Pet Shop Boys – 10 of the best

1. Jealousy (extended version)

A dining room in Blackpool witnessed the birth of Pet Shop Boys. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe didn’t meet there: that happened in a Chelsea electronics shop, where an idle chat about dance music and synthesisers began a lifelong friendship and musical partnership. That friendship also inspired the lyrics to the first song they wrote together, for which Chris Lowe composed the melody on a piano in the dining room of his parents’ house in Blackpool.

A friend of Tennant’s was envious of his new friendship with Lowe, and this mood runs through the lyrics, although they also sound as if they could be about thwarted love (“Where’ve you been? / Who’ve you seen? / You didn’t call when you said you would”). Jealousy was not released until 1991, as the fourth single from their fourth album, Behaviour; the band had dreamt of Ennio Morricone orchestrating it for years, but he’d never replied to them. Harold Faltermeyer produced Behaviour, and did a brilliant job on Jealousy with a sampler-based orchestra, but a real orchestra was brought in for the single. This extended mix makes this Top 10 for two reasons: for the jealousy-conjuring quote from Shakespeare’s Othello at the start (“Not poppy, nor mandragora / Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world / Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep / Which thou owedst yesterday), and for the track’s measured drift between harp-slathered bombast and naive, tender melancholy. This was Pet Shop Boys’ music as it would be, from the first day, to a T.

2. Paninaro

Before Dusty Springfield and Liza Minnelli received fabulous songs from Pet Shop Boys, Tennant and Lowe were trying to write for a band called the Hudsons, one of whose members, Tom Watkins, was the Pet Shop Boys’ manager at the time. “Tom Watkins had a really brilliant idea for a gay disco record [called] I’m in Love With a Woman,” said Tennant in the liner notes for the 1995 B-side compilation Alternative. “We’d said we’d write it. [So] when Chris wrote this music, we decided this would be it … but Tom got sniffy all of a sudden and didn’t want us to do it.”

The nouns Lowe runs through, like a set of fabulously arty, Barbara Kruger-like slogans (“passion, love, sex, money, violence, religion, injustice, death”) were a lyrical idea from the original song. The title was not. The paninari were a subculture of Milanese youths, obsessed with fast food and fast fashion: Tennant and Lowe liked the sound of them because they too were fans of Wham!, Madonna and Duran Duran, and were despised by trendier townsfolk of the same age. A strange case of Chinese whispers emerged: the journalist Dylan Jones wrote that that band had written a song on the subject when they hadn’t – so then they did. Three decades on, it remains a total banger, Lowe’s blank delivery reining in the fabulousness just so. Even he breaks in the middle eight, however, in a piece of speech taken from a 1986 US Entertainment Tonight interview. “I don’t like much really, do I? But what I do like,” he burrs northernly, “I love passionately.”

3. It’s a Sin

A few years before Madonna kissed her black Jesus in the video for Like a Prayer, and REM used the image of doubting Thomas touching the wound in Jesus’ side in the video for Losing My Religion, Tennant was surrounded by candles and monks in heavy vestments as he sang about shame, getting ready to be burned on a funeral pyre. A UK No 1 for three weeks, It’s a Sin was inspired by Tennant’s Catholic schooling, not a particularly obvious subject for such a huge hit. What makes the song work, though, is its overblown production, which makes sinfulness sound like the most thrilling thing in the world. Case in point: the muffled vocals at the beginning are from a Nasa countdown, for no other reason than drama. The backroom boys behind It’s a Sin also knew their way around the charts. Producer Julian Mendelsohn and engineer Andy Richards had worked on Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax and Two Tribes; the former recorded a Catholic mass in Brompton Oratory for this track’s middle-eight, while the latter created the thunderclap effect that launches It’s a Sin into the countdown, then into space. “Neil and Chris would normally leave the studio at around seven or eight o’clock every night, giving us a list of things they’d like us to do, and then they would come back the next morning and tell us what they did and didn’t like,” Mendelsohn told Sound on Sound magazine in 2010. “As things kept getting added, the two of us got quite carried away.”

4. King’s Cross

In the same year the Smiths released a song about leaving home on a train heaving on to Euston, and inspired by the journey from north to south that Billy Liar never made, Pet Shop Boys released a song named after the station at which north easterners would arrive after fleeing (“You leave home,” Tennant sings, “and you don’t go back”). “King’s Cross is the station you come to when you come down to London looking for opportunity from the north east, then the most depressed part of England,” he added in the liner notes to the 2001 reissue of Actually. “And there’s lots of crime around King’s Cross – prostitution, drug addicts, and a lot of tramps come up to you there. I just thought that was a metaphor for Britain – people arriving at this place, waiting for an opportunity that doesn’t happen.” This “angry song about Thatcherism”, as Tennant also calls it, is one of Pet Shop Boys’ most beautiful songs. The slow, note-by-note descent of the melody in its verses seems to ache with real sadness. The melody then rises in passages in the chorus, offering tangible moments of hope, before Tennant quashes them: “Wake up in the morning,” he sighs, “and there’s still no guarantee.”

5. Heart (disco mix)

Another track off Actually, and a version that raises our pulse from the start. At this stage, Pet Shop Boys could do no wrong. This is a straightforward song about love, which held tween goliaths Bros and Climie Fisher off the top of the charts. (It was finally knocked off after three weeks by S-Express’s Theme From S-Express, but you know Tennant and Lowe wouldn’t have minded that at all.) The moment just before the end where the song’s relentless rhythm just stops – as if the song’s heart itself is even open to the possibility of missing a beat – is pop at its most playful and exquisite and perfect. Their last No 1, and their best.

6. Left to My Own Devices

This song is about a day in the life of a very ordinary person, its lyrics from the school of Alan Bennett, its music from the opera via the rave. Tennant woke up one morning with its title in mind, ready to write a song that contained elements of his own life. The “party animal” mentioned at the start of the song, for example, his music writer friend Jon Savage, who used to call him every morning. (Tennant said in the liner notes to the 2001 reissue of Introspective that Savage wasn’t quite that rowdy, “but in the 80s he did go out more”.) The “brochures about the sun” were ones Tennant had picked up from a travel agent and were lying on the table in front of him as he wrote. He had also recently talked to his mother about his enjoyment of solitude as a boy, about “a world of my own at the back of the garden”, although in his secret life he was a Cavalier, not a “roundhead general”.

The last section about Che Guevara’s secret life is meant to be happening at the end of the day, in a dream (Tennant had been fascinated as a teenager by Guevara), but it was the song’s producer Trevor Horn who inspired the song’s most famous phrase, “Debussy to a disco beat”, which was to be his next musical, he told Tennant and Lowe, who added Che Guevara. Happy for the band to steal the sentence, Horn was given a writing credit on the single’s B-side, The Sound of the Atom Splitting, as thanks. The song is their second-greatest ever, in my book: eight minutes that come from a gloriously English but wonderfully outward-looking perspective, with a chorus that manages to eke genuine tenderness from its lovable nonchalance.

7. Being Boring

This is Pet Shop Boys’ greatest track, a song even Tennant calls “our moment of pop perfection … our Shangri-La”. Its roots are again autobiographical, but more painfully so. One of Tennant’s best friends from childhood, Chris Dowell, died of an Aids-related illness in 1989; he was a friend with whom Tennant shared the “invitations to teenage parties” that are mentioned in the first verse. The second verse sees Tennant transported to London in the 70s, when he studied at the North London Polytechnic, got into glam-rock fashion and came out (“My shoes were high and I had scored”). In the third verse, Tennant is looking back, and as he says in the commentary to 1996 fanclub CD, About, imagining a life when he is continuing to do what he does, but Dowell has died.

Being Boring is a song both Tennant and Lowe have always loved, but another surprising rock star professed his admiration for it in 1991. “We played at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles [that year]”, Tennant adds, on the same CD commentary, “and Axl Rose from Guns N’ Roses came backstage, and says, ‘But why didn’t you play ‘Boring’, man? I just love that song!’”

8. Flamboyant

This 2004 single, one of two extra tracks on the compilation PopArt, showed Pet Shop Boys, even 20 years into their career, could still move up a gear. It doesn’t mark a radical change in terms of its lyrical content: Flamboyant celebrates the larger-than-life characters who make pop culture tick. But its production by German producer Tomcraft (who had an UK No 1 earlier that year with Loneliness) feels truly alive, and its pure, blissful melody is one of their sharpest, brightest best.

9. Integral

Pet Shop Boys have always done politics, albeit in their own extraordinary way. (It’s referenced as far back as West End Girls’ line about Lenin’s journey “from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station”, and To the Finland Station was the title of Edmund Wilson’s history of revolutionary thought.) Their 2006 album Fundamental implied an “ism” in its very title, and ended with the pairing of the explicitly political Indefinite Leave to Remain, followed by this air-punching finale. Inspired by the legislation being suggested at the time for official ID cards in Britain, and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1920s Russian dystopian novel, We, Tennant takes on the guise of a government official, alternating messages of comfort and terror: “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear / If you’ve something to hide, you shouldn’t even be here.” Trevor Horn’s fantastic, bombastic production was his first work with the band since 1989 and it has a might and majesty that fit the song’s theme perfectly. This record makes makes the idea of living in a perfect society sound utterly intoxicating, before the mask slips, the mirror cracks, and the shards cut to bone.

10. Love Is a Bourgeois Construct

To conclude, another song soaring from an orchestral core, although that core is a sample from Michael Nyman’s Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds, a piece from the soundtrack of Peter Greenaway’s 1982 film The Draughtman’s Contract, which itself uses a melody from Purcell’s King Arthur. In the Purcell, this theme introduces a scene in which love is said to be able to melt the coldest of hearts, which is what happens in this song. Its narrator decries and denies love throughout (“You won’t see me with a bunch of roses promising fidelity / Love doesn’t mean a thing to me”), until the last chorus, when he says “he’ll give up the bourgeoisie … until you come back to me”. There are other moments of Pet Shop Boys’ playfulness here. A composer friend closed in on the lyric about Goldhawk Road in west London, which also crops up in Greenaway’s first feature film, The Falls. “I’m either reading far too much into it,” he said, “or that song is a masterpiece of kaleidoscopic cultural references.” I’ll happily read into it: Pet Shop Boys’ whole career is a dazzling, multicoloured overload of repeated reflections and glittering ideas. Long may it sparkle, and long may it turn.