A Film Canon

 

 

The Pet Shop Boys fulfil the Beatles' prophetic "A Day In The Life", which envisages a supreme avant-garde voice, distinguished by its quintessentially English combination of the quotidian and the visionary, and capable of generating a sublime conversation between singer and listener. This is partly due to an idiosyncratic  - and penetrating - take on 1980s sexual politics, in which the oppositional stance of Boy George or Soft Cell, and its requisite musical 'outing', is replaced by a more nuanced vision of partial integration, such that homosexuality takes on the quality of an open secret - present everywhere, visible nowhere. This imbues even the most apparently innocent lyrics with a haunting resonance, opening them up to a demographic beyond their sexual orientation, and rendering any explicit reference to that orientation redundant. This is all particularly clear on Please, which tells a rough narrative of urban immigration, dislocation and, eventually, initiation, culminating with Tennant's tentative question: "Why Don't We Live Together?" In the process, it conjures up an evocative vision of 1980s London, most iconically in "West End Girls", as well as partaking of the decade's conflation of nightlife with late adolescence - a final, melancholy respite before the banalities of adulthood, working life and money kick in