The sky empties and the tower blocks evaporate, as though some cosmic “reset” button had been activated while someone fumbled with the air con.
There is a row of bunkers in front of you.
It’s a moment before you hear the sinister, chirping, 8-bit chorus.
Then you see them: a two-dimensional wall of pixelated heads is descending slowly towards you, pouring through the air with zero regard for physics.
Look closer. The heads — how are they making that sound? — all have one of two faces. Some of them are wearing visors; all of them have helmets on. Their arrangement is completely uniform.
They are attacking.
A man more in control of his senses might be alarmed, might ready himself for fight or flight, but you can’t help but marvel. And as you stare, still more bleeping copies issue like an airborne virus from a hole in the atmosphere that stays just beyond the edge of your vision wherever you turn your head.
What does this remind you of?
Your brain creaks into action at last and you grope speculatively in the air, hoping to find a red button to keep the maniacal army at bay. Split-seconds stretch into decades before, at what feels very much like the last minute, the faces start to vanish.
Now you realise the breathing you can hear isn’t yours, and nor is the gun firing under your control.
When did he get here?
This man-machine, his hands moving at light-speed over the controls, is a vision. It’s like the sky itself is an extension of his fingers, controlled by reflexes rather than buttons and circuits. You try very hard to stop yourself staring – but odds are he wouldn’t notice even if you leaned over and kissed him.
Spin the record backwards for a moment.
There’s a track on the Pet Shop Boys’ debut called ‘Later Tonight’, in whose three soft minutes a foppy-haired Neil Tennant admits his concealed but hopeless lust for a young man walking down the street.
It’s implicit that the gentleman in question is not only physically out of reach (Tennant is looking through a window) but also culturally unobtainable – he is, or appears to be, heterosexual.
While the two sound very different, ‘Later Tonight’ is in some sense the template for Very’s tenth song, ‘Young Offender’. Seven years on from ‘Later Tonight’, Tennant’s affection has turned half to annoyance – but there’s certainly admiration in ‘Young Offender’ buried beneath the critical, almost patronising, tone of the lyrics.
The object of Tennant’s gaze here is a gamer rather than a mod, and the age gap is greater – Tennant is probably describing someone fifteen or twenty years his junior, arms folded in the darkened arcade as he pretends to disapprove of the man’s pastime. Still, it’s the younger character, not the singer, who holds the balance of power.
This is where the two plots diverge. The boy’s magnetism was straightforward and physical in the lyrics of ‘Later Tonight’; here, however, we’re not really told anything about the gamer’s appearance. It’s hinted that perhaps he’s grubby, a bit of a dropout, but there are no descriptions of his clothes, his profile, his hair – any of the things we might expect in a song about fancying someone.
Instead, it’s the man’s technical skill that attracts – and annoys – Tennant. Look for it and there’s a double entendre in there somewhere about his manipulation of the computer keyboard, but in truth this isn’t about sex between humans.
A sharply focused artificial sky of bleeps and lasers hangs low over the action, and when Tennant sneaks a look into the gamer’s eyes he sees something almost cyborg.
This kind of character will be familiar to anyone who’s read William Gibson or Jeff Noon – a bratty “digital native” with astounding, seemingly effortless skill whose tech mastery is intuitive and natural. Like those cybernetic anti-heroes, our young offender might just as well be plumbed directly into the mainframe.
It’s not very Hollywood. This guy isn’t desirable because of looks, broad shoulders or bank balance, but because of his nerdy, teenage hobby. And for a moment we’re reminded of the Pet Shop Boys’ war against the norm.
Because to their critics Tennant and Lowe are nerds, too – precocious and soulless, playing synthesisers at the crossroads for some devil whose existence they deny. How many film stars serenade girls on a Fairlight?
So perhaps Tennant recognises himself in this insolent younger man, sees the future in his furrowed brow as he stares at the flickering screen.
He would, of course, be quite correct.
Like any new medium in its formative years – film, TV, pop music – videogaming is an unremarkable fact of life for anyone younger than the technology [. . .] while older generations routinely dismiss or even vilify it. Now, though, the kids who’ve grown up with gaming are on the verge of becoming the ones in power.81 When computer games came in, a certain generation just didn’t know what they were all about.82
It’s hardly surprising Very idolises the sole Gen-Xer to stride across its peaks and troughs.
As other musicians look behind them for inspiration – paying homage to previous eras, wasn’t it? – the Pet Shop Boys greedily absorb graphics cards, remixers, digital synthesisers and bright colours. Very sucks up 1993 like some wide-eyed newborn. From its hyper-synthetic sound to its CGI videos and doomed utopian-ism, the record is almost posthumanist.
In the course of the five short films made to promote it, Tennant and Lowe rarely step out of virtual reality. They play ping-pong with floating blue eggs, climb staircases into space, surf almighty galactic waves and rub shoulders with clone armies of themselves. They are transformed into lampshades, eagles, spinning tops and – most tellingly – videogame characters.
It’s impossible here to ignore the legacy of Kraftwerk, who were turning themselves into robots years before the Pet Shop Boys even cut their first digital master. But the Germans had a hefty modernist chip on their shoulders, creating a new folk music from the trauma of the Second World War, trying to zero in on the point where history went wrong.
Even when they insisted it was ‘More Fun to Compute’, it sounded like a pleasant side-effect. Whether or not they happened to be enjoying themselves, the four men sat in the Electric Café were shouldering the weight of the world.
The Pet Shop Boys, a decade or so younger, belong to the new dawn Kraftwerk had tried to usher in. Kraftwerk wanted to be cutting-edge; the Pet Shop Boys want to be contemporary.
In their efforts to describe a (largely) brighter tomorrow for their fellow countrymen, Düsseldorf’s finest were deeply concerned with subjectivity. Their robots were basically humans with straighter lines. Kraftwerk themselves drove on the auto-bahn, worried about nuclear energy, rode European trains, used pocket calculators.
Their 1983 single ‘Tour de France’ concluded that humans had been machines all along – their legs pistons, their breath an industrial ventilation system. The future was already here.
MASCHINE
MASCHINE
MASCHINE
MASCHINE
MASCHINE
MASCHINE
MASCHINE
MASCHINE
It’s true in a sense that Kraftwerk have been sinking into the background, letting the technology fill the spotlight, ever since The Man-Machine. Humanoid bots briefly replaced them on stage in 1981; the 1986 video for ‘Music Non-Stop’ animated digital scans of their faces; illustrations accompanying The Mix in 1991 mounted their heads onto sleek, towering androids.
But here’s the rub: where Kraftwerk’s robots look like they have been designed with pencils and rulers and made in factories, and where their album covers look like art with purpose and message and intention, the Pet Shop Boys – on Very more than ever – look, well, digital. Like something spat out by a malfunc-tioning dot matrix printer; like there is no longer a god in the machine.
Take another look at the LP cover: Tennant and Lowe’s dis-embodied heads are repeated across the sleeve like polka dots or space invaders falling languidly out of the air.
Lowe Tennant Lowe Tennant Lowe
Lowe Tennant Lowe Tennant
Tennant Lowe Tennant Lowe Tennant
Tennant Lowe Tennant Lowe
Lowe Tennant Lowe Tennant Lowe
Lowe Tennant Lowe Tennant
Tennant Lowe Tennant Lowe Tennant
Tennant Lowe Tennant Lowe
Lowe Tennant Lowe Tennant Lowe
It’s a dehumanising gesture – while you can just about read Tennant’s expression, twenty identical smiling heads without bodies isn’t an easy image to relate to. The Very sleeve could scarcely be more different from the moody, naturalistic portraits that remain to this day the bread and butter of band photography.
This has a couple of effects. Firstly, the heads’ geometric congruence hints at mass, specifically digital, reproduction. It’s the visual equivalent of sampling and looping someone’s voice, dissolving Tennant and Lowe’s subjectivity and reminding the user he or she is viewing the work of a computer.
Tennant, at least, appears delighted by this.
It’s also a curious reversal of dance music’s traditional duality, in which head is subordinate to body.
Hidden faces – behind motorcycle helmets (Daft Punk), masks (Michael Jackson), sunglasses (everyone) – are common enough in the dance world. The remixer whose voice is never heard, the sampling and re-sampling of vocals and the use of “white label” records are all phenomena that serve to relegate auteurship to the status of a sleevenote, if that.
But the removal of the body to leave just the author’s face is more unusual. For starters, it’s hard to dance – and this is a band who pitch at least half their records at the dancefloor – without one. Even outside the club, pop stars’ bodies are typically turned into objects of desire, not deleted altogether.
So is Very an exercise in placing mind over matter – dance music for people who don’t dance? Does it take its cue from Warp Records’ language of “electronic listening music,” a phrase emblazoned proudly across the Sheffield label’s 1992 Artificial Intelligence compilation?
Has the gamer, lost in cyberspace, emerged victorious over the dancer, lost in the rhythm?
Well. . . not exactly.
As Tennant and Lowe copy and paste their way out of corporeality, they usher in something new to replace their bodies – something virtual.
It’s almost like they’re inviting you to cut the heads out and experiment by putting them on different bodies or objects. They join RoboCop in exploring what it means to be an android below the neck – or a car, or a toast rack.
But Alex Murphy’s transformation into Detroit’s star cybernetic police officer was all too “real” – violent, messy and expensive. The Pet Shop Boys as pictured on Very’s front cover aren’t really looking for a physical upgrade. They simply want you to cycle through the display options like you’re choosing a character in Mortal Kombat.
Open the CD booklet and they have provided some suggestions: gravity-defying superheroes in blue and yellow (available with or without wraparound visor); aliens in pointy hats looking skywards to understand their origin (available with or without stepladder). Even the clouds look like the digital scenery of a console game, a single pattern duplicated over and over across the sky to help it load faster.
The Krokers, writing in 1987, anticipated the loss of the Pet Shop Boys’ bodies by some six years.
Having mused on clean bodily fluids, HIV and “panic sex,” 83 they suggested: “If, today, there can be such an intense fascination with the fate of the body, might this not be because the body no longer exists?” 84
They said the body’s functions had been tendered out: computers had taken over the role of memory; test tubes had alienated the womb; the Sony Walkman was a set of “ablated ears”; CGI had replaced perspective; body scanners had taken over from the nervous system.85
Maybe Tennant and Lowe don’t see this as a problem.
In the end, the body betrays us, holds us prisoner as it ages and decays. So perhaps ‘Young Offender’ shares the corporeal paranoia we encountered in ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ and ‘To Speak Is a Sin’. The song, after all, is about an age gap – about whether Tennant can get away with hitting on a twenty year-old. That, rather than any implied heterosexuality, is the reason the boy is inaccessible this time round.
The point of the song is the difference between me being me and someone being younger – about that generation gap. [. . .] There is also a suggestion in the song that there is a potential of the two people having a relationship. They’re not lovers, but they could be.86
Tennant will hint again at his frustration with ageing the month after Very comes out, telling Chris Heath: “I know people who are twenty but I regard myself as living a teenage lifestyle.” 87
So ‘Young Offender’ doesn’t just muse on Tennant’s attraction to the gamer – the song lusts after the tech at his fingertips, seeing in it the end of the ravaged, mortal body and the possibility of a cyborg future in which people are assembled from plastic and metal and nobody gets older.
In one form or another, the Pet Shop Boys have been raving about synthetics pretty much from the outset.
Hell, they met in an electronics shop. Looking back on the recording of their first album, Tennant would tell Chris Heath in 2001: “Chris and I were very, very against having real instruments brought in the studio.” 88
By the time they make Very, the Pet Shop Boys have largely abandoned attempts even to imitate “real instruments.” The album has its share of string sections and drum patches, and of course there are voices – but there’s a whole lot of chiming and beeping and whirring going on, too, and plenty of sounds that have no real analogue in the physical world.
Very is primarily a virtual space, and the Pet Shop Boys’ manipulation of it from within serves only to make them seem even stranger.
Just as highly artificial landscapes replace the duo’s natural surroundings in those videos, highly artificial sound environments replace acoustic instruments throughout the record, casting them adrift on a digital sea.
I was playing computer games a lot, thinking, “This is what the kids are into”, and thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if we became this thing removed from reality and existing in a non-real world?” 89
While it draws some odd looks, Tennant and Lowe’s materialisation in cyberspace is a pretty logical extension of the way video-games have smashed into young people’s everyday lives. Even as the Pet Shop Boys toured south-east Asia in 1989, Tetris for Nintendo GameBoy had people on the streets outside “seeing falling blocks in front of their eyes and mentally rotating real-life objects to get them to fit together.” 90
But Very does more than just chuck in a couple of Sonic references to look trendy. It borrows so heavily from videogames it almost starts to become one. It immerses its user in spectacular three-dimensional spaces; it has characters; it’s fun; it’s escapist; it reveals more the more closely you look; it has a narrative; you can play it. It even contains an Easter egg.
Of course you don’t really get to control it – but it does send you on a journey, and not just one created by its lyrics. It instils and satisfies a longing for abstraction, for space; somehow it mimics the sense, at once spectacular and sad, of getting further than you have before, of collecting something you thought would always remain out of reach, of being dangerously close to the final sequence, which will be both loss and reward and which cannot be repeated, not really, not so that you’ll feel this way again.
Before we grow up and learn what parts of our minds things belong in, back when a videogame or a song could consume us, take over our dreams and rewrite our source code – that’s the album’s timestamp.
[Videogame] environments are [. . .] spatial and encyclopaedic. [These] two properties help to make digital creations seem as explorable and extensive as the actual world, making up much of what we mean when we say that cyberspace is immersive.91
Very is certainly immersive; Janet H. Murray’s use of the word “spatial” implies visual space, but might it not also apply to sound environments? For these are the computer screens on which the album’s narratives play out – soundscapes, if you like.
The Pet Shop Boys have treated music as a subgenre of cinema ever since ‘West End Girls’ somehow made a choir sample sound like a metropolis in bad weather. But Very’s more abstract sound creates more abstract digital spaces; they juggle photons halfway through ‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing’, proposition you on a sofa made of numbers during ‘A Different Point of View’, surf the clouds into infinity at the start of ‘One in a Million’.
They switch from celluloid to CD-ROM and make every spike and every shadow marvellous because you don’t know what you’re looking at anymore.
Very’s “graphics” sound like the building blocks for a dream, and don’t videogames share a certain dazzling logic with dreams?
The word is “liberation.”
It’s making your way home on a Friday afternoon over impossible shimmering vistas, past giant spinning tops and through streams of tiny cubes that behave like shoals of fish.
It’s experiencing the sublime, staring up at giant Cold War structures that may or may not have the Pet Shop Boys’ profiles when viewed from a certain angle.
It’s turning into a cybernetic eagle, soaring over this unreal kingdom and headlong into the vanishing point.
Mark P. J. Wolf, analysing the abstract imagery of early video-games, quotes Wilhelm Worringer’s 1908 treatise Abstraction and Empathy and finds that, in fact, the Edwardian has a lot to say about Pac-Man.
But read a little closer and the Pet Shop Boys’ 1994 video for ‘Liberation’ seems to stare out of the page, too:
The urge to abstraction is the outcome of a greater inner unrest inspired in man by phenomena of the outside world; in a religious respect it corresponds to a strongly transcendental tinge to all notions.92
By setting it within its own magnificently abstract universe, director Howard Greenhalgh gives ‘Liberation’ a “strongly transcendental tinge,” too. Its world may be boxed in by a television but it’s hard to resist the urge to step inside like Max Renn in Videodrome. The interface feels like a window, not a screen.
The Pet Shop Boys, by now, are four singles into their campaign of otherness. But ‘Liberation’, the album’s most experimental film, seems more at home among the abstract videos Phil Wolstenholme is making for Warp Records than slotted among Greenhalgh’s other Very clips.
In the sleevenotes for Motion, the VHS compilation that accompanies Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series, Wolstenholme writes:
Through computer graphics, we are now able to realistically depict and inhabit utterly unreal and bizarre worlds that could only exist in our deepest imaginings. These places and creatures are real to the eye, yet shockingly unreal to the soul. We remember them but we deny them significance.93
David Slade, who perhaps has seen the Very sleeve a year earlier, chips in:
In 1994 people are having their heads cut off and cryogenically frozen. The promise is an immortal life after death. The technology to retrieve the structure of a given human mind and reform it in a new reconstructed equivalent sits on the horizon of scientific rationale. [. . .] For now, the price of utopia is a decapitation.?94
The ‘Liberation’ video cuts the Pet Shop Boys loose, picking up where the disembodied heads on the album cover left off.
Tennant would later remark: “We finally achieved our ambition on this one of not actually being in the video.” 95 Sure enough, the duo appear in the four-minute clip only as computer-generated versions of themselves: their profiles are rotated 360 degrees about a central axis to become three-dimensional spinning tops; casts of their heads – still, in their haste, wearing the pointy hats from ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ – are mounted onto giant, golden wings that slice sine waves through the air. Their bodies, of course, are nowhere to be seen.
Liberating the Pet Shop Boys from their own film at first seems to rob the clip of its central characters, leaving it as an empty stage, a piece of discarded scenery.
But there is still a character here.
The video carries us through this bizarre world as though we are directing its movement. It moves through the spinning tops and cubes and towers and swirling clouds of tiny cones like the user-controlled point of view in a first-person videogame. Particularly in one sequence, as the perspective slides through a series of silver tunnels, it almost feels like we are exploring a map – like we could tell the “camera” to stop and it would.
Much of the development of video games has been driven by a desire for a corporeal immersion with technology, a will to envelop the player in technology and the environment of the game space. That development has coincided with and been supported by developments in perspective and the optical point-of-view structures of games, which have increasingly emphasised the axis of depth, luring the player into invading the world behind the computer screen.96
The Pet Shop Boys make it clear they are on the same (web) page as those immersion junkies when they turn ‘Liberation’ into a virtual-reality ride to promote the single. Anyone brave enough to step inside the capsule that tours English shopping centres finds themselves being physically tilted up and down, side-to-side, in sync with the film’s perspective.
It will be the closest anyone gets to entering one of the Pet Shop Boys’ abstract worlds until 2001, when a three-dimensional version of the ‘Liberation’ clip is chosen to form part of Cyber-world, a feature film made to demonstrate the capabilities of the new Imax screen.
Perhaps the gamer eulogised in ‘Young Offender’ is controlling the perspective in the not-yet-made ‘Liberation’ film. Standing over him, Tennant doesn’t know what it is, not yet, not if he has the sound turned down.
Maybe the boy is already lost in the video world, his body half-way through the screen.
The monitor guides us into (a perceptual and corporeal) interaction with the computer and, as a technologised form of vision, it becomes a component and extension of the body; it replaces our body, or rather extends its capacities, and becomes both a representation and source of bodily experience, thus creating a hybrid condition resonant with the cyborg.97
But the condition is temporary. For all their efforts Tennant and Lowe aren’t, and can’t be, inside the computer world they’re trying to suck us into. In ‘Liberation’, and behind the young offender’s eyes, they render an alternate universe, an escape hatch from the emotional turmoil of being gay in the mid- Nineties, of ageing, of being heartbroken, of living under a Conservative government – but one we cannot hope to access.
And when the record stops, and the game is complete, and the dream is over, we’re back where we started.
If we needed it spelt out, it’s there in the third of Very’s video clips, the film that accompanies ‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing’.
This is the only time we see Tennant and Lowe actually step from one world to another. During the song’s instrumental break, they materialise on a TV screen as characters in some unlikely version of Street Fighter while, outside the TV, we see the controls are in the hands of. . . the Pet Shop Boys themselves. (Tennant wins by knocking Lowe out with a baseball bat.)
It’s obviously quite funny to watch but, to be humourless about this, what we’re seeing inside the TV set are avatars. The actual Pet Shop Boys are stranded on the terrestrial side of the black mirror.
You can escape inside the computer, for a while, but you don’t get to live there. Not even Tennant and Lowe, who created this world themselves, can inhabit it. The film invites us to look further out and we discover that we, too, are on the wrong side of the screen.
Then there’s the curiously non-committal tone of ‘Liberation’, the song that soundtracks Very’s most escapist film. The language is all immediacy; Tennant pushes obligations and longer-term responsibilities to the back of his mind – or, possibly, out the window of the taxi altogether.
His words hang over the video, their emotional tunnel vision an analogue to the dark, windowless walls of that peculiar virtual- reality ride. We’d move in if we could, spend eternity freefalling through Greenhalgh’s marvellous, foreboding landscape. But four short minutes whip by and we’re ushered down the steps into the bright, boring lights of a shopping mall.
Of course, there are nine more tracks, each with its own abstract world, but as with any good album we spend each successive minute missing the whole before it’s even gone, more aware than usual of the strange passage of time. Are we hearing, or remembering, or anticipating? The CD player’s unfailing time-code, representing the progress of the needle across the record, is both torture and ecstasy.