Heating up the soup - the Pet Shop Boys’ Hotspot

In my mum’s kitchen lurks a book which, I suspect, can be found lurking in many a British kitchen. It is The Dairy Book Of Home Management, a hefty tome containing all sorts of practical guidance on home life - from cookery tips to DIY. Its ‘general editor’ is one Neil Tennant, pre-Smash Hits, and better known to the rest of us for almost the last 40 years as one half of the Pet Shop Boys. Now, I’m not suggesting that Tennant, as the duo's chief lyricist, has taken the banality of domestic living into his pop career, but for all the giant silver hats, circus dancers and other emblems of arch ironic camp that the PSBs have displayed over the years, there has always been a marked understatement about them.

Indeed, think of the Pet Shop Boys and immediately you have a profile image of the tall, languid Tennant, standing in front of the shorter Chris Lowe, “the quiet one”, who has seemingly and quite happily taken a step back from his elder bandmate, stabbing away at a keyboard. And thus, 39 years after Tennant met Lowe in a Chelsea hi-fi shop and decided to make electronic music together, the Pet Shop Boys are back with their 14th album, Hotspot, and from one perspective you could argue that it’s more of the same: pulsating rhythms, a couple of cosy synth ballads, and Tennant’s distinctive vocals, set some way back in the mix, almost acting as a keyboard layer in themselves (and don’t just think of PSB material for this - Tennant’s voice was instrumental in Electronic’s Getting Away With It and Robbie Williams’ No Regrets). But such a statement belies two things: one, Tennant’s gift for lyrics that can be as matter-of-fact as guidance on putting up shelves earlier in his career, but at the same time convey wit, emotion and pathos; and two, Lowe’s gift for creating a vibe, be it a HiNRGhe club pulse or the soothing washes that first drew me to West End Girls.

With any music genre - be it rock, funk, R&B, whatever - repetition is inevitable. Signature cues, once established, come easily. It would be hard to receive a new album by the Rolling Stones anonymously and not know who you were listening too. Thus, the Pet Shop Boys provide the same familiarity with Hotspot, opening with Will O The Wisp’s immediately recognisable Euro disco and mildly saucy lyric. To be honest, I could do with fewer of these electronic anthems from the PSBs. They’ve done them for years and today musically they bring little new to their canon, even as perfectly good as they are, and as lyrically sharp. More interesting, more appealing, even, are the subtle shifts to something else. Burning The Heather - a song, simply, about a summer heath blaze Tennant witnessed - adds Bernard Butler’s guitars to give it a folky treatment; You Are The One is a ballad as lush as Rent, in which Tennant and Lowe apply their best combination of assets, Tennant’s voice as an instrument and Lowe’s orchestrated keyboard pads.

With Tennant now almost 66 and Lowe 60, there is a temptation to view some of Hotspot as nostalgic, but given the duo's historic anger at perceived ageism, lyrically, there is plenty on the album to be considered forward looking and fresh. Dreamland, a collaboration with Years & Years, is a bright and breezy piece of sumptuous pop music, while Monkey Business takes an electronic turn into Nile Rodgers territory. Irony, a word that surprises me has never been used in the PSBs’ history of single-word album titles, continues to run lasciviously through this album, with wry (and subtle) statements about the state of things, from Brexit to same-sex marriage. Indeed, now I think of it, much of this band’s 35 years of recorded music has been notably ironic. Ever-so gently, they’ve not taken themselves too seriously while producing some joyous music. Hotspot may not be their best, but on the other hand, there’s plenty on it to slot nicely into the overall library of 14 studio albums, most of which contribute justifiably to Tennant and Lowe being afforded national treasure status. And, while it might appear incongruous to see two men in their 60s still, effectively, mounting further celebration of the dancefloor, a brief aside: last week the 79-year-old ‘Godfather of Disco’, Georgio Moroder, was pictured DJing at a corporate event in Las Vegas. You’re never too old to boogie.