Pet Shop Boys at Starlite: In the Eucharist of Pop

Music can also be a bad habit, like nail-biting. You have to quit it while you can. Otherwise, suddenly, it's 2025 and ... you find yourself at a Pet Shop Boys concert, on top of that, at Starlite. The anticipation is palpable and nerves start to blossom. The first lights flicker. Two street lamps draw thin luminous threads and then sketch two large circles revealing Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The Pet Shop Boys are here. Thankfully. The habit, if it ever was bad, now seems divine.

Wrapped in futuristic suits, wearing striking masks that are also antlers, they don't hesitate for a moment and open the magic box where the best essences of pop from the last four decades are kept. 'Suburbia' begins to be sensed and an instant feeling of timelessness makes its way through. A state that would extend to the rest of the concert. Why? Please, continue reading if you feel like it.

Neil Tennant still has one of the most incomparable voices in pop. Neither man nor woman, while being lofty and aloof, as if looking slightly over one's shoulders. An illusion. Because the closeness with the audience, including monologues to explain the origin of some songs, is a constant. Pet Shop Boys' hits, such as 'West End Girls', 'Can you forgive her?' or 'It's a Sin', maintain the label of irresistible.

Okay. Tennant and Lowe, soul mates, have always been beings in whom the passage of time seemed relative. Artists who have had refined image strategies and graphic designers who imposed their will with an iron fist. But it doesn't matter that they now have little hair and wrinkles. There's Photoshop for promotional photos. For live performances, concerts like this Wednesday's, which become irrefutable proof.

Pet Shop Boys never bore with inconsequential themes or get tangled up in romantic troubles. Nor do they boast of their excellent artistic taste. They do their thing and that's it. As they did again in Marbella, at a stop on their 'Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits' tour. It is very likely that it has already been seen in all the major capitals of the world. It is equally improbable that it had a setting like the one Starlite offers. The granite mountains in the cliché of atlas and, at the same time, acting as a sound box for a sound that was as clean as a water spring.

In the Nagüelles quarry, there was less and less audience not standing. A special mention deserves the visuals. They have always been at the same level as the sound aspect. The videos, the stage work, and the show are always fundamental elements for Pet Shop Boys. In Marbella, they made it clear they are more Andy Warhol than Velvet Underground ever was.

Never Boring

Therefore, the show they offer never seems outdated. Not even in 2025. Noteworthy is the version of 'What have I done to deserve this', which Neil Tennant performs hand in hand with Clare Uchima.

A Pet Shop Boys concert contains enough vices for seven lifetimes, it's a collection of songs that remind you of moments of euphoria, of sex in an urban setting, a day in the jacuzzi when you should have been at the dentist, two extra sugars in your coffee. But in the pop eucharist, at least it is assumed, sins are forgiven.

In their wide mosaic of 'hits', 'Go West' is missed. The closing comes with the song titled 'Being Boring'. But that's something the Pet Shop Boys never are. Never boring.