Pet Shop Boys combine lyrical openness with a more eclectic, playful musical backdrop.
When you’ve been around for over more than forty years you can probably consider yourself to have gone through most important career phases; from defining yourself, to finding an audience then, if you’re lucky, to being imperial and finally embracing the defiance of people’s expectations.
Pet Shop Boys are of course an institution, and a peculiarly British one (which is probably some of their appeal to non-UK audiences), but Neil Tenant and Chris Lowe have been in reflective mode in the run-up to the release of Nonetheless.
One of their favourite tales has been their then manager Tom Watkins’ 1985 prediction that they would last three years in the wake of signing a monster seven album deal with EMI.
Tennant knows he’s had more than his share of last laughs at that, but equally Pet Shop Boys’ uniqueness comes with the double-edged sword of having to avoid complacency whilst gently shifting their audience around; they’re still, after all, a pop band.
If 2020’s Hotspot was in retrospect like listening to Pet Shop Boys through a pane of glass, for its successor the duo have brought in super producer James Ford, partially in the wake of his work to rewire the Arctic Monkeys.
Ford brought the ensemble strings so prevalent on The Car whilst at the same time coaxing warmth and humanity from artists who’ve always had their own interpretation of the performance contract.
Tennant has also addressed the record’s subject matter in his usual forthright way, citing its storytelling as in straight line descent from the gay coming of age anthem Being Boring.
With the original material conceived in part during lockdown and laid out by Tennant on GarageBand, the result is a body of work that combines lyrical openness with a more eclectic, playful musical backdrop.
That doesn’t apply though to opener Loneliness, its Italo-Disco pulse sounding beamed in from some catwalk, a multi-channel, no-holds-barred paean to introspection that drags the listener back towards the light.
Given that, as cheesy as it sounds, Pet Shop Boys’ universal appeal has always been in joining the dots between seemingly incompatible communities from drag queens to football casuals, there’s a familiar, calm efficiency to the up-tempo numbers.
Here Dancing Star’s fictionalisation of Rudolf Nureyev evading the KGB on the Italian Riviera contains echoes of Domino Dancing, whilst Bullet For Narcissus channels the sort of neat synth pop which used once upon a time to be the domain of New Order, and Why Am I Dancing?’s cinematic disco feels effortless.
There’s some purpose here too though. On New London Boy, Tennant captures the essence of his formative years as a straying teenager from the North East in seventies’ London, where glam rock was king and prejudice came in the guise of skinheads, the gossamer-light tune conveying victories for hope over fear.
As a way marker it’s far from all: A New Bohemia has the kind of louche sensibility which Alex Turner has become so fond of in recent years, a spirit channelled by Tennant via the seventies’ queer art collective Les Petits Bon-Bons, whilst the moody closer Love Is the Law documents the excesses of Oscar Wilde’s post incarceration residency in the South of France.
Nonetheless has all the hallmarks of the soundtrack to a biopic. Its central premise is that, when even the number of albums you’ve released are measured in the teens, having license and self-exploration should be the minimum conditions for setting out anything.
Pet Shop Boys now exist in an era all of their own, one where being yourself is the last remaining rule.
