Gig review: Pet Shop Boys at Hull Bonus Arena

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe deliver a five-star cavalcade of esoteric performance art and clubland euphoria on their first-ever greatest hits tour.
Pet Shop BoysPet Shop Boys
Pet Shop Boys

“Tonight, we’re going to a dream world,” Pet Shop Boys frontman Neil Tennant tells a packed-to-the-rafter Bonus Arena in Hull, as Chris Lowe burbles sequencers next to him with impassive poise. “It’s a world of music and memories.” He’s not wrong; if the veteran synth-dance pair achieve anything across a subsequently sublime dive through their catalogue, it’s to conjure rosy recollections of why the world fell in love with them in the first place.

Two years on from an original pandemic postponement, the duo’s belated sojourn comes with a few perks. For one, it brings them to Humberside, with this show added amid the rescheduled runs in their itinerary. For another, it has given them extra time to perfect this spectacle, elevating their knack for televisual mini-musical dramas into a glittering, hyper-camp tour-de-force of cinematic maximalism.

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Their latest show – named Dreamland, for the 2019 single duly aired mid-show to complete the generation-straddling nature of their performance – is billed as their first greatest hits tour. It’s a tribute to the pair that a concert crammed wall-to-wall with two-dozen-plus bangers can still leave a plethora of top forty smashes by the wayside.

But truly, there are few glaring omissions; this is an archly burnished crowdpleaser cavalcade. It’s business as usual for a Pet Shop Boys concert transmuted between esoteric performance art and clubland euphoria. Minimalistic streetlights accompany soaring opener Suburbia; a lush Left to My Own Devices adds multi-tiered DJ decks; You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk provides shock value by reverting to affecting acoustic balladry.

At 67, plenty of frontmen might be winding down, but the memo clearly hasn’t reached Tennant. Dressed in a succession of costumes somewhere between Doctor Who-esque dictator-of-the-day and debonair ringmaster, he remains compulsively watchable, both resignedly melancholic and waggishly coy. Keyboardist Lowe remains as impeccably implacable as ever – but even he may crack a grin when their cover of Steven Sondheim’s Losing My Mind bleeds into Always On My Mind with hurtling abandon.

That kickstarts a third-act rush encompassing Pet Shop Boys’ undisputed home runs: Heart, Go West, a delirious It’s a Sin. Their biggest, brashest hits are arguably unrivalled in modern pop arrangements – and when they return to the stage for an encore of West End Girls, their idiosyncratic sweep remains wonderfully undimmed. “This is amazing!” Tennant exclaims, before the downtempo Being Boring ushers proceedings to a close. Isn’t it just?

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