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Pet Shop Boys (without the definite article "the") are a highly influential UK electronic music act. Founded in the early 1980s, the duo (Neil Tennant, Chris Lowe) enjoyed immense critical and commercial acclaim, starting with their first single "West End Girls" in 1985. They are one of the most consistently successful duos in pop music. They have had four Number One singles in the UK: "West End Girls," "It's a Sin," "Always on My Mind" (a cover of an Elvis Presley hit), and "Heart." Another well-known single, "What Have I Done to Deserve This?," was a collaboration with Dusty Springfield that directly led to a resurgence of interest in her music.
On August 19, 1981, Tennant and Lowe met by chance at an electronics shop on the Kings Road in Chelsea. They later began to write songs together. After rejecting the name West End, they settled on the name Pet Shop Boys, a name they had previously used to describe some friends of theirs who ran a pet shop in Ealing.
At the time, Tennant's day job was reporting for teen pop magazine Smash Hits. Tennant was sent to interview The Police for the magazine, and, while in New York, had lunch with his idol, producer Bobby Orlando. Soon after, Tennant, Lowe and Bobby O' wrote and recorded their first versions of many of their early hits, most notably West End Girls. Pet Shop Boys later cut their contractual ties with Bobby O' and instead signed with the Parlophone label.
Neil Tennant has consistently and sincerely labeled the Pet Shop Boys' music as "disco." Their music's trademark sound is a combination of pure synthesised pop, with sometimes slightly over-the-top instrumentation, contrasting with Tennant's laconic, barely-sung vocals. Strong studio production values mark out their work.
Visually, the group grew to favour avant-garde tailored fashions. The duo were frequently accused of lacking stage presence, said to be a deliberate reaction to the hyper-cheerful boy band music of the time demonstrated by, say, Wham!. A typical early performance featured Lowe in the background hitting the occasional note on a Fairlight synthesizer keyboard and Tennant singing but otherwise unanimated in the foreground. However, later productions were elaborate exercises in costume and production design more reminiscent of modern opera than pop music. (Indeed, one tour was designed by former U.K. National Opera designer and architect Zaha Hadid.)
Pet Shop Boys are significant figures in queer culture for such songs as "West End Girls", their cover of The Village People's "Go West," "Can You Forgive Her?," and "It's A Sin," among many others.
Neil Tennant came out around the time of their album Very (supposedly his answer to the question, "Are you gay?"').
The Pet Shop Boys were key performers in a planned 2001 tour of out gay musicians, entitled Wotapalava, that was later canceled.
While they seem to have a penchant for one-word album titles, it is reported that they named their first album Please in order to force the public to be polite when asking for their record ("Can I have the new Pet Shop Boys album, Please?"). Another story holds that the band chose album titles based on words they'd been using a lot during the album's production, such as "Actually," "Please," and "Disco."
In 2000, Pet Shop Boys collaborated with Jonathan Harvey to write the musical Closer to Heaven. As of 2004, the musical has had only one run, for less than a year at the Arts Theatre in London. In September 2004, Pet Shop Boys appeared at a free concert in Trafalgar Square, London where they performed a new soundtrack to accompany the seminal 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin.
Neil Tennant also is involved as producer and singer with Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr's Electronic project. Chris Lowe also contributes but to a lesser extent publicly.
The rereleased versions of their albums, sometimes also called reissues, each have a "further listening" disc which contains b-sides, remixes and unreleased songs from around that era.
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