Gig review: Pet Shop Boys at First Direct Arena, Leeds

“We thought very much that we had the secret of modern pop,” said Neil Tennant, the former assistant editor of Smash Hits turned singer with 80s multi-million sellers the Pet Shop Boys, a few years ago. The knack, he said, was to match “dramatic music with sort of prosaic lyrics that expressed an unexpressed emotion”.

It’s a formula that has served him and his synth-playing musical partner Chris Lowe well for nigh-on four decades, and, as their current 55-song compilation Smash demonstrates, the pair have been consistently adept at tickling the taste buds of a mainstream audience.

Here, in the cavernous but packed surroundings of Leeds’s First Direct Arena, they seem very much in their element.

Over the course of two hours they reel off hit after hit, each one hardwired into collective consciousness by Lowe’s flair for composing instantly hummable melodies and Tennant’s ability to write highly quotable lyrics that in a song like Left To My Own Devices combines artiness, knowing humour and erudition with a unique relatability that’s endeared them to so many.

They arrive in shiny chrome face masks designed by Tom Scutt, pounding out Suburbia and Can You Forgive Her under two giant streetlamps before Tennant discards his to loud cheers for their telling satire of Thatcherite greed Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money).

Scenes filmed by the late Derek Jarman of Margi Clarke and a youthful Tennant in chauffeur’s garb play behind them as they perform Rent, then stagehands dressed as workmen appear to shift their stage props and the screen lifts behind them to reveal drummers Afrika Green and Simon Tellier and keyboard player and backing vocalist Christina Hizon as they launch into a dazzling rendition of Left To My Own Devices.

Tennant claims, tongue-in-cheek, one suspects, that the song Domino Dancing was inspired by the victory dances a friend indulged in after beating him and Lowe in nightly games of dominos during a holiday in St Lucia. The audience enthusiastically delivers the choruses.

By the frisky Monkey Business, the 68-year-old singer looks understandably flushed playing to a by-now sticky auditorium in his polo neck sweater, two-tone suit jacket and snow-white Jinnah cap.

Jealousy, Tennant tells the crowd, was the first song that he and Lowe wrote together, and that the tune was composed on a grand piano at Lowe’s parents’ house in Blackpool in 1982. It stands up well 41 years later.

The latin house of Paninaro ushers in a sequence of songs that show off their dancefloor credentials – including a pounding take on Always On My Mind – and Hizon duets effectively with Tennant as they spin around the lampposts during What Have I Done To Deserve This.

“The Year 3,000 may still come to pass but the music shall last,” Tennant sings in the thrilling It’s Alright; Vocal is equally euphoric. Go West and an epic It’s a Sin bring the house down, but they’re not done yet, bidding farewell with an encore of West End Girls and Being Boring.

Tennant thanks the Leeds audience for “a wonderful Yorkshire welcome”, and as they stand for a final ovation it’s even possible to detect a faint smile creeping across the Lowe’s normally impassive features.

The Pet Shop Boys might have lost at dominos, but tonight they are impressive winners.