Caught in the Carousel

Pet Shop Boys

Warfield Theatre, San Francisco, CA
September 22, 2009

Pet Shop Boys

You can never accuse the Pet Shop Boys of not knowing what they're up to. Two-thirds of the way into their impressive assault on San Francisco's Warfield Theatre, Neil Tennant came from behind a wall of stacked white moving boxes (which had been used throughout the show as a screen) dressed in a crown and a royal cape, singing Coldplay's "Viva la Vida." The crowd sang along with such fidelity to the lyrics that for a moment I wondered if that song was in fact a Pet Shop Boys song and not a smash for the "biggest band in the world." At song's end, Tennant tossed aside cape and crown and launched into the duo's own 1987 smash "It's A Sin." The stage was ablaze in white, and the sound—the sheer loudness of the song—I somehow, somehow, instantly recognized as the sound I would hear if I were hydrogen peroxide sitting in a medicine cabinet eavesdropping one shelf over to the sound of bleach bleaching itself. There was an almost chemically crisp ripping to the song. And the crowd's reaction was more redemptive than a month spent in the confessional. Five minutes later, one thing was clear: the crowd had been but whispering the Coldplay song in comparison. Satisfied that the message had been received loud and clear, Tennant continued on for a few more numbers before closing the show down with an exhilarating version of that timeless 1986 classic: "West End Girls."

Pet Shop Boys

But what came in the earlier part of the concert was slightly different. The show seemed to have three acts. In the first, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe took to the stage with mesh boxes over their heads, singing "Heart" their 1987 brilliant prediction of what pop music might sound like in 2009. (I initially thought that Chris might be the one standing and Neil sitting at the keyboard/dj booth with the removal of boxes at song's end a playful surprise). But I was wrong, and it was clear that the Boys felt less need to be clever, more urgently sensing the need to re-establish their pre-eminence on stage much in the same way their current album Yes has re-established their worldwide dominance over the pop landscape.

Pet Shop Boys

Throughout the night the stage was shared with four dancers (two of whom were revealed towards show's end to be identical twin French women). The songs in the first third were dance-heavy with recent hits "Love, etc," mixed in with lesser-known romps (the under-appreciated "Discoteca," the vintage "Left To My Own Devices," and then one of the duo's few cringe-inducing songs "New York City Boy") culminating with the curtain closer of act one: their astonishing version of "Go West," a version that remains a powerful psalm of hope in so many forms to so many people, from Pioneers to ex-Communists to San Francisco-bound lovers. It is a song that ever since it appeared on their 1993 career-defining album Very, has managed to take a pop confection and turn it into a meal of sustenance. It is a song that can catch the casual listener unaware and stunned as if he had stumbled upon surgeons operating on his own heart.

Pet Shop Boys

The middle set of the show started with great promise, a fantastic version of one of this year's most perfectly-crafted pop gems: "The Way It Used to Be" that is more poetic than any pop song has a right to be: "What is left of love?/Tell me who would even care/So much time has past/I'd still meet you anywhere." As if aware that the pop landscape needs dancing, Tennant had the one male dancer move in ways that made me feel much older than I am and that took me out of the moment if only to remind me I needed to pick up some more glucosomine/chondoitrin tablets next time I was at Trader Joe's (although a doctor friend once told me that the body can't really absorb the chondoitrin, that it was just a marketing ploy and I was really paying extra for a placebo effect, so maybe just the plain glucosomine pills it'd be). The number was a fabulous meeting of music and movement and the crowd was clearly aware that if Tennant can't answer the Timberlakes and Beyoncés out there with his own moves, he'd hire someone who could leave them in the stardust. Unfortunately the rest of the middle section focused on slower numbers, with Tennant often sharing the spotlight with a male and female dancer who had the dreadful assignment of performing a series of interpretive dance moves that reminded me why Northern California always has the ability to send a shiver of terror through me. All this twirling, these arms opening to the sky, receptive to the sun or whichever god answers whichever religion you are this week. If Tennant is as economical a songwriter as one of his heroes Graham Greene was as a novelist, the lyrics to a song like "Jealousy," don't need interpretation. If the intelligence of a typical pop audience needs explication beyond the lyrics "Where've you been?/Who've you seen?/You didn't phone/When you said you would," then it's time to move away from pleasing that type of a crowd. Why they didn't use this time for "King Of Rome" or "Legacy" from the new album was the night's great mystery.

Pet Shop Boys

The duo used its most majestic lyric to transition to the aforementioned astonishing final third of the show. If the audience would soon shower the duo with affection during "It's A Sin," now was the time for the same audience to reverently, chantingly sing along to "Being Boring" from 1990's dark and brooding Behavior: "Now I sit with different faces/In rented rooms and far away places/All the people I was kissing/Some are here and some are missing/In the 1990s/I never dreamt that I would get to be/The creature that I always meant to be/But I thought in spite of dreams/You'd be sitting somewhere here with me." The misfortune might have tackled the night when the sound system went bass-heavy and chewed some of Tennant's most elegant and elegiac prose, but in a quiet, mantra-pace that the song dictates, the crowd finished the ends of those brilliant words.

Pet Shop Boys

When the Pet Shop Boys were at this same venue in 2003, supporting that year's moderately-good Release, the show was free of sets and theater. It was as if they intended to show that they could rock and roll with the best. But in the five plus years—years during which Bono had all but embraced Bush's policy and Springsteen played at the Super Bowl halftime and Dr. Dre has taken to plugging Dr. Pepper—the Pet Shop Boys continued to blast the Bush and Blair policy and to remain thoroughly un-Corporate and have thus reminded us all that rock and roll—its true spirit whether filtered through pop or R&B, etc—is all about attitude, and their opening night on September 22nd was a master class on the subject.

—Thomas Cooney

Pet Shop Boys