The last days of disco

July 1985, the high noon of the 1980s, and the decade that began in a riot of manifestos is settling into recognisable shape. Across the coalfields of Yorkshire and South Wales, miners have returned to work. Madonna has scored her first UK number one single. Grieving families have buried the dead of the Bradford Stadium fire. EastEnders has begun on BBC1. Philip Larkin has been diagnosed with cancer while Rock Hudson is confirmed to have AIDS. Stephen Frears is shooting My Beautiful Laundrette in south London. Mikhail Gorbachev has succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Bob Geldof is trying to pull together the running order for Live Aid.

And the Pet Shop Boys, two northern pop chancers the wrong side of 25, are trying very hard to bolt through a closing door. Their prospects, to be honest, don’t look good. “Opportunities”, their debut single for Parlophone, is an elaborate yet anachronistic confection, with a start-up shtick that harks back to Heaven 17’s pinstripes and ponytails pop-entrepreneurialism, and a production, courtesey of Art of Noise’s JJ Jeczalik, that sounds dated before the vinyl has cooled. In the week before Live Aid, the event that in so many ways marks the end of the golden age of English synthpop, it limps to an ignominious 116 in the charts.

Unusually, for this most lackadaisisal of groups, “Opportunities” tries too hard. Especially in this incarnation, the trifle of strained satire, self-fulfilling bathos (“my car is parked outside, I’m afraid it doesn’t work”), rueful middle eight, and portentous, Audenesque coda (“all the love that we had and the love that we hide / Who will bury us when we die?”) curdles on contact. It’s as though they were determined to cram together all their ideas into a single song, as though on a mission to become the most absurdly perfect one-hot wonders of the 1980s.

Instead they failed, soundtracked a decade or so of the ongoing national nervous breakdown and ended up as central to the story of English pop art as, oh, PG Wodehouse, John Betjeman, David Hockney, Ray Davies or Bryan Ferry. It’s hard to say Pet Shop Boys were the most original or the most subversive of English synth-pop groups, but they were certainly the culmination, perfecting pretty much every notion the genre ever had. How on earth did they manage it?

It was partly about knowing when to shut up. Their debut album, Please, when it was finally released in March 1986 was sleeved in the most perfect manifestation of pop minimalism, Eric Watson’s sauna room headshot, centred by designer Mark Farrow like a postage stamp in vast milky margins of white space. And “West End Girls”, the follow-up single that eventually rose, like the steam from an east-side street, over the course of over two months, to overtake Wham!, Whitney, A-Ha and Shaky to become the first number one of 1986, was, despite its wordiness, almost pure atmosphere and suggestion.

It begins with sounds of the city: stilettos on pavements, taxi horns hooting, night falling with a hiss on Soho. It’s not the Soho of Soft Cell, to whom the Boys owed a thing or two: there’s no overt sleaze to Please. It’s a very moody, filmic, Roxyish opening; in fact it’s almost a straight homage to the opening moments of “Love Is The Drug”. Compare it to the version they recorded with hi-NRG auteur Bobby Orlando a couple of years earlier, with its breaking glass and crude electro samples, and it’s all very - in a word Tennant and his Newcastle friends used to describe the poolside gatefold  of Bryan Ferry’s Another Time, Another Place - sophis... 

Lyrically, Tennant described ‘West End Girls’, with all due modesty, as the missing link between TS Eliot and Grandmaster Flash. “Too many shadows, whispering voices / Faces on posters, too many choices…” - this was a lush, English noir, something like a postmodern update of The Third Man, that corresponded to the affluent, paranoid dreams London was starting to have about itself. 

The soundworld of ‘West End Girls’ and subsequent singles and b-sides - glossy, poised electro, refracted through a sullen, yearning northern sensibility  - was to become a key soundtrack of the moment. The same week that ‘Opportunities’ flopped, BBC1 launched The Rock and Roll Years, a tv show which married post-war social history to contemporary pop, and framed the Pet Shop Boys’ pop ambition: to soundtrack and comment upon their times. When the producers of BBC1’s The Clothes Show, launched in the autumn of 1986, wanted the perfect theme for their show bringing Style Culture to the suburbs, they naturally turned to ‘Opportunities’ Hi-NRG-in-occupation-France b-side, ‘In The Night’.

Tennant and Lowe have spent much time in their post-imperial period hoping to find a new context by chancing their arms at musicals. In truth they are never likely to improve on Please, released in the spring of 1986, which across 10 songs tells a perfect pop story: flight from the suburbs into the metropolis; lust on the dancefloor and love in the shadows; dreams of escape and dreams of domesticity. Even when singing ‘I Want a Lover’. Tennant is one of the least sexual singers to ever front a major pop group - he’s like a male version of one of ABBA’s ice queens - but Please now feels like an immaculate concept album about the Last Days of Disco, released just as AIDS became a pandemic.

Actually, released 18 month later in the autumn of 1987, initially felt simply like an assured consolidation: ‘One More Chance’, ‘Hit Music’ and even their fourth number one ‘Heart’, felt like a band successfully fine-tuning a formula. But the album marked their real ascent to pop aristocracy. ‘It’s a Sin’, dated from the same 1983 Bobby O demos as much of the first album, but here was turbo-charged into a Europe-devouring disco-monster, the first-dance floorfiller at Charlemagne’s coronation;  “ABBA in hell” was coined to describe Propaganda, but serves perfectly to describe the thunderclap grandiosity of it all. This was a group that now understood perfectly how to create number one singles. 

“What Have I Done To Deserve This?”, meanwhile perfected another early 80s new pop ambition, reviving the career of Dusty Springfield, just as Heaven 17 parent company BEF had once restyled Sandie Shaw and Tina Turner as electro-pop divas. But while Martyn Ware and Ian Marsh had turned to Bacharach and the Brill Building as the foundation for their anti-rockist pop classicism, Tennant and Lowe (with notable assistance on this occasion from Earth, Wind and Fire auteur Allee Willis) had the songwriting chops to not merely pay homage but actually extend the canon. The video established them as odd icons: bow-tied backstage boys of pop who had somehow strayed the wrong side of the curtain, standing awkwardly among the feather boas and finery.

If ‘Rent’, a song that Sondheim might have been proud of, was incontrovertible proof that Tennant and Lowe were the finest songwriting duo of their generation, it was a cover version, that propelled them into their imperial period proper. Famously denying the Pogues their 1986 Christmas number one,‘Always On My Mind’  was almost a throwaway, a stupidly overblown cowbell cover produced for an Elvis tv tribute, that somehow turned Willie Nelson’s rueful schmaltz into a song about English reserve and regret. 

They might have successfully milked a winning formula for a year two yet (they allowed Erasure to pick up that trail). Instead success emboldened them. Introspective, released in the autumn of 1988, is their finest album. Comprising six songs, all over six minutes long, it’s ostensibly the sequel to Disco, their 1986 12-inch compilation. Except, in a move worthy of imperial ZTT, on this occasion the extended versions preceded the single edits. 

Naturally, Trevor Horn was on hand to assist. ‘Left to My Own Devices’ is the boldest release in the strongest singles discography of the decade. It’s not quite, as the cute couplet would have it, “Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat” (Tennant tends to overestimate the potency of the group’s subversion), but as a pop critique of everyday life, it’s a worthy heir to ‘A Day in the Life’. If in the 60s psychedelia seemed to offer an spiritual escape from the stifling routines of work and home, by the 1980s the orchestrated hyperstimulation of advertising and media overwhelm the individual in their leisure, inducing a sated passivity. 

Elsewhere, ‘I Want a Dog’, on the face of it a comedy b-side squib,  (“Husky, dalmatian, Saint Bernard, dachshund / Mongrel, beagle, Cocker spaniel” Chris Lowe had rapped on the original, as he had once hymned Armani and Versace on ‘Paninaro’),  becomes, in its extended minimal house version, an update of Roxy’s ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’ in anatomising modern melancholy.Finally ‘It’s Alright’, a cover of the Sterling Void house track, showed that the Pet Shop Boys were unique in late 80s UK pop in being able to not respond to the rise of house, but to absorb it into their aesthetic universe (compare it for example to Paul Weller’s doomed attempt to go house on the Style Council’s Modernism: A New Decade). 

Commercially the group seemed to be waning however: Tennant declared the relative failure of ‘Domino Dancing’ (it only got to number 7) as the end of their official imperial era. They seemed to embrace this passing with 1990’s determinedly autumnal, adult Behaviour. ‘So Hard’ could have been an update on the lovers who shacked up at the end of Please, five years into living together and beginning to stray (“we’ve both given up smoking, cos it’s fatal / so whose matches are those?”). And ‘Being Boring’ was a peerless elegy - for friends lost to AIDS, for lost youth, for the 80s pop dream itself. 

Following one of the all time great singles compilations (1991’s Discography), a classic piece of antirockist pop-art provocation (splicing ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ with ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’) and an obliquely Iraq War protest single (‘DJ Culture’), and being unlikely to ever really translate transatlantically (see Chris Heath’s amusing Pet Shop Boys vs America), it may have seemed that the group had no more worlds left to conquer. 1993’s Very proved a winning victory lap (and their first number one album) however, by turning everything up to 11. By transfiguring classic disco, Broadway choirs and state of the art CGI animation into post-Soviet geo-political commentary, ‘Go West’ may even be the quintessential Pet Shop Boys single. 

The story doesn’t end there - there have been a further eight albums (with another due for release in 2019), each adding sly commentary, heartbreaking balladry and surreal wit to the extended catalogue. But as the singles chart has lost cultural gravity, it does feel as if they have drifted off into their own self-sufficient artistic universe. Does the pop moment, as the Pet Shop Boys once mastered it, still exist? Is it possible for a group to soundtrack the times, or is a place on a movie or a commercial the most a group can hope for? If anyone is to make a convincing anthem summing up environmental apocalypse, the prospects for a radical left UK government or Britain’s re-entry into the European you suspect it will be the Pet Shop Boys. But will anyone will be listening?