Dennis Lim at The Current:
For a brief spell in the 1980s, in much of the world but especially in the United Kingdom, the Pet Shop Boys ruled pop music. The synth duo’s singer and lyricist Neil Tennant, once an editor at the magazine Smash Hits, was a keen surveyor of the scene before he became one of its biggest stars, and he would later call this the band’s “imperial phase.” During this halcyon period of critical and commercial invincibility, these improbable pop idols, known for not smiling in publicity photos and for standing stock-still while performing, racked up a string of British number-one singles and many more global hits. Whatever Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe attempted—a melodramatic disco stomper about Catholic guilt (“It’s a Sin”), a swaggering reinvention of a morose ballad popularized by Elvis Presley and Wille Nelson (“Always on My Mind”)—it would top the charts.
There was something both incongruous and thrilling about a sensibility as distinct as theirs attaining mainstream success, a sense that they had cracked the code of pop music while remaining outside it. Their hooks were undeniable and universal, their command of dance-music subcultures effortless, and that was hardly the extent of their polyglot fluency.
more here.
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