Pet Shop Boys Pet Shop Boys,
Thanks to innovators like Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League, alongside the huge leaps made in drum-machine technology by the Roland corporation, musicians finally realised in the early '80s that they didn't actually have to lug around that neanderthal skin-thrasher and his enormous caseloads of equipment. Come to that, they didn't even have to lug any equipment around. As the decade progressed, it became more acceptable-mandatory, almost -for young musicians to make their music in a suburban bedroom, and never appear live at all. After all, most pop was aimed at a suburban heartland, so why continue with gunslinger fantasies of escape and rebellion purchased wholesale decades earlier with rock'n'roll? The modern fantasies were, in any case, being acted out on dancefloors, as filthy sweatbox clubs metamorphosed into palais of tack, flashing lights and mirror-balls. If you were too shy, self-obsessed, arhythmic or pustular to chance your hand down the disco, you retreated to your bedroom and wallowed in self-pity.

The Smiths, of course, were the prime articulators of adolescent angst, but their rock-band style seemed old-fashioned when you'd just purchased a cheap Casio that could virtually do it all. Still, as they ditched the bass along with the drums-and eventually, anything that came with strings and went out of tune rapidly-the new pop groups took for their own both the disco pulse and Morrissey's attitude of hurt, slightly camp snidery. It went hand in hand with a new, almost Thatcherite realism to the pop process: hanging out with the lads, and all that-but a service industry for the burgeoning dancefloor economy. Nobody grasped all this more quickly, or more completely than the Pet Shop Boys.

The PSB hits compilation Discography presents their singles output, from the second, successful version of West End Girls to the latest DJ Culture 45, plus another recent recording, Was It Worth It? (one of several Morrissey-esque titles in the PSB oeuvre). The surprising thing about the collection is its consistency, in terms of both quality and style. There's an increase in sophistication, but right from the off, the basic formula was complete: gorgeous pop melodies, smartass lyrics, disco underpinnings, and moody-boy attitude par excellence. Neil Tennant's voice, which initially seemed weak and lacking in character,

carried an eternity of adolescent yearning perfectly suited both to the tone of emotional bewilderment in Love Comes Quickly and the more amorphous, abstract needs expressed in Suburbia. They had smarts aplenty, it was immediately apparent, especially in the dry wit that pervaded much of the material. It was only meant as a joke in the first place, they claim of Opportunities(Let's Make Lots Of Money) in their sleevenote, but the irony has outstripped even that implied in the song, with all its talk of brains, looks and brawn. Not only have they made lots of money, it's been done without brawn entering it, and as for the looks part of the formulation, their bored visual style has deliberately downplayed such considerations. The musical style of their debut, Please (1986), may be merely a slicker extension of the original The Human League principles, but the Pet Shop Boys' innovations are still considerable.

For one, the no-sweat principle of avoiding playing live, letting MTV take the strain, was never held as tenaciously by any other group. For another, their initial hit West End Girls was the first time a white outfit- and an English one at that-used rap techniques successfully, applying them with an appropriate fey, white-boy intelligence and irony, rather than directly aping black rap aggression. Another corollary of the no-sweat principle resulted in their innovation of the Disco remix album (1986) to ease the usual album-per-year workload groups traditionally laboured under. Although in truth, the songs on Disco were rarely improved by the elongating attentions of such as Shep Pettibone and Arthur Baker, with only the new composition Paninaro successfully surviving the tedium factor due to its novelty. Their second album proper,

Actually (1987), was an even more assured extension of the first album's style and values, especially the laconic tone of songs like Shopping and Rent. Whatever the emotional turmoil, Pet Shop Boys themselves were always one step back, observing, removed from the action-more intellectually interested in the situation than emotionally involved. I love you, you pay my rent may be their most exquisitely cool line, redolent both of `80s materialist attitudes and the rent-boy scrapheap that such attitudes ultimately result in. But though the album contained two Number 1s in Heart and It's A Sin, elsewhere Hit Music was a PSB-by-numbers exercise, while the Ennio Morricone collaboration It Couldn't Happen Here was as ill-advised as it appears on paper-though at the side of their film of the same name, it seems positively sharp. 1987
Andy Gill

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