This was a Friday night in Manchester that had been a long time coming. Nearly three years ago, in September 2019, Pet Shop Boys announced Dreamworld, an arena tour billed as their first ever Greatest Hits show and designed to roughly coincide with the release of their 14th studio album, Hotspot, which followed in January 2020.
Well, we all know what happened next. The pandemic led to the tour being postponed not once, but twice - and an anxious message posted on the Pet Shop Boys website before Dreamworld's first date in Milan, explaining that they couldn't meet and greet fans on the road for fear of catching Covid and derailing the whole thing again, highlights the air of precariousness that still surrounds live music.
But happily, the Pet Shop Boys made it safely to the AO Arena. And if the idea of a Greatest Hits show was in any way a gambit to make the selling of tickets run more smoothly, now it makes even more sense as a way of celebrating the jewels of their back catalogue with an audience of thousands after such a long delay.
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Jewels is no overstatement, either. Recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the most successful British pop duo of all time, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have been crafting their erudite synthpop for over four decades, selling more than 100 million records worldwide.
While some would have interpreted the notion of a greatest hits tour loosely, slipping in fan-favourite album tracks that never charted individually, Pet Shop Boys have put together a formidable two-hour setlist that properly fulfils the brief. Tennant was once an assistant editor for Smash Hits, after all, and is credited with coining the term 'imperial phase' - when an act is at the peak of their commercial powers, and creative excellence seems effortless.
It's fairly easy to deduce where Tennant and Lowe think their own imperial phase begins and ends. Tonight's choices consisted purely of singles that mostly made the upper reaches of the top 40, finding room for only three from albums that came out after 1999.
This means all their 1980s classics were present and correct, including the show's opener Suburbia, Love Comes Quickly, Rent, Left To My Own Devices and their four number ones: Always On My Mind, Heart, It's A Sin - getting fresh exposure by inspiring the title for Russell T Davies' acclaimed Channel 4 drama about the AIDS crisis - plus West End Girls, saved for the encore.
The latter was of course the debut single that introduced the PSB aesthetic to the world, with Tennant speak-singing a literate tale of a pressure-filled London where "sometimes you're better off dead" over an atmospheric arrangement stamped with Lowe's immediately recognisable bassline.
The staging, designed together with creative director Tom Scutt, was simple but highly effective. Two cute-looking mini street lamps formed the centrepiece, while video screens were deployed for excerpts from past promo clips and flashy neon graphics.
Lowe, as ever, was an enigmatic presence behind his keyboards, impassive on a tall rostrum beneath a succession of hats, dark glasses and chunky coats, while smart-suited Tennant - an underrated frontman - was in fine voice, urging on the crowd to a mass singalong during Domino Dancing.
Given the breadth of the PSB canon, there's still space for curios even when taking the 'best of' approach. It was a treat to hear their version of Losing My Mind from Stephen Sondheim's musical Follies - it wasn't ever a hit for them, but the hi-NRG interpretation they produced for Liza Minnelli was.
And it seems remarkable today that a song as singular as You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk, an almost country-tinged number with a finely observed lyric about a lover's alcohol-fuelled mood swings, could have charted at number eight - but it truly did as Tennant, with an eagle eye for chart positions, reminded us as he strapped on an unaccustomed acoustic guitar.
The pair's collaboration with Dusty Springfield, What Have I Done To Deserve This, was performed as a duet with Clare Uchima, one of three backing singers and percussionists who joined Tennant and Lowe. A similar method was employed on Dreamland, the Hotspot track which originally featured Years & Years' Olly Alexander, who starred in Davies' It's A Sin.
They said their farewells following a poignant Being Boring, dedicated by Tennant to the victims of the arena bombing - which he summed up as a "horrendous hate crime" - as the atrocity's fifth anniversary is reached. Its appropriately defiant chorus - "We were never being boring, we were never being bored" - is as good a manifesto as any for the Pet Shop Boys' career, this stellar Dreamworld show and how to live life generally.
