RETROSPECTIVE: Pet Shop Boys

All the people I was kissing some are here and some are missing in the nineteen nineties- Being Boring lyrics

Whenever someone mentions "80s music" one always thinks about some kind of high energy pop music, like New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle, Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want To Have Fun or maybe even something more chic like Tears for Fear's Everybody Wants To Rule The World.  But... where are all those artists now? Big time eighties stars who are still around today having succesful careers, like Madonna or Michael Jackson, are no longer seen entirely as stars from this era due to the fact that their success has spanned more decades and, most importantly I think,  their aesthetics and music style has shifted from what we usually consider it to be (Madonna "reinventing" herself every time). Michael Jackson can be considered "very eighties"yet I consider that he has outgrown the eighties culture and has become something different now.

On the other side, the Pet Shop Boys are a popular eighties band that continues to have success today. They have evolved, yes, but not in radical ways like Madonna, or in a commercial/political activist way like U2. Whenever you hear a new song from them it's easy to recognize the classic synth pop feeling from twenty years ago but in a new fresh way.    

Creepy? Maybe, but genious nonetheless.

The Pet Shop Boys were born in 1982 when Neil Tennant met Chris Lowe, not in a pet shop as most people think, but in an electronics shop in Chelsea, England. They chose the name "Pet Shop Boys" just because it sounded cool to them, not because of a well known mythical homosexual practice involving gerbils as rumores once stated. From 1984 to 1989 they release such massive hits as West End Girls, Opportunites (Let's make lots of money), What have I done to deserve this? and It's a Sin, dance club anthems with catchy rhythms and witty lyrics. But as brilliant as their music is, one of their most emblematic aspects has been their visual aesthetic, very "Trapper Keeeper" at first and then more "Pop Artish" in an Andy Warhol kind of way (their 2002 greatest hits collection was titled Pop Art as a result of this) but always with a very healthy dose of eighties vibe to it.

Take a look at this, one of their first videos from 1984. It may look very primitive for today's standards but it featured some clever camera tricks and a lot of post-disco eighties features like the neon clouds and the side scrolling action.

Now take a look at this video from 2009. It sounds different, it sounds fresh, it looks probably like nothing we have seen before, yet there are still some very evident eighties symbols both in the music and in the video. Heck, even Pacman appears munching things!



 High Definition version available on YouTube and petshopboys.co.uk.

Yes, the new Pet Shop Boys album comes out the 23rd of March, 2009. Check it out!