Pet Shop Boys, Royal Opera House: the superstar duo had the crowd dancing in the aisles
As a popular music critic, I don’t often have an excuse to visit the Royal Opera House, but I can’t imagine the grandiose building has witnessed many scenes like this. People were out of their seats in the stalls before the curtain was raised. There was dancing in the boxes and the balconies, occasional charges down the aisle, and roaring singalongs as a colourfully attired audience reacted with joyous abandon to a streamlined punch of gleaming electronic sound tightly synced with dazzlingly inventive digital visuals.
Images of Rudolf Nureyev whirled around as the Pet Shop Boys’ banging 1988 anthem Domino Dancing segued seamlessly into Dancing Star, their recent ode to the late ballet genius. Nureyev himself pirouetted on this stage in his 1960s and 70s prime, but it was impossible to guess what – or any classical aficionado – he might have made of such uninhibited displays of fan fervour.
It has to be said, the Pet Shop Boys themselves looked right at home performing their sophisticated suburban popera at the start of a five-night residency. The 2,500-capacity Royal Opera House counts as an intimate venue for the synth superstars, who are more usually to be found occupying soulless arenas. Yet their oeuvre has always weaved cerebral lyricism into modernist mainstream art pop well suited to this culturally highbrow venue.
The Dreamworld show is a greatest hits set that has been travelling the globe for three years, so apart from the seamless addition of three fine songs from their 19th album, Nonetheless, there were no surprises for dedicated admirers. “I think you’ve seen this at least 50 times already,” vocalist Neil Tennant noted of fans in the front row.
The design of the show is glorious, tightly paced, with a gradually shifting colour scheme and slowly expanding sense of depth and scale, opening out over the course of two hours to use the full dimensions of the large stage space with fast moving visuals, rising and falling screens, silhouetted musicians and a late arriving ensemble of 12 silver clad dancers.
Once he had removed a full-face mask, Tennant looked gleefully delighted at the scenes unfolding before him, barely unable to wipe a smile off his face all night. His synth playing partner Chris Lowe remained inscrutable as always, standing stock still behind keyboards, playing one handed melodic motifs whilst triggering an onslaught of sequenced and pre-recorded elements. Their line-up was augmented by three female musicians whose backing vocals thickened the thin tones of Tennant’s choirboy voice, and whose percussion, keyboard and occasional guitar flurries added hints of live texture to the sculpted sound, yet for the most part they went unseen and frankly unthought of.
My reservation about the Pet Shop Boys live experience is shared with a lot of electronic music: it lacks true liveness. There is no jeopardy in performing to backing tracks, no real interactions between musicians that might absorb you into a fully engaged listening experience. Sure, the trumpet solo on West End Girls is immaculate, but without a trumpeter to play it, what does it really represent?
Everything ultimately rests on the power of the songs themselves and what they mean to their audience. Fortunately, the Pet Shop Boys have a lot of exceptionally well-constructed songs that mean everything to their audience. Particularly moving was a storming blast through Go West celebrating queer culture with vintage film of a Pride parade in San Franscisco, reminding us of the outsider narrative that powers the duo’s mainstream music. It’s A Sin would bring the house down wherever it was played but somehow its authority pricking melodrama seemed even more fruitily joyous in the pomp of such an establishment setting. They ended teasingly and triumphantly with Being Boring, utterly assured that it was something no one could dare accuse them of.
Until Saturday; rbo.org.uk