“We could make five times more money playing the O2 arena for one night,” Pet Shop Boys’ singer Neil Tennant mused to an interviewer in April, on the decision to play five nights at London’s Royal Opera House. They eschewed the opportunity in favour of this intimate, refined space to stage Dreamworld – the duo’s ongoing greatest hits tour. It’s a set that covers much hallowed pop ground but finds space for deep cuts and the band’s latest output as well.
This is the third time Pet Shop Boys have played an Opera House residency; the venue suits them. Both institutions are long-lived bastions of aesthetic sophistication and mannered feeling in a rapidly changing world. When not making sleek pop that marries the frictionless glide of Kraftwerk and the controlled release of New Order with Tennant’s cool-eyed aperçus, the Boys score ballets and films. There is a grand gesturing to many of their synth chord progressions that chimes with the red velvet upholstery.
Having released their 15th studio album earlier this year – the affecting Nonetheless – it swiftly becomes clear that the Pet Shop Boys aren’t touring these songs with any kind of artistic end point in view. The pair are now working on a musical based on The Emperor’s New Clothes and, even though Tennant turned 70 earlier this month, “finally” does not yet appear to be a one-word adverb title in their lexicon. This venue does some important geographical work too. Covent Garden is at the eastern border of London’s West End, the band’s long-ago spiritual home; 2024 marks the 40th anniversary of the duo’s first hit, West End Girls, and tonight it really feels like a monument to a long bygone London. The bar, meanwhile, is serving terribly up-to-date PSB-themed cocktails. A highball of cherry, tequila and CBD goes by the name of It’s a Sin – the title of their 1987 hit, and the Russell T Davies Channel 4 drama it inspired.
The staging is suitably theatrical, with twin lamp-posts bookending Tennant and keyboard player Chris Lowe at the start and end of the set, suggesting solitude, seediness and clean design lines all at the same time. Hard-hatted, hi-vis-ed stage hands move the scenery about, old school, but the light show dazzles with classy retro-futurism. White lines oscillate, eventually becoming human stick figures and graphic equalisers, doubling down on the Kraftwerk references. Silver-clad dancers with diaphanous cape-wings cavort in the show’s second half. The Boys’ metallic masks – also worn by the troupe – simultaneously suggest rugby goalposts, Minecraft and rapper MF Doom. The band at the back, meanwhile, all faintly recall Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore in the early 1980s, with big hair and aviator shades.
External reference points only go so far in the Dreamworld, though. Two hours in the Pet Shop Boys’ company points up how self-contained they are, how immune their output is to trends. Forty years is a long time to go without a single lurch towards the latest thing. This is an oeuvre free of tokenistic collaborations – with just the eminently logical Dusty Springfield duet What Have I Done to Deserve This (sung tonight with multi-instrumentalist Clare Uchima; special guests might have been fun to fill the role). Even the Rolling Stones went disco in the 70s. Fashions just pass the Pet Shop Boys by. When this euphoric, bittersweet set builds to a house-laced, hi-NRG climax centred on It’s Alright, Go West and It’s a Sin, it’s just a natural iteration of the deep well of club music the pair have regularly drawn on. One notable incursion from the 21st century is Tennant changing the lyrics to West End Girls. Out goes “Lake Geneva to the Finland station”, in come references to “Mariupol and the Kyiv station”.
The devil’s advocate position might be that the Pet Shops Boys’ canon can get a bit airless as a result, but the duo’s adherence to a set of barely fluctuating musical principles has served them nothing but well. The magnificence of their early work remains undimmed, with songs like Rent gliding by lustrously. Tennant’s look at relationships of convenience feels remarkably compassionate and non-judgmental, given our more opinionated times.
Tennant introduces Jealousy as the first song the pair ever wrote in 1982. Significantly, it’s no dance track, but an introspective torch song, churning over a guy who doesn’t call. They still play Paninaro, a curveball paean to passion and an Italian luxe streetwear look (upmarket bomber jackets, white jeans, Timberland boots), voiced by the band’s otherwise silent partner Lowe.
Fast forward to 2024 and a triptych of new tunes slots straight into the megamix. Dancing Star pays crisp homage to ballet phenomenon Rudolf Nureyev, who defected from the Soviet Union; he “jumped the barrier at Orly airport” to claim asylum. Tennant tells a better story in the run-up to Domino Dancing, however, about a friend’s little victory dance after a domino match on holiday. Naturally, the 1988 song isn’t really about that. Rather, a revelatory couplet drills down to nuanced feeling, Pet Shops Boys’ strongest aesthetic calling card. “I don’t know why, I don’t know how,” Tennant croons, “I thought I loved you, but I’m not sure now.” Their cool ambivalence should have its own Kitemark.
