Try not to contemplate the number of times that album has been in and out of the player, how strange it is that you still marvel uncomprehendingly as it fires up. Are you satisfied that Very is solid fact when when its fifth and final single drops out of the charts? Or when you see it ironed onto the page of the Guinness Book of British Hit Albums as the Pet Shop Boys’ only number one? Or when the record is reissued – once, twice, a third time? When is it absorbed into pop history?
Somehow that point still hasn’t come. We can’t look directly at it: there is a gap that the material details of the fifth Pet Shop Boys album ought to fill, but Very is made of energy. The shadows beneath the polka dots are not darkness but the future. It is a pop paradox. Trying to assess it is like trying to remember before you were born. It’s easier to reset time itself, to start counting again at 1993 and cut the past – if there really is one – adrift.
[Electric] is the most essential album Pet Shop Boys have made in 20 years.140
MusicOMH, 2013
[Yes is] their most vivacious, consistent and adorable album since 1993’s Very.141
BBC, 2009
This [Fundamental] is their best album since Very.142
Stylus Magazine, 2006
[Disco 3 is] the Pet Shop Boys’ best album in 10 years.143
NME, 2003
[Release is] the best Pet Shop Boys album in nearly 10 years.144
AllMusic, 2002
This imposing record defied perspective. We looked up at the sky and saw it stretching out below us and felt it in our hands all at once; we closed our eyes and the light was orange.
Tennant, perhaps, had cottoned on to the fact Very had about three dimensions too many when he mysteriously told Heath in 2001: “It’s a good album. It’s better than you think.” 145
Yet since its release life has improbably carried on, like the day after the apocalypse hits at the end of a disaster film. Every couple of years a new LP is hailed as a “return to form” for this band whose form has been basically unfaltering, while an endless stream of side projects pours out: remix albums, retrospectives, a musical, a film score, a ballet, a song cycle about Alan Turing. We, too, have grown up, grown older. And yet the more time passes the more monumental that original “comeback” album – now itself practically an incunabulum – seems to get.
Very is constantly at the Boys’ elbow. But I don’t think it’s just the album’s brilliance that haunts them – it’s also the fact the record was liminal, a blaze of glory after the tapes had stopped, a white rabbit pulled out of a hat the audience had already checked for hidden compartments.
And like the final red-shifted impression of something disappearing over the edge of a black hole, the last glimpse we caught of the Pet Shop Boys’ golden years has turned out to be the enduring one. We assess each new release not against the throbbing glory of ‘Always on My Mind’ or the measured majesty of Behaviour, but against this anomaly in their collection, a video-game soundtrack that spins and flashes, so off the charts even its cover is difficult to depict on a flat surface. It’s almost easier to pretend Very doesn’t exist, except for the fact that it’s everywhere you go.
But rewind a bit further, if you can, and it’s possible to catch a glimpse of the band in transition. Listen to ‘Was It Worth It?’, delivered at the end of 1991, or to ‘Disappointed’, Tennant’s last collaboration with Electronic in 1992, and you can hear the Pet Shop Boys exploding into light, finally escaping the twin shadows of Bobby Orlando and ‘Blue Monday’. Fittingly, when first Tennant and then Lowe started working with Sumner and Marr they left the duo sounding more like the Pet Shop Boys than either New Order or The Smiths. Even the Electronic tracks that aren’t theirs sound like they were ghost-written: dance music that is confessional and stubborn at the same time, that has a faraway look in its eyes.
The tension between happy and sad had always been the Pet Shop Boys’ bread and butter but it was Very, encouraged by these early experiments in exuberant melancholia, that finally grabbed the Boys’ audience by the shoulders, stared them in the face and shook them.
Their first four albums were certainly related. On Please there’s a hefty dose of unfulfilled longing and dark excitement thrown into relief against the clicking electro; we find desolation and anger between the kick drums on Actually. Then came their light-and-shade studies of house music, Introspective and Behaviour – lusher, more transcendental than their predecessors, but even so there’s no way you could shuffle Very into the middle and expect it to make any kind of sense. If we’re talking about the way the records feel then it’s not until Very that Tennant really makes eye contact with you. Not until then do the songs sound like freefalling and falling in love all at once.
The Pet Shop Boys may have been reacting against the majority of the top ten, but they didn’t invent this sound from scratch – they merely synthesised it better than everyone else, cleared the half-complete Jeopardy! board. It wasn’t just Electronic who had made a start on it; you’ll find some, but not all, of Very’s (Lego) building blocks assembled into an entirely different structure on the instrumental Bytes album by Black Dog Productions, others on songs by 808 State, The Cure, Depeche Mode and Take That. Then, of course, there’s ‘True Faith’, the record that fired the starting gun for the Nineties three years early. Which is a book for another occasion, but suffice to say the Pet Shop Boys (unlike New Order) just sort of picked their moment.
Another thing that’s noteworthy about the depth of Very’s footprint is the way people look for each new Pet Shop Boys record to have its own respective ‘Go West’ – the moment Tennant and Lowe transcend even the context of their own album and rip a hole in spacetime. Some of the comparisons half hit home; others seem more like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. ‘A Red Letter Day’ (1996), ‘New York City Boy’ (1999), ‘Integral’ (2006) and ‘Love Is a Bourgeois Construct’ (2013) have all been charged with ‘Go West’ syndrome, sometimes because the songs truly do have a dash of otherworldliness and sometimes just because they have a choir.
It goes without saying they have never actually replicated that single – it would be a historical impossibility even if they were to make an identical record. Very and its almighty conclusion are embedded in 1993, in Britain, in Tennant’s late thirties; the album is a single point on a bewildering graph whose axes include the progress of computer technology, the state of public health and the Pet Shop Boys’ own lives.
In the two and a bit decades since, they have been mostly brilliant; even their darkest days have been tempered by genius, by records that dumbfound us. But the CD in the funny case stands apart; it was a one-off not just for them but for us. Very was a goal in extra time during the world’s last football match – and yet its legacy is our sustained, irrational belief that they could do it again.
The extent to which the stigmata remain unhealed was made clear when Yes briefly threatened to enter the album chart at number one in 2009. Delirious fans spoke like it was the end of days: it seemed almost fate that this glossy pop record, which in truth bore only a passing resemblance to its elder sibling, was to be the Pet Shop Boys’ second second coming. And yet just a few years on, Yes has sunk comfortably into the duo’s biography while Very continues to tower above it.
After ‘Too Many People’, the perceived ambiguity shrouding the Pet Shop Boys – the sense that there were lines to read between – has been largely cast off; a new romantic honesty pervades their albums post-1993. This phenomenon would lead Yes co-producer Brian Higgins to claim that Tennant’s lyrics “became less and less broad [. . .] I just felt that what I was getting, rightly or wrongly, was Neil’s personal life.” 146
Higgins’ insistence Tennant try and write songs for the masses may be the reason Yes contains the Pet Shop Boys’ least interesting set of lyrics to date. But his comment is half-right; Tennant’s writing does get more personal as the years go on.
It isn’t hard to understand that he was more guarded about his emotions in the days before publicly coming out. It’s not that he has ever lost his interest in history, in politics, in character studies, but he does seem happier to sing in the first person, and to sound roughly like he means it, since the Attitude interview. But that might also be because Very soundtracked a romantic change in Tennant’s life. He was always writing about himself; the hero of his autobiography merely changed from a student into a lover, and that’s a hard box to shut.
All the same, Very had the element of surprise, so integrally it’s almost as though a different band made it, different both from the people who had gone before and from those who emerged twelve and a bit tracks later having conquered music.
All the record’s themes popped up again in the years that followed. ‘The Boy Who Couldn’t Keep His Clothes On’ and ‘The Ghost of Myself’ pick up the LP’s intertwined fascinations with sex and identity; Bilingual is practically a concept album about surviving Aids, after which Nightlife returns to the bar in ‘To Speak Is a Sin’ for one last drink. And the Pet Shop Boys’ love affair with escape has never left their discography, either: their characters continue to lose themselves in London, the past, the future, the club and their memories.
In the final analysis it doesn’t matter one bit whether you can trace Very’s timeline backwards or forwards: it was, and is, so remarkable the world now defines a band that has been solidly writing music for three decades by one record.
To say, now, that something is “very Pet Shop Boys” is primarily to say it sounds or feels like Very, not like the duo’s thirty-year career as any sort of whole. Like the featureless black tower in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the moment we glimpsed this orange box the world changed, and kept changing.