Brief 51: Pet Shop Boys

Speaking of 80s bands.

They used to call the Pet Shop Boys the Pat Sharp Boys on Capital Radio. Or at least I think they did, that might just have been David Jensen's accent.

Recently, the Guardian did a big and very well written list of the Top 100 Number 1 singles of all time, and 'West End Girls' was Number 1, which took me aback a little.

It's one of the first Number 1s I was aware of - I still remember them playing it on Children's BBC in, I suppose, early 1986. I remember I immediately liked it and thought "this isn't like most of the songs" - I couldn't work out any of the words apart from "East End Boys and West End Girls". I thought the line before was something like "wassatadadawa".

And so the Pet Shop Boys carried on, and I always enjoyed their singles well enough. I actually loved Erasure during that period, as far as perfect pop double acts go, but I certainly remember liking Pet Shop Boys.

And yet, they haven't stuck. I've never loved them. To many of my generation, they're hallowed, they're Dylan and the Beach Boys. They've written songs that could be Blur songs, songs that could be Madonna songs, that could be Rufus Wainwright songs, Killers songs or Arctic Monkey songs.

There's nothing not to like about them. And yet, there's a point where I found myself getting a bit irritated, and I never quite got past that. The way Neil Tennant was, like Brian Eno, always cited as a "rare pop intellectual" when it seemed to me that there were countless very clever people in pop music. I remember having their lyrics spoken to me as if I should be awed (I mean, I've done that myself with much worse lyrics). 

I think, above all, as I've said before, I found it harder to love the music I actually grew up with and experienced as a child, whether it's U2, The Smiths, or Prince.

I'm interested, one day, in getting to the bottom of that, but not now.