Pet Shop Boys at 3Arena: Five stars for a landslide of arch, tart, ageless hits

Pet Shop Boys

3Arena, Dublin

★★★★★

All the best pop songs are both catchy and sad, and many of those have been written by Pet Shop Boys, chart music’s pre-eminent poets of pathos. Bringing their Dreamworld greatest-hits tour to Dublin, they open with Suburbia, a lament for a misspent youth in the burbs that unfolds like a Martin Amis novel scored by house piano: it blends documentary grit, English melancholia and monster grooves.

There is plenty more of that signature dance-floor melodrama: It’s a Sin, their timeless Catholic-guilt disco dervish, for instance, has lost none of its gothic thump as it arrives towards the end of the night. But their baroque side is offset by a mood of celebration and generosity towards their audience as one smash follows another. Pop’s supreme ironists have shape-shifted into the lovable uncles you can dance to.

It begins with a nod to their minimalist origins. Neil Tennant (vocals) and Chris Lowe (keyboard, baseball cap) arrive wearing space-invader-shaped plastic masks and studied frowns. Looking like Noel Coward’s idea of the Prodigy, they proceed from Suburbia to Can You Forgive Her?, a stomper about a repressed gay man trapped in a straight relationship (“she’s made you some kind of laughing stock/ because you dance to disco and you don’t like rock”).

Their songs have always been seasoned with intellectual rigour. Pet Shop Boys famously referenced Lenin’s journey from Switzerland to St Petersburg – “from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station” – on their first number one, West End Girls. That smarty-pants dazzle is sprinkled through this gripping victory lap.

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It is loud – goodness is it loud – but, as a spectacle, Pet Shop Boys are playing within themselves. The restraints come off as a screen rises to reveal their band: two drummers and an auxiliary keyboard player. The chill is banished, the party begins and they move from the grimdark banger So Hard to the flamboyant Single-Bilingual, the 1996 single that marked their “coming out” as purveyors of feelgood pop.

There isn’t much banter, though Tennant – an improbable 68 years old – reveals that their first trip to Ireland was in 1986 to appear on an RTÉ show. (In a perfect world it would be Glenroe or Today Tonight, but it probably wasn’t.) What there is is a landslide of hits, including Always on My Mind, their exuberant cover of the dirge made famous by Elvis Presley – and, in an enduring victory for pop, the tune that kept Fairytale of New York out of the UK Christmas number-one spot. It’s followed by What Have I Done to Deserve This?, where the keyboardist and singer (and former Harry Styles band member) Clare Uchima takes on the Dusty Springfield part as Tennant’s romantic foil.

One unexpected upside of Pet Shop Boys’ trademark drollness has been to render their music immune to the ravages of time. Much of the material is more than 30 years old, yet it is ageless in its archness and tartness.

They encore, as they must, with West End Girls. Tennant tweaks the lyrics – “from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station” becomes “from Mariupol to Kyiv Station”. It’s an acknowledgment of the suffering in Ukraine that confirms that, under their droll layer, the Pet Shop Boys were always sincere. And this show is as heartfelt as they come.