Review: Pet Shop Boys deliver art attack in Vancouver

Electronic duo Pet Shop Boys perform in Vancouver, B.C., on Oct. 3, 2013. (Anil Sharma, special to CTVBC)

When it comes to the ongoing success story that is The Pet Shop Boys, what they do is so deceptively simple, it’s remarkable that everyone isn’t doing it.

Here’s how it works. Write some incredibly catchy commercial pop songs – the type that Katy Perry would sacrifice savoury snack endorsements to get her hands on – and marry them to a visual aesthetic steeped in high fashion and performance art. It doesn’t matter that you’re a pair middle aged men – one of whom has a vocal range that would be generously described as limited, the other whose motionless anti-stage presence raises the question of whether or not he is actually doing anything. You are the Pet Shop Boys and you are great pop stars.

Last night the half-dynamic duo brought their Electric Tour to Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre, where they comprehensively proved how ideas are at the heart of pop stardom.

In Pictures: Ageless fashionistas The Pet Shop Boys play up Vancouver

The first rule of Pet Shop Boyhood is to not play one’s hand too early. The first two songs of the evening, wordless house track “Axis” and “One More Chance” were both performed from behind a translucent curtain, onto which vocalist Neil Tennant and keyboard player Chris Lowe’s featureless heads were projected. The curtain finally dropped and the crowd leapt to its feet for “Opportunities,” revealing the pair in the spikiest jackets ever seen on a Vancouver stage. Not the kind of outfit you’d even risk going to the bathroom while wearing.

With Tennant and Lowe both offering deliberately little in the way of visual excitement, a welcome change of pace arrived when the duo stepped off stage for a costume switch and were replaced by a pair of androgynous dancers wearing cattle skulls and horns over their heads, hopping around to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Lowe and Tennant returned for “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Type of Thing” in matching suits and headgear of their own, best described as Daft Punk-themed Viking helmets. The band’s faces were revealed for a rousing “Suburbia,” before they were obscured again as the auditorium filled with smoke and lasers for a ravey “I’m Not Scared.”

Although the pair clearly had taken great pains not to turn their concerts into greatest hits nostalgia, the old favourites were still what the sold out crowd had come to celebrate. “West End Girls” throbbed with new life thanks to an added electro beat and “Somewhere” reenergised the Bernstein favourite as classic disco.

Not that the newer stuff wasn’t shining. “Love Etc” delivered the performance concept of the night, Lowe and Tennant both tucked into vertical ‘beds’, allowed leaping bodies to be projected onto the sheets under their stationary heads. A short lull in proceedings for “I Get Excited” (a misnomer of a title), “Rent” and “Miracles”, as any student of dance music would appreciate, was the calm before the final storm.

“OK Vancouver, let’s go!” announced Tennant, launching into “It’s A Sin” immediately followed by “Domino Dancing,” the crowd singing its chorus as the silent frontman conducted the choir.

“I think you might know this one,” he smiled, launching into the big finish of disco Elvis cover “You Are Always On My Mind.”

The encore filled the remaining gaps from the back catalogue while celebrating the present, with soccer terrace anthem “Go West” followed by throbbing new track “Vocal.”

And with that, Britain’s greatest conceptual pop stars left the stage for good, leaving their two dancers, whose faces had finally been revealed, to continue the party.

Ageless fashionistas. Electronic music bohemians. Modern art agitators. Commercial pop perfectionists. The Pet Shop Boys made all of it look so easy.