Segunda-feira 29 Set 2014, 6h:44
The Pet Shop Boys’ “Electric” Tour is a 105-date behemoth, spanning eleven months and visiting comfortably over 30 countries. For all of that coming, seeing and conquering, however, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe arguably face a uniquely difficult – if not unenviable – gig in topping the bill of the final day at Bingley Music Live.
Pause for a brief bit of background. As festivals go, Bingley – which has undergone various incarnations since its original establishment in the early ‘90s; and mushroomed since joining the multiple-stage event-set in 2007 – is a bit of an odd animal. A champion of live music and emerging, off-radar talent at accessible prices, the festival is pitched at a broad and highly diverse church: wizened rock veterans rub shoulders with metrosexual, designer label-club kids; chemically-enhanced teens share oxygen, sometimes awkwardly, with camping-chair-toting middle-aged families with face-painted broods in tow. The festival’s attempt to give equal weight to contemporary dance music sounds (Gorgon City) and guitar bands (The Strypes) has already, earlier in the weekend, seen some purists take to social media, apoplectic at the very idea of a DJ set inhabiting a “main stage”.
The booking of the PSBs, while clearly a considerable coup for the organisers, could therefore have transpired as either a roaring success or an unmitigated disaster. Uniting and pleasing such a range of disparate tribes (at the end of a weekend in which a lion’s share of that audience has been burning the candle at both ends) is one task; maintaining face – let alone winning new fans – before a crowd of 15,000 (give or take) dominated by casual listeners, where the sound might all be sucked up into the late-August dusk anyway… quite another. Given a show which features excerpts from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, jackets constructed entirely from drinking straws, and dancers appearing – variously – as masked Minotaurs one minute and pogo-ing tinsel-yetis the next, again, it’s a safe bet to venture that the Bradford suburbs have probably never witnessed anything quite as arch or bonkers as this.
For in the first place, despite close to thirty years as the UK’s most pre-eminent pop duo, with over 50 million albums sold worldwide, and feted with an Outstanding Contribution BRIT Award as recently as 2009, the PSBs nevertheless sometimes seem to occupy a curiously anomalous, anti-establishment place in the culture (not for them, at least yet, a sniff of anything like a “Services to Music” accolade in any Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Answers on a postcard, but it might or might not have something to do with persistent urban legends swirling around just what might have inspired “that” band name). Cards-on-the-table: I’m a dyed-in-the-wool fan, who thrilled to the Stuart Price-produced, return-to-form album that gave the Electric Tour its name. For many others, however, the fact remains that their inimitable (and yet instantly recognisable) synthpop can veer on the side of something slightly too futuristically sterile, almost; too fey, too faux-intellectual. The now-familiar trope of the raconteur-singer (Tennant) offset by an unsmiling accomplice at the keyboards (Lowe) has resulted in numerous parodies, sometimes hitting their targets spot-on (the uninitiated should check the Flight of the Conchords’ take on breakthrough #1 “West End Girls” - “Inner City Pressure”); at the same time, the PSBs’ own refusal to play ball in terms of pilfering from sometimes unlikely genres and sources has, equally, been a point of tension (their camp-as-Christmas cover of U2’s po-faced “Where The Streets Have No Name” supposedly provoking Bono to quip “’What have we done to deserve this…?’”).
The good news is that what’s served up for the Bingley audience is a streamlined, pacier, 90-minute version of the show the PSB’s took on the road in the Electric Tour’s first summer, with only marginal changes (the radio-ready “Thursday” is sacrificed for the far clubbier, techier New Romantics-homage “Fluorescent”; ballads “Miracles” and “Invisible” are also, wisely, left in the pile labelled “For completists only”). Such is the show’s range, however, that the duo somehow manage, from the word go, to take turns in both bewildering the audience and having them eat out of the proverbial palms of their hands. The two opening songs (“One More Chance” and “A Face Like That”), for instance, are performed entirely behind a distancing translucent screen, whipped away – much to the relief of several head-scratching bystanders – for a raucous rendition of their ironic anthem to ‘80s materialism “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)”. The inspired thing about several of the subsequent song-choices – if the friends I went with are anything to go by, one of whom was born after the last PSBs UK#1 – is their ability to trigger “Where might I have heard this before?” reactions, even with non-singles. “I’m Not Scared” – heartbreakingly melancholic as only the PSBs can do – is enhanced with a plethora of lasers that really have to be seen to be described; “Fugitive”, alongside the duo’s trademark clear-as-a-bell melodies, is packed with rises and “drops” which cause at least two declared full-time techno/trance-musos stood near me to nod appreciatively, while turning down the corners of their mouths in approval. It barely goes without saying, perhaps, but the Bingley show, by the same token, also confirms that the PSBs’ surviving anthems from their “imperial”, chart-trouncing phase (“It’s A Sin”, “Domino Dancing”, “Suburbia”) sound just as commanding, emotive and transformational in the era of torrents and streaming as they did in the positively – by comparison – analogue age in which they first emerged. (…I’m not counting “Go West” in this, which I probably wouldn’t have missed even if they hadn’t succumbed to hauling it out).
What’s especially pleasing about Electric is that it ends not with an “Always On My Mind”-type mass karaoke-session (though that would’ve been fine), but with “Vocal”, itself the hands-in-the-air piece-de-resistance of Electric the record, whose lyrics exalt in the redemptive power of the dancefloor. It’s a reminder that the PSBs, having witnessed the first generation of club aesthetics cross-pollinating the mainstream, are riding the crest of a full-circle wave – and might have a thing or two to teach those who followed them. I’m gratified to learn from my trance-muso-friend, on our way out, that far from being the cabaret synth-pop act it’s okay to ironically like once you’re drunk enough, the PSBs provided his entire point of entry into a life of immersion in dance music. Despite this level of debt owed them by many, more impressive still is that the PSBs, now at the very top of their profession, are refusing to rest on their laurels and contemplate lives of Rolling Stones-style-retromania: plans for beginning work on a sequel to Electric, again with Stuart Price on board, are already in the works for this November, and if I end up having an iota of Neil Tennant’s charisma – let alone stage presence - at sixty (…I know, sixty!), I’ll be happy. I hope they continue to thumb their noses at convention for a long time to come.