Pet Shop Boys: Pandemonium Tour (MEN, Manchester)

For only my 5^th arena concert in my 25 years (after Kylie, Will & Gareth, and Girls Aloud twice) we braved the snow, ice and slush between Leeds and Manchester to see the Pet Shop Boys at the MEN last Sunday.

After a run of gigs/concerts at smaller venues (Frankmusik, Alphabeat, Alesha Dixon, VV Brown) it was easy to forget how huge an MEN concert is. The Pet Shop Boys did an excellent job of filling the place with a great number of tracks from their current album, Yes, and their back catalogue.

I only own Pop Art, their greatest hits, so I’m not an expert on the duo, but Andrew has Yes and their Christmas EP so I knew quite a few of their most recent tracks. I find with a lot of PSB songs that I can only recognise them from the chorus as the intros I find difficult to differentiate. That’s not say I think all their songs sound the same, just that I’d be rubbish at the Intros round on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

There were many songs I knew – Heart, Se A Vida E, Always on My Mind, Go West, Suburbia, etc – and many I didn’t which must have been older album tracks and B-sides. I wasn’t that keen on the Madness cover, My Guy, as I don’t know the song at all, but the surprise extra Xmas encore was great – It Doesn’t Often Snow at Christmas – an ironic choice of title given the state of the country at the moment.  

1. Heart
2. Did You See Me Coming?
3. Can you forgive her?/Pandemonium
4. Love etc.
5. Building A Wall
6. Go West
7. Two Divided By Zero
8. Why Don't We Live Together?
9. New York City Boy
10. Always On My Mind
11. Closer to Heaven/Left to My Own Devices
12. Do I Have To?
13. Kings Cross
14. The Way It Used To Be
15. Jealousy
16. Suburbia
17. What Have I Done To Deserve This?
18. All Over The World
19. Se A Vida É
20. Viva La Vida / Domino Dancing
21. It's A Sin

22. Being Boring
23. My Girl (Madness cover)
24. West End Girls

25. It Doesn't Often Snow At Christmas

Neil Tennant was in fine form, his not-quite-singing voice managing to fill the arena, and Chris Lowe was enigmatically silent in charge of the music. Come to think of it, this is one of the few shows I’ve seen this year without a live band on stage. 4 dancers provided most of the spectacle and an intriguing set made up of white cardboard boxes. Initially the boxes were stacked to form two large walls, and then these were eventually pulled down and men in white coats rebuilt the sets during breaks in the songs, and then whatever was built was utilised by the dancers as podiums or to reflect the songs. The dancers’ costumes occasionally reflected the box motif when they came out wearing skin tight spandex-looking outfits with boxes bulging inside them at the calf and arm, topped off with a box on the head. The white boxes of the set also aided in the effects created through the lighting of the stage, with films projected on to them.

For the Xmas encore, the dancers came on dressed as Xmas trees and ‘snow’ was released into the crowd. This last song left me feeling very festive and very happy with the whole show.