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on Behaviour than he had before. And then they staged another tour, a show that distances them again, literally, from themselves.
Their obsession with ridding the stage of such rock’n’roll things as monitors and musicians swelled to the point where Chris Lowe was reluctant to have his own keyboard on the stage with him, though it’s not clear what he intended to do instead.
The intention of]! Couldn’t Happen Here, their feature film, was to put them inside their own songs; at one point on their current tour, they watch from the side as vaguely interested spectators as the Pet
Shop Boys story is enacted before them. Tennant has said that The Pet Shop Boys should exist in their own little universe, with
satellites like Dusty Springfield and Electronic’s Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr sometimes crossing its outer edge, and that’s the spirit in which we’re meant to take the concerts as well. There is all the feeling there — writ large, in West End extravaganza terms, writ small in Tennant‘s thin. undemonstrative voice. This time around. they wear angels" wings on their back. or matching pink and yellow suits and bowlers, fronting pumpkin-headed dancers. Having imagined their audience to be
composed of disaffected, brighter-than-average types, they were dismayed last time around to come face to face with what was virtually ‘a Simply Red audience’. It’s easy to imagine that they might feel it their duty to educate pop audiences in the nuances of camp, to confront them with Liza Minelli, Dusty Springfield and Bobby 0 until they’ve learned to respond with the same ease and understanding normally reserved for the gritty guitar solo or overwrought testifyin’.
The Pet Shop boys play the SE CC, Glasgow on Tue 28.
The List 17— 30 May 71991 15