Pet Shop Boys

This is the wonderful story of an album born twice, a phoenix that, thanks to the almost fairy-tale perseverance of its protagonists, reaches its ultimate sublimation. A British-flavoured soap opera that reaches its happy ending only because the record industry, for once, drops the role of villain and bets with genuine flair on a wager that seemed already lost.
This is the story of "Please", the debut of one of the longest-running and most creative bands in all of pop music: ladies and gentlemen, the Pet Shop Boys.

The first take, let's call it the prequel, is actually shot on the other side of the Atlantic: at the start of the most hedonistic and carefree decade, in New York, a promising producer, musician and composer is starting to make a name for himself. His name is Bobby Orlando, stage name Bobby 'O', and he's one of the pioneers of hi-NRG, that somewhat thumping style with pulsing basslines, new wave-style vocals and heavily pumped-up dance rhythms built on a four-on-the-floor kick. Orlando literally invents an all-female band, the Flirts, made up of dancers and low-budget actresses whose job is simply to put a face (and a body) to the project. Session singers from various agencies take turns at the microphone, while he naturally does the heavy lifting, writing the lyrics, playing the instruments and arranging everything. Back home, just a few months later, similar mechanisms would repeat themselves, leading to the triumph of Italo disco (the intertwined stories of Den Harrow, Tom Hooker and Enrico Ruggeri are better than any soap opera). A few years later, on a global scale, it would be Milli Vanilli's turn.

The first fruit of this imaginary female band is "Passion". It's 1982, and in England Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, a few years apart in age but united by a shared love of dance and electronic music, fall for it at first listen. They decide their debut record has to have the Bobby 'O' sound (picture Brian Eno, who after hearing Moroder's "I Feel Love", rushed back into the studio to tell David Bowie he'd just heard the sound of the future), naturally under the aegis of the Stars-and-Stripes producer.
Smash Hits, the music magazine where Tennant works as a staff writer, provides the perfect assist: he needs to go to New York to review a Police gig, complete with an interview with Sting. The trip, at zero cost to boot, finally gives Neil the chance to meet Orlando and hand over the inevitable cassette containing about ten already-recorded demos. The material is good — the verdict from the oracle they'd so eagerly awaited — and so, in short order, a deal is signed for the release of a 12" and an album. Twelve songs in total are recorded, forming the backbone of both "Please" and the follow-up, "Actually".

In April 1984, the first official version of "West End Girls" — the most promising of all the recorded tracks — finally sees the light of day. It becomes a club classic in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the gay community is a strong presence; in Europe it makes inroads on the dance charts of France and Belgium (hardly the trendiest markets), while in England it's only released as an import 12", with little impact.
The track bears the heavy imprint of the producer, who essentially takes full ownership of it, deciding single-handedly how it should be developed in the studio. The rhythm is more urgent than in the demo, sampled percussion and noises take priority, and the syncopated yelps poor Tennant is forced into hardly do the melody any favours, leaving it relegated to the background. Orlando, in fact, is far more excited by the idea of a rap record sung with an English accent, and in this delusion of omnipotence, Lowe too is left with mere scraps — some bass lines and the odd chord.
Commercial failure — the band rightly believes they have a potential hit on their hands — combined with the strain in the studio relationship, are the first signs of the coming split, which is finalised in early 1985 when the PSB finally free themselves, after exhausting negotiations, from the existing contract. A gentlemen's agreement grants Orlando substantial royalties on future sales, a deal that in hindsight turns out to be a win for both parties.
With a career that already looks over before it's even begun, the two regroup in London and, with the help of new manager Tom Watkins, sign to Parlophone, the historic home of the Beatles.

To test the waters back home, another track is quickly released, "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)", with help from J.J. Jeczalik of Art Of Noise. It fails to enter the UK chart, missing the top 100 altogether — another flop foretold.
To avoid disappearing for good, and at this point it's a very close call, the band decides to stake what few chips they have left on "West End Girls", a kind of all-in bet that they nevertheless want to play their own way, re-recording the track from scratch with a new producer.
The choice isn't an easy one: the two set their sights on rising talent Stephen Hague, who has done excellent work on the World Famous Supreme Team's "Hey DJ" and, above all, Malcolm McLaren's "Madame Butterfly". The label, however, would prefer an already established production team, perhaps the wonder-trio Stock, Aitken and Waterman, who by the mid-Eighties are already the Midas touch of sugary, made-in-England pop. In the end, despite plenty of misgivings, Hague is confirmed behind the desk.

Work in the studio is frantic, the stakes couldn't be higher, and the order of the day is to win (op. cit.). The blueprint remains the same: a lavish, synth-oriented track influenced by hip-hop, specifically by Grandmaster Flash's famous "The Message". Less aggressive vocal lines and a new, driving rhythm woven around a far more effective bassline, replacing the beats and minimal synths scattered almost at random through the old recording. A small portion of the lyrics is also trimmed, while the Gregorian-style chants created by Bobby 'O' on the Emulator are kept intact (one of the few arrangements surviving from the original version — the two would have liked to scrap them entirely to distance themselves from Orlando's work, but wisely, the production team decides to leave them in).
Hague, struck by the lyrics and the atmosphere of the song, decides to add a long intro. He goes out onto the street with a DAT recorder and captures the sounds of a typical London morning: women's heels clicking on the pavement, car horns blaring, chaotic traffic and the chatter of passers-by. If you listen closely on headphones, you can even make out a female voice, in the opening seconds, exclaiming: "It's Sting!" (Hague did indeed bear something of a resemblance to the Police frontman at the time).
"West End Girls" 2: the revenge starts quietly, but week after week it climbs the charts until it breaks into the top ten in early '86. The next step is number one in the UK, the US, Canada and pretty much everywhere else. One and a half million copies sold to date, making it the best-selling, most-listened-to and most-streamed single in the entire PSB discography.

With the hit racking up record after record on charts worldwide, and true to the old adage about striking while the iron is hot, "Love Comes Quickly" also hits the floor — another striking, atmospheric mid-tempo number with lyrics musing on the inevitability of love, seemingly banal on the surface yet undeniably true. "Sooner or later, it happens to everyone, to everyone", the Pet Shop Boys reassure us, and we all choose to believe it as an act of faith through the lean times and lingering melancholy. Whatever you think about love, this early-career staple, embellished by Andy Mackay of Roxy Music on saxophone, would go on to be revisited in later tours with new, seductive arrangements — proof of an ability to reinvent their own repertoire that remains unmatched within synth-pop.

"Please" (legend has it the title was chosen after thousands of fans, following the runaway success of "West End Girls", rushed into record shops asking: "Have you got the Pet Shop Boys, please?") kicks off a series of albums, continuing to this day, whose titles all consist of a single word.
The historical moment, the cultural soil from which the album springs, isn't easy to read. The first thrilling wave of electronic pop is already fading: Yazoo, Soft Cell and Blancmange are already gone; Ultravox, ABC, Thompson Twins, A Flock Of Seagulls and Gary Numan are on their last legs.
Kraftwerk are hanging on, barely, with the controversial "Electric Cafè", an album whose rhythms and percussive sounds are actually strikingly ahead of their time (though the songs themselves, as melodies, don't particularly shine, save for the timeless gem "The Telephone Call"); Tears For Fears are veering ever more towards conventional pop-soul, Human League pull off a classy comeback thanks to "Human" and, above all, Jam & Lewis, while "Black Celebration" by Depeche Mode has nothing classic-synth-pop about it at all (though Gore and co. would partly get back on track with "Strangelove", right through to the apotheosis of "Enjoy The Silence").
Within this fairly bleak picture for the fortunes of electronic music, a new synthetic wave begins to emerge, spearheaded by the fledgling Erasure, helmed by maestro Vince Clarke, ZTT's Propaganda and Bronski Beat, who shine brilliantly before vanishing in the blink of an eye (though Somerville would later create two fine albums with the Communards project) — and, of course, PSB, who alongside Depeche Mode, New Order and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark remain today, in 2020, the only true survivors of that explosive decade.

"Please" was born as a wager on every front, and not only because of its troubled gestation. Take the cover, for instance, endlessly debated with the label and management, who want something eye-catching and immediate, able to grab attention at a glance. Instead, here's a white ocean with a tiny photo in the middle, showing the pair wreathed in white and thus, effectively, invisible. As if that weren't enough, the name and title appear in small lowercase letters at the bottom.
Practically commercial suicide from a marketing standpoint; but from the Boys' point of view, it was a deliberate attempt to stand apart as much as possible from the covers of the era, all vying to be colourful, in-your-face, brazen almost to the point of kitsch. In the French edition, curiously, the same photo is used but blown up much larger, with the name and title placed higher up, much to the band's displeasure. Oddly, the later CD edition didn't keep the same proportions as the vinyl, so the photo ends up taking up almost half the cover.
The British media, always quick to dig for gossip if not outright scandal, make no explicit reference to the pair's sexuality. After all, the lyrics, even the more personal ones, can easily be read as referring to straight relationships, and the two deliberately avoid any comment on the matter. Neil's admission would only come at the time of "Very", by which point the Nineties are already well underway. But it's hard to blame Tennant and Lowe — venturing into that territory wasn't easy back then, especially with an eye on the American market.
They aren't alone. Marc Almond, staying within the synth-pop world, also avoids coming out officially, even though it all seems fairly obvious. The same goes for George Michael, for whom, however, it's rather less obvious. The one exception is Jimmy Somerville, who instead shouts his homosexuality from the rooftops, almost defiantly, with pride.
But despite the code of silence and the underlying ambiguity, the clues are there for anyone who looks. The cover of "Please", for instance, capturing them in a languid pose wrapped in white towels, or the rather brazen lyrics of "I Want A Lover". Even more explicit is the cover of "Love Comes Quickly", showing Lowe in close-up wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the word BOY in huge letters — one of the most iconic images of the band from this early period. Tennant himself, much later, would call that shot incredibly gay, an image that essentially represented the group's coming out from their very first record.

Musically, the album is just a touch simpler, more naive if you like, compared to what would come later, but still in step with the sounds of the era (Kraftwerk, as ever, are a law unto themselves). Tennant's lyrics, on the other hand, are already mature, witty, at times cutting — helped along by his thirty years of age, an exception to the average age of an artist on a debut album.
Not yet present are the orchestrations that would give the melodies their trademark sense of openness, which would only arrive with "Introspective" and Trevor Horn's lavish production — synthetic strings, or even a thirty-six-piece orchestra at certain special concerts, which even yielded an album of its own, "Concrete".
Stephen Hague's touch can be heard above all in the interplay between the bassline and the percussive, rhythmic sounds, a modus operandi also found in his later productions, for instance New Order's "True Faith", Erasure's "The Innocents" and the Communards' "Red".

In truth, both on the debut and on the following "Actually", Bobby 'O''s ghost still looms large, and certain tracks don't stray far from the demos recorded in New York. Take the album opener, "Two Divided By Zero", for instance: while on one hand it aims to be a tribute — intentional or not, it hardly matters — to Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator", it otherwise rests on a complex musical structure built by the American producer (and indeed, it's the only track on the album where he's credited as co-writer). The song's origin is pure chance: it starts with a Sharp calculator (model EL-640) that Tennant buys as a Christmas present for his father in 1983. The calculator is already programmed to voice each operation aloud, and the sound, however cheap, is so captivating that the phrase "two divided by zero" gets sampled and a melody is built around it.
"Opportunities" also resurfaces as a single, a remake of the track released after signing with Parlophone and now reprogrammed with new vocal lines. The song grew out of a catchy line of Lowe's, "let's make lots of money", around which his partner weaves a thoroughly ironic lyric, its protagonists two losers who ought to team up and find a way to make a pile of cash (it would be the first in a long series of irreverent lyrics, sparing not even U2 or rock bands of world renown in general). This writer, in fact, finds a good deal of healthy self-mockery in it too, since the characters in the story could easily be the duo themselves, driven by an iron will to become famous rich kids.

The A-side of the record, the one with the greater commercial impact, includes all the singles, and therefore also “Suburbia”, inspired by the film of the same name by Penelope Spheeris, which brought to the big screen the violence and squalor of the far outskirts of Los Angeles. Tennant weaves into verse the daily life of suburban kids, torn apart by gang wars, generational conflicts and police crackdowns. The single version, produced by Julian Mendelsohn and released several months after the album, obviously differs in the mixing, with much punchier rhythms and a decidedly more cinematic atmosphere full of pathos.
On the B-side, among others, stands out a great atmospheric track, “Violence”, a midtempo number with distant echoes of urban hip-hop, born from a bassline played on the PPG Wave. A hypnotic pace, rhythms brought to the fore, and lyrics that once again reference real-life episodes of violence, this time the Northern Irish conflict.
Gay disco sounds, on the other hand, run through “I Want A Lover”, one of the last anthems to sexual freedom and casual promiscuity before the dark ages ushered in by Aids. There's a curious inclusion of a sample of Lowe having a go on the trombone, an instrument he had learned at a young age thanks to his father's teaching.
The most singular episode on the album, though, remains “Later Tonight”, a delicate ballad – the first of a very long series in the band's discography – recorded live with Lowe on piano and Tennant perched on a stool: soft lights and a dreamlike atmosphere, the poetic image of the old-school crooner entertaining an attentive, engaged audience.
Closing things out is a would-be single, “Why Don't We Live Together”, with basslines and rhythms recalling Madonna's “Into The Groove”, elevated by a chorus sung entirely in falsetto.

There would actually be a fifth single too, but that's a story that concerns Italy specifically, since it's only here that the 12″ of “Paninaro” (Italian mix, given its exclusivity) hit the shops – an unpretentious track originally conceived as the B-side of “Suburbia”.
Thanks to a promotional trip to Milan, the duo came into contact with the new dominant phenomenon of the city's youth culture. Without getting too deep into the how, why and where (although, actually, yes: the Al Panino bar in the San Babila area), it's enough to rattle off Wham! and Moncler, Duran Duran and Naj Oleari, Madonna and Timberland – fashion and musical tastes that couldn't leave our heroes indifferent. And so a basic track already sitting in the archive was earmarked for the purpose, with the addition of nonsense lyrics by Lowe, who probably just threw together the first random things that came to mind.
The track will go down in the discography as a piece of pop-culture memorabilia, and the most curious anecdote concerns the line “Armani Armani Armani… Versace cinque…”: the latter name was blanked out on the B-side of the 7″ single, but on the Italian 12″ they forgot to edit it, so the designer's name stayed put, even though neither of the two particularly liked him, and on top of that he was never even a paninaro. Amen.

The period after “Please” – leaving out “Actually”, since as already mentioned the two records have a lot in common – saw the Pet Shop Boys enter a new phase with “Introspective”, an ascent that would lead to the commercial peak represented by “Very”, while the creative zenith, in this writer's opinion and that of many others, band included, remains the untouchable “Behaviour”.
After a handful of less successful records came the artistic and media rebirth with “Fundamental”, “Yes” and the triumph at the 2009 Brit Awards. It's a story whose ending has yet to be written, for a band that fully deserves a seat in the pantheon of pop worldwide – not just synth-pop. Because it can be relatively easy to nail the album of your life, set a trend for a while, or experiment for the few rather than the many, but it remains tremendously difficult to craft pop songs that land and choruses that stick, and even harder to keep doing it for almost forty years.

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12/04/2020