There are beach balls suspended in the heavens.
Somehow you are at once inside and outside the aeroplane. You know instinctively that the ocean is bright orange and unrealistically flat, the sky the wrong shade of blue. The clouds look programmed; squint and you can see the same pattern repeated against the azure over and over.
You are on holiday and you are on a one-way flight, tracking the run-out groove and the count-in simultaneously.
You are leaving an era and beginning an era. It is 1993 and 1983. Like the clouds, the men seated around you are identical to one another, eyes fixed on some undisclosed point beyond the front of the aircraft. You have no idea where they got the hats.
The soundtrack is brilliant.
Headed west, probably, this one-in-a-million plane is cruising at an astonishing altitude, bright and artificial and perfect the way they say the future used to look.
Fasten your seatbelt: miscellaneous fragments of history are drifting past. Beyond the wing tips you see the debris of acid house, new wave, Kraftwerk, Bowie, Morrissey, Thatcher, London, Newcastle, council estates and the Poll Tax, temporarily shorn of significance. You know there is a risk they will hurt later but for now it is enough to stare blankly at their outlines.
Shut your eyes – no, they’re already shut – and count the albums: I II III IV V(ery). Your narrative, like theirs, feels as inevitable as it is unfamiliar, v Pet Shop Boys, but Pet Shop Boys v whom? And so on.
You haven’t left the room, and nor will you be back.
Two decades on, there’s something implausible about Very.
The Pet Shop Boys’ fifth album snuck posthumanism and panic sex into the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Its arrogant title said: here is our essence, an easy reference point, a convenient definition. But once you probed it, touched its orange case with trembling fingers, the conceit started to unravel.
You looked at the sleeve inlay and saw giant eggs, conical hats and beach balls before you spotted any human faces.
Then there was the music: Very didn’t so much showcase the Pet Shop Boys as reinvent them. The twelve career-best songs Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe recorded for the album glinted awkwardly like computer-generated skyscrapers in the artificial sun for miles – and years – in all directions. Somehow they were too near, or too large.
Even Very’s packaging was curiously oppositional. CD cases were meant to be shop windows, dressed by fancy designers to sell the silver discs’ invisible contents. This one was opaque.
To date, the album has been sold in no fewer than seven different sleeves, but Very’s first edition remains one of the most recognisable items in British recorded music history.
Tennant and Lowe were bored of compact discs. Their pocket-sized artwork was a snivelling apology for the glorious 121 sleeve it had replaced, its pathetic scaled-down images shielded by flimsy transparent plastic. This was the conundrum they took to Pentagram.
Pentagram, which also designs buildings, gave them an orange box with three-dimensional polka dots on the front.
It was a gamble – each of these unusual objects cost the Pet Shop Boys 40p2 – but Very’s limited edition was a success, rendering the album instantly visible in the racks, a flash of colour among hundreds of anonymous see-through cases.
The album’s vinyl and cassette versions mirrored the relief on the CD cover by arranging tiny photographs of Tennant and Lowe’s heads in the same polka dot pattern. It looked a bit like it was designed for babies, but novelty is sometimes the vehicle for genius.
As it happened, the CD case was an appropriate metaphor for what lay within: Very is rather difficult to miss. It’s a synth-pop obelisk, a wall of sound built from Tetris blocks.
After four smash-hit LPs and a multi-platinum singles collection, one could have been forgiven for thinking the Pet Shop Boys had achieved everything, reshaping British pop music and surviving to tell the tale.
Their 1990 studio effort, the stately Behaviour, had suggested a band whose members were growing old gracefully as they meditated on absent friends and Shostakovich.
Pop fans aren’t known for their attention spans, and by June 1993 Tennant and Lowe had been absent from the UK top ten for twenty-six months. In the meantime they’d toured, put out that greatest hits LP, worked on Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr’s Electronic project and produced a single for Boy George – but the memory of their last original album was fading. Dance music had grown tougher and more monotonous; rock was enjoying its biggest revival in a generation. It was hard to imagine a new Pet Shop Boys record surfing the crests of the British charts in quite the same way as the duo had done years earlier.
This made it even more satisfying when Very’s impertinent lead single put them back on Top of the Pops. Rubbing shoulders with Lisa Stansfield, ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ was an undercover policeman at a children’s party, its five-o’clock shadow an instant giveaway.
The song was a dense starscape of motion-blurred synthesisers that, even when Tennant started singing, sounded every bit as unreal as the costumes. In the spaces between orchestra hits, he spun a cautionary tale of humiliation, innuendo and denial while – incredibly – Lowe danced with three women holding cricket bats.
The next few months would see the pair achieve their only number-one album, make a string of iconic videos and score a career-defining hit with a song someone else had already released. But while Very’s final three cuts all made respectable inroads into the top twenty, the release of that second single – ‘Go West’ – would prove to be the last time the Pet Shop Boys truly held the pop world in their palms.
‘Go West’, in all its blissful despair, practically tricked its way into the charts. At heart, the song you might know as ‘One-Nil to the Arsenal’ is as bleak as midwinter, but to hear it chanted on the football terraces you’d never have realised.
The song’s optimism was sincere enough when the Village People recorded their version in 1979, but Tennant made it sound thoroughly hopeless. If ‘Go West’ was a list of wedding vows, the Pet Shop Boys were reading them out at a funeral.
The Village People had barely left the stage when Aids began to ravage gay communities. The future – blue skies, open air and all – had been cancelled.
As the pandemic took hold, conservative politicians and commentators found homophobia once again in vogue, and soon the mysterious illness bore a stigma quite independent of its devastating physical effects. Margaret Thatcher’s government refused even to allow the mention of homosexuality in schools, while ageing newspaper columnists told dying men they had only themselves to blame.3
Things had turned out so horribly different from the Village People’s vision that ‘Go West’ sounded naïve, even silly, when Tennant recited it. You could almost hear the air quotes around each line of the abandoned manifesto.
We say this now, but it was also bloody catchy, and it was probably this quality that propelled it squarely into the top five. As a harbinger, ‘Go West’ did its job perfectly, reducing fans and critics to a polite frenzy as they waited for the LP to drop.
Trailing ‘Go West’ by three weeks, Very hit the top spot on October 3rd, 1993 – almost eight years after the Pet Shop Boys’ first hit single had done likewise.
It shredded the pop rulebook in the process. Tennant was pushing forty and the Pet Shop Boys were tainted with the memory of the flashy, overwrought Eighties; precious few of their contemporaries still had any sort of chart presence, and the ones who did were busy reinventing themselves as rock gods. Duran Duran and Depeche Mode had managed to score hits with guitar-driven LPs pitched vaguely at America, but Very – with its techno references, eccentric lyrical flourishes and almost parodically English vocals – suggested the Pet Shop Boys had little interest in winning over the Seattle crowd.
Between them, the album and single spent two months in the UK top ten. The Pet Shop Boys had gloriously outstayed their welcome; Tennant and Lowe had been awarded extra time and they were jolly well going to make the most of it.
This isn’t to say Very is frivolous. It cloaks adult paranoia in ecstatic, widescreen pop songs. Beneath its fluorescent lights walk a succession of wounded men repeatedly learning and forgetting how to love.
Tennant had witnessed twenty-five years of inconsistent gay history by the time the record was released. On his watch homo-sexuality had been legalised and then recast as a killer; disco had been born and Freddie Mercury had died.
Unlike Jimmy Sommerville or Erasure, the Pet Shop Boys had kept quiet about their sexuality, their songs of lust, loss, crime and loneliness heartbreakingly ambiguous. By the time Very was released, the silence was deafening.
You can hear it in a song like ‘To Speak Is a Sin’, Very’s requiem for the gay club scene of the early Eighties. Half-hidden by cigarette smoke and shadow, its narrator watches silently as nervous men return again and again to a seedy, anonymous West End purgatory, too afraid to open their mouths as they loiter at the bar.
It’s in ‘Dreaming of the Queen’, too, whose isolated narrator has no need to spell out the cause of his paranoid nightmares. An Aids widower, he sleeps alone, wondering if or when his own time will come.
These are songs about what we leave unsaid.
Elsewhere, the album flips the paranoia on its head, and we feel the giddy helium-highs of loving like there’s no tomorrow – because there might not be one. In a flash, Tennant goes from barbed to besotted, dedicating ‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing’ to a new suitor, but on ‘Liberation’ a few minutes later he’s already got a foot in the door. “Don’t think of obligation,” he urges his companion. Instead, he wants the man to focus on “now, right now,” averting his gaze from a future that holds god-knows-what.
These glimpses of trauma and delight were conceived as part of the Pet Shop Boys’ most artificial album. With its abstract packaging, surreal wardrobe and references to videogames and theatre, Very doesn’t exactly strive to appear natural.
Grunge, with its unwashed hair and everyman clothes, was the flavour of the decade. The Pet Shop Boys found it uninspiring. Far more exciting to them were the recent advances in computer technology that allowed youngsters to escape into virtual reality.
As bands began to unplug for MTV, the Pet Shop Boys were plugging in – not only synthesisers, but also games consoles and graphics cards.
“Everyone was just dressing in baggy jeans and t-shirt and sweatshirt,” Lowe explained, looking back eight years later. “That Nirvana thing – looking ordinary.” 4
By contrast, as Tennant told the NME in May 1993, the Pet Shop Boys wanted “to have some kind of distinction between us and normal people.” 5 He and Lowe were making “an attempt to move away from all this supposed naturalism in pop.” 6
A summary glance at the album’s music videos hammers the point home. As other bands stood around looking moody, the Pet Shop Boys marched up a vast staircase into space (‘Go West’) or perched on stepladders and blew bubbles at an ostrich (‘Can You Forgive Her?’).
By the time of ‘Liberation’, the album’s fourth single, they had been liberated from their bodies altogether, their visored heads mounted onto metallic wings that swooped in and out of a collapsing kingdom of spinning tops and orange cubes.
Its fascination with appearance doesn’t mean Very is superficial, but the Pet Shop Boys certainly had no interest in being “real.” Their hope was that, in being openly synthetic, they were at least being honest – unlike bands who droned on about how raw and authentic they were more than half a century after Walter Benjamin’s death.
Besides, technology was changing the way people communicated, thought and played. Tennant and Lowe figured they had little to gain by holing themselves up in a log cabin like Henry David Thoreau, recording Dylan covers and catching their own dinner. They needed plug sockets.
This refusal to be cowed by peer pressure paid off: the record sold in its millions and established the benchmark for a generation of fans, just as the Pet Shop Boys’ first album had done in 1986 when it set sail in altogether friendlier waters. With access to hindsight it seems obvious that Very was always going to be a hit but, at the time, it must have been a relief – if not a pleasant surprise – that it didn’t tank.
Very isn’t one single story – it’s too clever for anything so straightforward. But perhaps its stories all take place in the same year, and happen to the same people in the same places.
Like all good journalism it turns the profound into the mundane, paring sex and politics down into miniature soap operas. Great pop music, goes the adage, makes you feel good about feeling bad, even if a part of that melancholy is knowing you’ll never truly be part of the world you’re hearing about.
Very would be the last Pet Shop Boys album to make a prolonged dent in the charts, but its success stopped the clock. It gave the duo licence to keep making records as daft and morose as they liked for the next twenty-three years, and counting.
These days, some publication or other levels a “best-since-Very” claim at each successive Pet Shop Boys LP, but rarely does anyone look further back, recalling that Very itself was once an epilogue.
Though they would never again sound quite so consistently transcendent, the record set the sonic template for much of their later work. And as the 20th century grows more distant, it’s easier to remember pointy hats than Issey Miyake sunglasses.
The title was prescient, then: Very succeeded in being “very Pet Shop Boys” after all, if only by redefining what that meant.
