a scripted intro), no musical deviations, no special guest stars (surely John Grant will one day get the call to sing the Dusty part on ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This’?). But I get the feeling that for those who have paid upwards of £200 for a ticket, this is not their first Pet Shop Boys rodeo – it’s probably not even their first gig of this tour. So the audience are just as well-drilled as the band, which may be why at times it feels like more like a musical than a gig, making cutting some rug feel a little self-conscious.
But all that just sounds churlish when presented with two hours of songs of this calibre. Opening with ‘Suburbia’, ‘Can You Forgive Her’, and ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’ – the industrial klang of the latter rattling the fixtures of the 300-year-old building – everyone is immediately up and singing along, and for much of the evening, it stays that way. The kitchen sink futurism of ‘Rent’ and ‘So Hard’ follow, but it properly goes off with the operatic rave of ‘Left to My Own Devices’, resulting in the first ovation of the night.
In the live arena Pet Shop Boys have always relied on spectacle, and in the past could be accused of letting their visuals do the heavy lifting. But tonight the staging by creative director Tom Scutt, while undoubtedly impressive, compliments rather than detracts from the pair’s charisma. Tennant has become quite the frontman, striding around the stage, conducting the audience, all the while acting like the host at the best dinner party Evelyn Waugh never held. As for Lowe, has any other performer made so much of so little? Even during his solo vocal on ‘Paninaro’ he barely moves, inscrutable as ever. When the mask does slip, and a smile occasionally plays across his lips, it fills the room.
While their studied detachment can make them an act easy to admire but hard to love, there are several times during the the evening when a song reaches out and squeezes the heart in the most unexpected way. The Mardi Gras styling of ‘Se a Vide é (That’s the Way Life Is)’ is genuinely joyous in this setting, while ‘Go West’ – a song I have never cared for – is incredibly moving when coupled with footage of the doomed San Franciscan idyll it describes. And ‘It’s a Sin’ may have lost some of its power due to its ‘hits of the 80s’ status, but this live iteration is a Grand Guignol of blood red and strobe lighting, and contains a drop that shows the afternoons the pair spend having tea and biscuits at Berghain aren’t wasted. Even in their fifth decade as a band, Tennant and Lowe still know their way around the dance floor, and while the Hi-NRG section of ‘It’s Alright’ and ‘Vocal’ shows their continued close ties to club culture most explicitly, the whole evening is a celebration of the last 40 years of dance music, from Latin freestyle to Electroclash, Italo-disco to Chicago House, Acid House to EDM. This is the main difference between Pet Shop Boys and their 80s peers: no other electronic act apart from Kraftwerk has stuck to their aesthetic and musical principles as firmly as Tennant and Lowe, but also subtly updating them as they go along, keeping on the right side of contemporary without blunting their pop nous.
The encore is of course, ‘West End Girls’. Despite both being Northerners, London has been their spiritual home since the 70s, and the changes that have happened to the capital over the years are put in stark relief as footage of long lost Soho and the young Tennant and Lowe are projected behind them. But even here though, they tinker: changing a key line – “From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station” to “From Mariupol to the Kyiv Station” to remind us that they are still present, and in their own way, political.
They finish with ‘Being Boring’, still the saddest of all pop songs. But in the hands of Pet Shop Boys, melancholy is not miserabilism, because they understand that sadness is part of everyday life as much as the little victories that balance it out. By the end of the song we’re all wiping away tears while grinning ecstatically, because you cannot have one without the other. That’s the way life is.
The freedoms that Dreamworld celebrate are hard won, and keeping them is an ongoing battle. On the train home the “We want our country back” brigade are fewer in number but louder in volume. What would they have made of the last two hours in Tennant and Lowe’s company? A celebration of inclusivity, tolerance, culture, and the freedom to be who you want to be. Perhaps Dreamworld is just as fantastical as the England that they’re calling for, but I know which world I want to live in.
