5. Electric (2013)

After the comparative disappointment of Elysium and given Tennant and Lowe’s slowing output rate, nobody could have expected an album quite as brilliant as Electric only 13 months later, almost in every way the opposite to its predecessor. A sharp, disciplined collection of Euro-disco piledrivers, announcing its intentions straight away with the Moroder-esque ‘Axis’, the Pet Shop Boys’ twelfth album was easily the best they’d made in twenty years. Most PSB albums have always broken up the momentum with slower, more introspective numbers, but with Electric they maintain the hi-NRG pace all the way through without it ever becoming exhausting. In this way, its closest relative in their catalogue is the in-the-mix 1988 album Introspective.

Tennant’s trademark scathing wit is present on ‘Love Is A Bourgeois Construct’ (“when you walked out you did me a favour / you made me see reality”), while his dispassionate, dry delivery somehow makes Bruce Springsteen’s full-blooded ‘The Last To Die’ work despite the extremely odd choice of cover. Musically, Stuart Price’s shiny production values hold the key to the presentation, giving a fresh and energised feel to everything. The joyous, skipping flamenco feel of ‘Bolshy’ is a joy to behold, while the epic closer ‘Vocal’ ranks among the Pets’ all-time best tracks. A stunning return to form for one of Britain’s grandest pop institutions.

(LISTEN)

Singles: ‘Axis’; ‘Vocal’; ‘Love Is A Bourgeois Construct’; ‘Thursday’

4. Very (1993)

Sexual ambiguity had always played a major part in Pet Shop Boys’ sound and writing, in an arch, ironic and playful way, but their fifth album Very often sacrificed subtlety for spectacle and paid off handsomely. Complete with flamboyant bright orange packaging and with Tennant and Lowe undertaking much of the promotion in their most extravagant Gilbert & George-style costumes yet, it’s ostensibly much more of an ‘up’ album in comparison to the moodiness of 1990’s predecessor Behaviour, essentially ramping up all the core elements of the PSB sound into overdrive.

Yet there was an unsettling undertone to the hedonism. The quietly shocking ‘Can You Forgive Her?’, speaking of a young man’s humiliation when his girlfriend accuses him of being in love with a childhood (implicitly male) friend, while the savagery of ‘The Theatre’ lays into the embers of Tory Britain at the beginning of the ‘90s. Tracks like the AIDS ballad ‘Dreaming Of The Queen’ or the suffocating strictures of straight society in ‘To Speak Is A Sin’ showed that Tennant and Lowe were capable of truly insightful songwriting at the same time as they were letting everything hang out, musically speaking.

However, this is balanced with the tongue-in-cheek ‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing’ and breezy ‘Liberation’, the kind of lavish pop spectacles that only the Pet Shop Boys can make. Capping it all off is the breathtakingly OTT cover of the Village People’s ‘Go West’, which became one of their highest-selling singles and brought them global exposure. Home to no fewer than five UK Top 20 singles, juxtaposing euphoria and abandon with melancholia and paranoia, Very is the sound of the Pet Shop Boys at their most effortlessly spectacular. (LISTEN)

Singles: ‘Can You Forgive Her?’; ‘Go West’; ‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing’; ‘Liberation’; ‘Yesterday, When I Was Mad’

3. Introspective (1988)

Featuring just six tracks spanning nearly 50 minutes, Pet Shop Boys’ third album saw them reconnect with their clubland roots in a much more satisfying way than any of their Disco self-remix album series ever did. Incorporating bold, up-to-the-moment production techniques that still sound remarkably fresh nearly three decades later, Introspective is a necessarily anomalous entry in their catalogue, but one of the most satisfying once you’ve gotten accustomed to the sound of a group that usually crafts disciplined chart-bound songs getting deep into the mix. “The idea was to have an album where every track was a single,” Tennant says in the 2001 re-issue liner notes.

The Pet Shop Boys don’t do anything fundamentally different to their sound, but they do explore it to the outer reaches of its possibilities, and it’s fortunate that the songs are strong enough to support the concept. The cyclical, perpetual motion machine of ‘Domino Dancing’ is one of those songs you wish would never end, while ‘Left To My Own Devices’ is an absolutely transcendent slice of house/pop perfection. A pair of triumphant cover versions – the peacocking of ‘Always On My Mind’, which sounds for all the world like a victory lap around heaven, combining it with an acid-house original titled ‘In My House’; and the Sterling Void club classic ‘It’s Alright’ – perfectly complement Tennant and Lowe’s original compositions.

The title Introspective may seem like an ironic joke given the upbeat nature of the music, but it actually refers to the lyrical content of the record, which focusses on the disaffected, atomised nature of the ‘yuppie’ society and the self-analytical crisis of the male psyche that was a phenomenon in the booming ‘80s. This is most evident in ‘I’m Not Scared’ and ‘I Want A Dog’ (the latter of which goes “when I get back to my small flat / I want to hear somebody bark / oh, you can get lonely”). Tennant feels that the 12”, extended mix nature of the tracks put off more casual UK fans from buying the record – the album’s four UK Top 10 singles were all mixed down to radio edits for their individual releases – but maintains that Introspective is the highest-selling Pet Shop Boys album worldwide. It’s also one of their best. (LISTEN)

Singles: ‘Always On My Mind’; ‘Domino Dancing’; ‘Left To My Own Devices’; ‘It’s Alright’

2. Actually (1987)

After the nearly-but-not-quite of their debut Please, everything clicked into place on its follow-up Actually, which ranks as one of the finest pop albums of the ‘80s. Following the success of their first clutch of singles, Tennant and Lowe decided to work quickly in capitalising on that, rapidly assembling a crack team of producers and arrangers ranging from Stephen Hague and remixer Shep Pettibone to legendary composer Ennio Morricone. In comparison to the beat-driven Please, Actually feels a lot more deliberately planned and arranged as a result, with rhythm and beats interlocking beautifully and hitting the sweet spot every time.

The trick to Actually lies in seeing beauty in bleakness, the sweetness of heartache, giving voice to the turmoil going on in the world. The songs are altogether more striking, particularly the beautiful Dusty Springfield duet ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?’ coming across as an early mid-life crisis, and the twinkling, minimalist ‘Rent’, evoking late night, rain-soaked streets in the capital. Tennant’s past as a Smash Hits writer and deep knowledge of the workings of pop music can be seen in resplendent pieces like ‘One More Chance’ and in particular the #1 single ‘It’s A Sin’, a staggering piece of writing taking on Catholic guilt that somehow turns a starkly intimate confessional into a party.

Sometimes Tennant got indirectly political as well: ‘Shopping’ is an acerbic critique of the booming consumerism of the ‘80s, ironically still frequently used as bumper music on business TV programmes. The all-ideas-welcome approach of Actually worked beautifully, spawning four more UK Top Ten singles and cementing the Pet Shop Boys’ place as one of Britain’s premier pop acts. The sublime New Order-aping fourth single ‘Heart’ also reached #1, telling you something of the record’s deep popular impact. It also broke them on the other side of the Atlantic, with the American audience lapping up the uniquely British poise and reserve juxtaposed against such beautiful pop. (LISTEN)

Singles: ‘It’s A Sin’; ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?’; ‘Rent’; ‘Heart’

1. Behaviour. (1990)

Many have noted the cinematic qualities of Pet Shop Boys’ fourth album, an expansion of their sound brought about by working with movie soundtrack composer Harold Faltermeyer. Behaviour. represents the duo’s bid for artistic recognition, after years of being sneered at by rock critics. Relying much more on pure songcraft than any other album in their back catalogue, Tennant tends to actually sing his lyrics rather instead of his previous approach of speak-singing them. It’s a subtle distinction, but this change in their formula was risky and potentially disastrous if the results hadn’t been so uniformly dazzling.

Initially, it wrongfooted some PSB fans because of its almost total lack of dancefloor-orientated numbers, opting instead for panoramic balladry and restrained, often string-swept electronic numbers courtesy of orchestration by Angelo Badalamenti. The subject matter often reflected personal turmoil, something that Tennant wanted as a mirror of the uncertain state of the entire world in 1990, at the end of the Cold War. The resigned melancholia of ‘Being Boring’, which for some reason stalled at a lowly #20 in the UK charts, is one of PSB’s very finest singles, basically what you would come up with if asked to give musical expression to a sigh. The same restrained, anxious approach applied to lead single ‘So Hard’, which was much more successful (#4). The fireside intimacy of ‘Only The Wind’ must be one of the most miserable tracks ever on a PSB album.

Elsewhere, they fused their pre-existing synthpop approach with indie ballads on the nostalgic ‘This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave’ and ‘My October Symphony’, both of which featured Johnny Marr’s contributions on the acoustic guitar. But things were not all ghostly and minimalist – marvel at the booming beats and rock guitar licks that adorn the chorus of ‘How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?’, or the transcendent doom-mongering of ‘The End Of The World’. The whole glorious package ends with ‘Jealousy’, a fully-orchestrated curtain call that savours every single moment of its pomp and circumstance. That it became a Top 20 hit is a testament to the occasional open-mindedness of the British record-buying public.

Behaviour.’s lasting qualities can be put down to the unresolved musical paradoxes within it. Comforting yet chilling, sparse but somehow managing to be widescreen and symphonic, it’s quite unlike any other entry in the Pet Shop Boys’ discography, and future attempts to repeat the trick (Release, or Elysium) were totally sterile. But somehow, under Faltermeyer’s experienced guidance, it held together, and Tennant and Lowe managed to show a new, deeper side to themselves, proving that they were no pop dilettantes but quite brilliant songwriters and composers. Critically, it did for Pet Shop Boys what Depeche Mode’s brilliant Violator did for them in the same year – making people see an established band in a new light. To the next snobby rock ‘expert’ that dismisses the Pet Shop Boys as only a singles band, slap them right back with Behaviour., and you’ll have won the argument. (LISTEN)

Singles: ‘So Hard’; ‘Being Boring’; ‘How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?’; ‘Jealousy’