The Pet Shop Boys return, as the tide turns

Last Sunday, the Pet Shop Boys—still the most commercially successful British duo of all time—made a triumphant live return at Camden’s Koko. The venue, with its 1,500 capacity, is considerably smaller than the arenas and festivals that the act are used to headlining, but their rapturously received set, heavy on greatest hits—from the Catholic-baiting “It’s A Sin” to their Village People cover “Go West”—showed that Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are still capable of alternately wooing and teasing a crowd, switching between soaring pop perfection and camp irony. If Noël Coward, Dusty Springfield and Madonna had had an unlikely ménage à trois at some point in the 1970s, the Pet Shop Boys would be the result.

The nominal reason for their comeback show was that their new album, Nonetheless, was released last month. It reached number two in the UK charts—their highest position since the mid-1990s—and was critically acclaimed, with many (including this correspondent) believing it to be their finest work since 2006’s still glorious, still underrated Fundamental, which was produced by Trevor Horn and showed the Boys dropping their usual ironic detachment to embrace a justified fury at many of the civil liberties infringements of the late-era Blair and Bush governments.

On Fundamental’s mighty closing song, “Integral”, a direct attack on ID cards, Tennant sang with bracing anger: “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear / If you’ve something to hide, you shouldn’t even be here.” Once, Tennant and Lowe were closely associated with Blair and New Labour; as time went on, their disillusionment became so complete that another song on the album, “I’m With Stupid”, directly attacked the Blair-Bush relationship, not-so-implicitly portraying the British PM as a gormless, grinning lackey of the American president.

Their return has fortuitously coincided with a sea change in British politics, and the realisation that, unless the polls are horrendously inaccurate, we shall soon have the country’s first Labour government in 14 years. This is not a prospect that Tennant—traditionally the duo’s hyper-articulate spokesman—appears to relish with excitement. He recently admitted to the New Statesman that “There’s a desire for trust rather than ideology, which Starmer represents perfectly,” but also sighed at the lowered expectations that our likely next prime minister will come with, saying “the Labour project could do with an infusion of idealism.” From this left-leaning, unashamedly cerebral act, mild enthusiasm—the sound of one hand clapping—is the most that Starmer and his colleagues can expect.

Certainly, Nonetheless is not an album that wears its social engagement on its sleeve, for the most part. Many of its lyrics return to Tennant’s default position of a sighing, Housman-meets-Larkin regret that all of those around him have found love and happiness, which came “just too late for me.” The song “Why am I dancing?” might be a classic Pet Shop Boys song musically, with its pulsing synths and stirring brass introduction, but the lyrics, once again, see Tennant’s arch narrator look around the club and feel wholly isolated. As he asks in the chorus, “Why am I dancing / When I’m here alone? / I can feel the tears in my eyes / My comfort zone.”

It would be too easy to suggest that the Pet Shop Boys have retreated into their comfort zone with the excellent Nonetheless, but only the penultimate track, “Bullet for Narcissus”, has any political overtones, and even then its target is vague, being a character of whom Tennant declares “The Narcissus, his power is his dream / His politics are simply mean / He doesn’t trust what he hasn’t seen / He’s so banal, he’s made it mainstream.” All apt, all witty enough, but it’s a far cry from “Integral”, let alone their Thatcherite-baiting 1986 anthem “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)”, which was, with crushing inevitability, taken up as a statement of intent by the bankers and financiers whom it was intended to satirise. “Opportunities” was, of course, on the setlist for their Koko show, and the chorus was roared back by the well-heeled North London crowd who had shelled out the best part of £100 for their tickets.

The return of the gloriously literate and mischievous Pet Shop Boys into the public arena is always welcome; their wry presence on the sidelines in a year that promises change, in whatever form, just feels necessary. And whether the Starmer administration offers dull but dogged competence or a continuation of the soap-opera style outrageousness that has defined politics over the past few years, you can count on Tennant and Lowe having opinions about it. If they choose to express them in music, it will make for a song very much worth listening to.