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Pet Shop Boys – Dreamworld Live

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Venue:

O2 Arena London

Date: 22/05/2022

In January 2020 I bought tickets to see the Pet Shop Boys, one of the few bands I love who I have never seen, who were doing a greatest hits tour. We know what happened next. Two years on I have been nervous about gigs; even though things have reopened, I have not been going out. This was literally my first big night out since 2019.

And what a fucking night it was! The Pet Shop Boys don’t do gigs, they mount productions. Impressive visuals, multiple costume changes (including the big coat and the Boy hat during the encores) and all of the songs played tonight, (apart from four), are on their Pop/Art Best of. This was a band who, perhaps planned to do a straightforward, make some money, greatest hits tour who, but who, thanks to circumstances, ended up giving a celebration of life, joy and music. They played banger after banger, hit after hit, to a crowd starved of joy. It was beyond brilliant. I mean it ended with, Go West, It’s A Sin, West End Girls and Being Boring. Shock and awe or what?

The audience:

“You old ravers” said Neil Tennant after “It’s Alright.” That was pretty accurate to be fair.

It made me think..

Pop can be so powerful. I was in floods of tears during “Se A Vide E.” And when Neil dedicated “Being Boring” to “all the people we have lost” I was gone again. A band I love, who I was seeing for the first time ever, on my first big post pandemic night out, just delivered. Honestly just give Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe knighthoods.

6

Comments

  1. Love this so much.

    Don’t have a great deal to add, other than that the lockdowns have made sweeter the simple act of standing in a crowd, listening to music, and that Se E Vida E is one of the most brilliantly euphoric and bittersweet songs you could possibly be listening to. Great stuff.

  2. Mrs L is a big PSBs fan, so I guess this would have been a good one to go to, although as we currently both have Covid I’m glad we didn’t have tickets.
    I’ve come to like them a lot more over the years, as they have a lot more in common with, say, New Order than I might have realised back in the 80s. My loss, definitely.

    • I was in my early teens when they first appeared and, because I took “Opportunities” at face value, I wrote them off as “yuppie scum” for years. I was in my twenties before I saw the light. But they blend the euphoria of pop and the sadness of age so well. No one does that better.

      • That’s definitely the point where I sat up and took more notice. Both albums are possibly my favourites by each band. I think there’s even a case for I’m Not Scared being one of the PSBs best songs, and it easily blasted Eighth Wonder’s already released version out of the water.

    • I now much prefer the joy of the PSB than the NME-pall over New Order (though I much preferred NO back in the day when still influenced by rock snobbery).

        • NME liked the PSB, but there was more cachet for NO’s seriousness and anti-rockism (with Pete Hook? Seriously?), the way I perceived it. Dour Indie puritanism rather than pop colour. Thank goodness for the emergence of E to liven up mardyarses in the late 80s.

          • I think “Dour Indie Puritanism” describes the NME in the 80s very well. I think we should have a “Rock Civil Wars” Thread, where we have to choose our sides:

            Cavaliers: ABBA, Queen, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder
            Roundheads: Nick Cave, The Smiths, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan

            Fight! Fight!

  4. Saw the show in Manchester, was fabulous. Great visuals and loved the subtle touches – Chris quoting lyrics, the retro videos retouched and Neil standing next to Chris at the final ‘you can always rely on a friend’ line in ‘Being Boring’.
    Remember seeing PSB in the late 80s live and Neil really struggled singing live. His voice is like a fine wine – probably helped with technology, but he sounds so impressive now.

  5. A toss up for me between Pet Shop Boys in Manchester or Gary Numan in Sheffield. Numan’s recent albums have been way better than Pet Shop Boys’, plus it was a lot cheaper, both for the tickets and being able to get home, rather than staying in a hotel. And I don’t like arena gigs and I’ve seen Pet Shop Boys more often, so Numan it was, and it was a great show.

    The support band, France’s Divine Shade, were the best (previously unknown) support band I’ve seen in a long, long time. Only someone as confident in his own fan base would have had those as the support act, and at that volume, as they would have blown some established acts off the stage. But Numan is Numan, and his fans are like none I’ve had the pleasure of standing with, chanting his name like footy fans. The show was awesome, as usual. To say he has been changing the set list from show to show you would never know, cos it was seamless. It would be interesting to see the reaction of 1979 Numan though, if we could video him doing Cars or Are “Friends” Electric? now, in their modern interpretations, and go back and show him what he’d be doing in 2022, when he was in his 60s. Better still, go back to his wilderness years in the late 80s/early 90s, and show him how his style would evolve and what the reaction would be. I dare say he’d have trouble believing you.

    From what I’ve heard about the Pet Shop Boys show, however, makes me really wish they hadn’t been on the same night.

  9. Just looked at the set list for Manchester. It really was a hits show. They missed off three of my favourite singles though, or two singles and a B-Side that got remixed and became a singles – Before, Minimal and Paninaro. The ex went and it was perfect for her, as there are only 2 songs she wouldn’t have known.

    I wish they’d do the opposite though, and do some smaller, more low-key shows of album tracks and B-Sides. They often do some of these in their shows anyway, but I’d pay good money to see a show where they do songs like A Man Could Get Arrested, You Know Where You Went Wrong, The Survivors, The End of the World, etc. There aren’t many bands who could do such a strong set whilst not playing singles. Is there anybody who has done a tour like this? There must be.

    • Kylie (yes, Kylie!) did the Anti-Tour in 2012, just b-sides, demos and deep cuts.

      And Prince famously toured the unreleased, unheard The Gold Experience album in 1995, also eschewing the ‘hits’ in favour of b-sides and album tracks.

    • Marc Almond has tended to alternate “hits” tours with those with more obscure setlists. He’ll throw in plenty of one-off covers (I’ve seen him do Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Syd Barrett, Bill Fay and Lewis Furey, as well as more on-the-nose choices like Lou Reed and Marc Bolan), and his run of gigs at Wilton’s Music Hall some years ago even included a handful of songs especially written for those shows and never subsequently recorded/released.

      That said, it’s a rare MA gig that doesn’t end with “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye”…

  11. I have to say that having seen them in Newcastle, of all places, I was generally underwhelmed with the staging and arrangements, at least for the first phase of the show. I bow to no-one in my love of PSB, but I’ve seen much better from them. Here are the observations I posted on Facebook:

    Well, that was…ok. Not helped by being held in what is, even by arena standards, the most horrible, joyless hangar, this show really struggled to reach the glories of previous Pet shows I’ve witnessed. The songs of course are unimpeachable, but the staging was, by their innovative and lofty standards, really quite one-dimensional and disappointing. Some of the arrangements in the first phase lacked the clarity and visceral punch that I would have expected, and it seemed that they were going through the motions a little..
    However, the show began to turn itself around by virtue of a more reflective interlude, and from this point the performance gathered momentum with a peerless parade of banger after banger, and even the staging seemed to come to life. It ended on a touching note with a dedication to Andy Fletcher.
    So, what I feared to be a listless performance leading to a frustrating scoreless draw was rescued by an intense period of relentless attack to bring about a breathless home win…just.

    My beloved and I both reflected that maybe we’ve been spoilt, both by much superior past PSB shows, and by the riches we’ve already seen this year, and particularly earlier this week [Lorde’s transcendent concert at Leeds O2 Academy].

      • Eggsackly! I thought there would be an additional frisson of passion because of that fact, but really all we got were two “knowing’ comments about “Newcassel on a Freeda neet” (not quite in that vernacular, obvs) and that was it for the special Geordie factor. And, Mr Mooche, you clearly didn’t catch on to my closing football allusion, ‘home win’ an’all. Honestly, divvent knaa why I bother, like?

  12. Glad you enjoyed the show and two years without live music is no good for any of us.
    I love Pet Shop Boys hits but I saw them live once about 6 years ago and they were decidedly dull. It was the tour with the Wall on the stage – the music was an exact facsimile of the records and devoid of any soul.

  13. In that Dreamworld picture on the OP … are they looking at us front on, are we looking at their backs?

    Almost certainly a reference to the 1974 childrens TV drama Soldier and Me. Here is episode 1. The closing credits show the two boys in silhouette form either running away – or running towards us.

  14. Went to see them tonight at Glasgow Hydro and they were magnificent. As an 18 year old in 1985 if you had told me that the Pet Shop Boys were better than The Smiths I’d have laughed at you. As a 55 year old now, I’d definitely say they are. And they didn’t even do two of my favourites of theirs (Home And Dry and Numb)

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