Pet Shop Boys’ Pop Report Card: We Grade Their 12 Albums Released Prior To ‘Super’

Behaviour (1990)

More than any Pet Shop Boys record before it, the ultra-sophisticated Behaviour signaled Neil and Chris’ graduation from pupils to Platos of pop. Trading in their usual state of the art sounds for the warmer sheen of analog synths, it’s a record whose staccato beats, hushed melodies and bubbling sonic textures perfectly match its dissertations on love, loss and desire. It also represented a bolder step forward visually, if Bruce Weber’s homoerotic video for “Being Boring” was anything to go by.

While beat ballads like “To Face the Truth” and “Only the Wind” impressed the class with the usual Pet Shop panache, this time there was a distinct air of tragedy behind the scenes. The Boys were growing up, yes, but certain lyrics remind us now that the AIDS epidemic had irreversibly made an impression on the pair: “It’s only the wind, they say it’s getting worse/ The trouble that it brings haunts us like a curse,” Neil opines wistfully at one point. But they weren’t completely out of the schoolyard, as the salty “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?” lays out a self-serving pop star (Sting? Bono?) with Tennant’s famous acid tongue, as well as a mutually unfaithful lover in “So Hard.” Elsewhere, the pair are confessional, candid and jealous, ably proving themselves the masters of singer-songwriter feels in the post-disco era. Grade: B+

Key cuts: “Being Boring,” “My October Symphony,” “So Hard,” “The End of the World”

Extra credit: On the heels of their most acclaimed release came Discography: The Complete Singles Collection, which included two new tracks that perfectly enhanced the PSB body of work: “DJ Culture” and “Was It Worth It?”, the latter of which resulting in the best PSB single cover art, ever. — JOHN HAMILTON

Very (1993)

The Pet Shop Boys’ rebellious nature reared its head with the album that followed the release of Discography, the pair’s first greatest hits collection. By 1993, Britpop was gearing up in England, while grunge and alt rock was surging on the airwaves in America. Bands from Pearl Jam to Nirvana to Blur were carving out solid careers by dressing down in ripped jeans and sweaters and coming off as the completely “ordinary,” down-to-earth gents of raw, organic rock. Naturally, Neil and Chris opted for the non-conformist route by slipping into orange body suits and pointy dunce caps, and recording an all-out dance-pop album full of blips and bleeps and video game noises — one that sounded so very, very Pet Shop Boys.

A few highlights: To start with, the iconic CD case, with its orange Lego-like design by Daniel Weil, is now on display in New York’s Museum Of Modern Art. Gold star for that one, Boys. But more importantly, the music is perfectly executed; it is commercially viable pop at its slickest on the surface, but plum the depths and you’ll find heart, despair and Tennant’s brilliant social commentary. The singles off this album are legendary, from Gay ’90s staples like “Can You Forgive Her” and “Go West’ to the self-deprecating “Yesterday When I Was Mad.” But don’t get caught up on the hits, for Very is a project best digested a whole — an absolute staple of its decade that propels the listener on a journey through love and loss and hope.

To put it in simpler terms, Neil Tennant and and Chris Lowe’s fifth album is that rare musical specimen that most acts never accomplish: It’s a pop masterpiece. Grade: A

Key cuts: “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing,” “Liberation,” “Young Offender,” “Go West”

Extra credit: A limited number of copies of Very were packaged with sublimely ravey six-track dance album Relentless. Also from the Very era was one-off charity single “Absolutely Fabulous,” a tie-in with the global hit series starring Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley. — ROBBIE DAW

Bilingual (1996)

While traveling around Central America on their 1994 DiscoVery tour, studious Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe clearly took a shine to the music of their surroundings. The stylized rhythms and grooves of 1996 LP Bilingual, which played in a way like an extension of the pair’s Lewis Martineé-produced 1988 single “Domino Dancing,” proved that the duo were often ahead of the curve. (The album pre-dated pop’s then-forthcoming Latin Explosion by about three years.) Somewhat of an uneven record, perhaps Bilingual‘s biggest flaw, unavoidable though it may have been, is that it followed bar-raiser Very.

That said, innovative, if not unconventional, singles “Before” and “Se a Vida é” kept the Boys entrenched in the Top 10 throughout Europe’s charts as well as on the American dance scene, while album tracks “Discoteca,” “Saturday Night Forever” and the beautiful “The Survivors” kept the conversation going on AIDS, long a topic within the PSB ouevre. Notably, penultimate album track “To Step Aside” found Tennant giving the pair’s fans quite a scare by contemplating retiring altogether from the pop scene: “I look at my short life and think of all the champagne that I drink / With all the faces that I know, and how much further can one go?” Thankfully, the answer to that question is 20 years and counting. Grade: B-

Key cuts: “Discoteca,” “Up Against It,” “A Red Letter Day,” “To Step Aside”

Extra credit: A year prior to the release of Bilingual, Pet Shop Boys’ vast number of B-sides up through 1994 were collected on two-disc compilation Alternative, a generous chunk of pop perfection in its own right.  — ROBBIE DAW