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LIVE ALBUM REVIEW
PET SHOP BOYS
Pandemonium Live, the O2 Arena,
Released: DVD and CD - 15th February 2010.
Label: Parlophone.
Genre: “Electro-pop”/”Synth-pop”, Dance.
Price: HMV - £9.99
Typically brilliant and outrageous pop pomp pandemonium not without its faults.
It’s always been hard to pigeon-hole pop music’s statistically most successful duo.
Pet Shop Boys, who have sold more than 100 million records worldwide, have never been afraid to move from their comfort zone.
For the past 25 years since the release of their debut critically-acclaimed UK #1 single West End Girls in November 1985, the singing one, Neil Tennant and the other one that “doesn’t do very much”, apart from play the keyboards, Chris Lowe, have delivered a catalogue of ironic, subtle, upbeat and often beautiful songs.
But the playful power of pop has never left Tennant, the former assistant editor of ex-music magazine Smash Hits and Lowe, once a pub glass collector and then an architecture student, confined to devoting themselves to one facet of this particular genre.
Neither has it in their artistry, perfectly summed up in the dividing line wryly used for the title of their 2003 greatest hits compilation, Pop Art.
Melding musical themes and subtle innuendos has always been this electronic duo’s metier. Four UK #1 hit singles, 10 UK Top 10 albums and an Outstanding Contribution to Music award at 2009’s BRIT awards, highlights their unrelenting influence.
So what better way than to uncover their legacy on an accessible but often wonderfully ridiculous live album Pandemonium?
A DVD of 22 tracks plus seven bonus performances – including their live BRITS montage, accompanied by two artists magnetized by their presence, Lady Gaga and Brandon Flowers of The Killers – and a CD with 17 songs both mixed by in-vogue eclectic electronic producer Stuart Price allows nostalgic middle-aged pop fans and the current breed of disco kids to equally salivate and ponder confusingly.
So, why - if you’re currently an angst-ridden teenager bored with JLS and Pixie Lott, or a parent of the teenager who was instead more caught up in Glam Metal rather than the synthesizer and capitalist Conservative boom of the 1980s – decide to buy this album?
Well Pandemonium is infectious, melodious, intelligent and innovative. This duly reflects Tennant and Lowe’s career since a chance meeting in a West London electronics shop in 1981 after fulfilling separate university backgrounds in North London and
From the cleverly worked new arrangements to segue many of their old and new hits together, including the astonishing merger of Se a Vida e/Discoteca/Domino Dancing and Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, Pet Shop Boys incorporate their myriad of emphatically clattering latin hip-hop and disco rhythms, bubbly and fuzzy bass lines and warm, glistening string and brass orchestrations in a superbly sophisticated and pleasing experience.
Indeed their ode to the disco-electronics of Bobby Orlando, Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, the hip hop tinges of Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash and their enjoyment of synth-tinged progressive and glam rockers Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and David Bowie alongside their generally appreciative support of universal pop music from the 1960s to 2010, all make for a sweet-tasting exotic cocktail of influences.
Particular highlights on the DVD and CDs are plentiful.
With Tennant stomping around the stage like a school headmaster with a drag fetish and enthusing on the energy of the audience tingled by the wonderful new re-workings from Go West to Always On My Mind and Suburbia, there is much to enjoy.
No more so than on the epic West End Girls.
Meanwhile due to Pandemonium – recorded live in December 2009 – showcasing many of 2009 UK #4 album Yes’ hits, Pet Shop Boys offer revved-up mergers from Did You See Me Coming?, to Love Etc.
And there’s always the endearing touch of social and political culture. Left To My Own Devices’ lyric, “But in the back of my head, I heard distant feet, Che Guevara and (Claude) Debussy to a disco beat” is one of many which tingle audiences due to the mixture of pop frivolity and sensibility.
Conclusively, they have always been a thinking person’s pop group.
But it does not mean the album is without its faults.
In essence, Pandemonium is a typical Pet Shop Boys live effort. It’s heart-warmingly playful and camp.
But while pushing boundaries, Pet Shop Boys allow for Tate Modern-esque ridicule.
Wearing colourful cardboard boxes on their heads and in donning glittery-yet-arty costumes, although they create typically amusing jokes of packaged pop, it's also glam pop pomposity.
Furthermore their array of rainbow-coloured dancers and boxes - which on the track Building a Wall from Yes - tries to poke fun cheekily at the extravagance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and subsequent stage shows.
It’s great, but a bit overwhelming.
Meanwhile, Tennant’s consistent outbursts of deadpan-then-eccentric punk and glam tinged vocal delivery, highlighted particularly on tracks like New York City Boy, Left To My Own Devices and Suburbia alongside his androgynous stage costumes and presence, does seem sometimes aesthetically overdone. At others it yearns for a better singer for such magnificent compositions and visual artistry.
Indeed the Bowie song Sound and Vision sums up the London-based duo perfectly.
But despite the rather ill-managed set list – particularly on the CD - with a swamping of high energy tracks from More Than A Dream to Closer To Heaven and producer Price’s tendency to wreak blaring synth arpeggio havoc and booming-bass drums on every album he works on – think Madonna’s Confessions On A Dance Floor or The Killers’ Day & Age – leaving a slight lack of subtlety to proceedings; this live album is still a success.
The only problem is subtlety. Their lyrics on pop life, fashion, politics, class, homo-erotica and love have always been ironic and refreshingly engaging amongst the droll output from some of their packaged peers.
But live albums can sometimes swamp underlying hints and messages with a necessity for visual extravagance and indulgence.
For their best balladry, thought-provoking lyricism and calm, you must wait until Do I Have To? – a former B-Side on 1987’s Actually – King’s Cross, Jealousy and Being Boring.
However then again, this is Pet Shop Boys. When have they ever been that subtle? They have always had a playful and hedonistic side intended for a live dancing environment.
It’s no wonder then when watching Pandemonium, current artists ranging from Robbie Williams, Lady Gaga, The Killers, Keane, Little Boots and many others, hail Pet Shop Boys as influential to them and on pop and art.
And as live albums go, on Pandemonium, both the pop and art whether pompous or not, are also spectacular.
