Pet Shop Boys, Actually
With all the grinning tooth-display of a dyspeptic tax-inspector,

Neil Tennant is not my idea of a pin-up dreamboat. Yet with Pet Shop Boys' internationally best-selling singles and album Please, he gave new hope not only to everyone with a doleful countenance but also to all pop journalists of a certain age and uncertain career prospects. Best of all, though, the success of Neil Tennant and his partner Chris Lowe demonstrates how a questionable pill may yet be smuggled into the mainstream inside a little guileful sugar. For example,
the single It's A Sin (included here) would have been a hit too for Soft Cell five years ago, but since then Radio One has rumbled Marc Almond's iffy persona and so now he finds it hard to get airplay despite records of continuing quality. Neil Tennant is far more ambiguous than Almond, his voice less strident, more insinuatingly wistful. This creates a mood of cool melancholy rather than a challenge to prick up your ears.

Just this side of camp, Tennant's lyrics crisply evoke a range of youthful longings from dreamy despair through sexual dependency to the transient relief of good times. All this filters naturally through the prism of Tennant's disembodied croon, and its synthetic accompaniment is a sweet melodiousness bedded on a disco sound that echoes a solipsistic world of mirrors and subdued lighting. Phew! Pet Shop Boys refine the kitsch of Soft Cell and garnish it with a little of Yello's Euro-Latin jokiness,

but centre these influences on a multi-layered mood all their own. As a development from last year's Please, Actually displays a growing assurance in a variety of songs, of which the lush ballad It Couldn't Happen Here stands out. With the bonus of the incomparable Dusty Springfield duetting on What Have I Done To Deserve This?,

Actually is 1987's most intelligent, bittersweet mainstream pop album.
Mat Snow