Porcupines on the loose

Britain’s biggest electro-pop export, the Pet Shop Boys, return to Bangkok next week after more than a decade’s absence, armed to the teeth with lights, lasers and cool dance grooves ready to fuse their Electric Tour into the Sonic Bang festival.
The Boys are Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, who debuted as a duo in 1981 and were quickly established among the most commercially and critically successful groups of their era with cheeky, smart and danceable tracks. They’ve sold 50 million records, won three Brit Awards and garnered six Grammy nominees.
Always one step ahead of their contemporaries, the Pet Shop Boys navigated the constantly shifting landscape of modern dance-pop, moving easily from disco to modern techno and house with their own distinctive image staying intact.
They have 42 Top 30 hits to their credit, and 22 Top 10 hits in the UK Singles chart, including timeless tracks like “West End Girls”, “It’s a Sin”, “Always on My Mind”, “Suburbia”, “Can You Forgive Her”, “Go West” and “Love Comes Quickly”.
The duo released “Electric” last year, their 12th studio album. Produced by Grammy-winning electronic musician Stuart Price, it contains hit tracks such as “Axis”, “Vocal” and “Love is a Bourgeois Construct”.
Neil Tennant called us up to chatted about the band’s second show in Thailand.

It’s been 30 years and 12 albums. What keeps you inspired?
What keeps us inspired is pretty much the creativity, the joy of making songs and making records and putting together shows.
When you come to our show in Bangkok you’ll see that it’s kind of music-meets-theatre, multimedia production with film, lights, strobes, lasers – lots of lasers! It’s called the Electric Tour, so it’s going to have a huge electrical field.
It’s great fun putting all this together for the audience to enjoy. That’s what keeps us going.

After the success of “The Most Incredible Thing”, would you consider to do more work in theatre?
The whole thing took about two and a half years to put together. What we wanted to do was take the traditional form of three-act ballet and do it with electronic and orchestra music. It was such a big project and it was very exciting.
We did a musical called “Closer to Heaven” that was not very successful, but we would love to do another one. Overall in our career, we’ve done a mixture of music, theatre and art. But our own tour is a theatre, really.

How do you like the electronic-music scene these days?
It has such a variety now. I’m not so keen on EDM [electronic dance music] – a lot of it is bit moronic for me. But I like a lot of the instrumental electronic music. It’s great to see Kraftwerk back touring.
Most pop music has foundation in electronic music, but I think the problem is actually not the electronic sound – it’s the songwriting that’s become formulaic. How many songs do you hear today that are not about getting “on the floor” and that kind of stuff?

How’s the Electric Tour going?
It’s been on for a little over two months now. We went to Chile in May. We’ve been to Europe and now we’ve just been to Singapore, the Philippines, Japan and we’ve just arrived in South Korea. Then we’ll go to Indonesia, China and, at the end of the tour, we’ll go to Bangkok.

What can you tell us about the current production?
We always work with a theatre designer, Es Devlin. She works in opera and theatre, but she also works with Kanye West often. We have ideas and she has ideas and we put them all together.
There are four different sections that have different themes and visual styles. The album is called “Electric”, so we wanted it to be very dazzling, bright and electronic. We also have a great lighting designer – he’s great laser guy. There will be contrasts to that as well – we also have things that are primitive.

Will we get the full production in Bangkok?
You certainly will!

What about the costumes?
The costumes tie in with the theme of each part of the show. For instance, the first outfits we wear make us almost look like porcupine – it’s made out of 2,000 black plastic straws. Chris will also wear a disco mirror-ball hat and all the lights will bounce off his head!

It’s been more than 10 years since you were here. How does it feel to be coming back?
Oh, we’re very excited! Bangkok is such a fascinating place. The food, of course, is also fascinating. Also, this time we’re bringing such a different show than we did last time, and it will be a complete contrast.
The last we had guitarists and a band. This time it will be a futuristic kind of show. Buy the new album “Electric”, because we’ll do some songs from that album. A lot of people like to know the songs before they hear them [laughs].

Go West, then north

The Pet Shop Boys perform at the Sonic Bang music festival a week from tomorrow (August 24), sprawling indoors throughout the Impact-Challenger complex in Muang Thong Thani.
Passes cost Bt4,000 and Bt5,000 at www.ThaiTicketMajor.com and (02) 262 3456.