Pet Shop Boys – SMASH review: ‘A new collection by the UK’s most consistently brilliant pop group ever’

Neil Tennant often talks about the Pet Shop Boys’ imperial phase as being from 1987’s ‘It’s a Sin’ until the following year’s ‘Heart’. I think he’s selling the band short.

Yes, everything they released in that period was huge in the UK and Europe, and ‘It’s a Sin’ gave them their first US top ten hit since ‘West End Girls’ saw them at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. And yes, their Dusty duet ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’ and their thundering redo of Elvis Presley’s ‘Always on My Mind’ rank as absolute classics.

Throw the wistful ‘Rent’ and the slinky ‘Heart’ into the mix and you’ve got a run of awesome singles across nine months that few other pop groups manage in a lifetime.

Tennant views the Latin-tinged ‘Domino Dancing’ as the end of his and Chris Lowe’s imperial period, simply because it wasn’t the huge hit they’d been expecting (even if it peaked at number seven over here) and marked the last time they troubled the US top twenty.

It’s a fantastic song, though, and as a new collection of their music attests in gloriously remastered form, they’ve been the most consistently brilliant pop act this country has ever produced.

The 55 tracks on SMASH – The Singles 1985-2020 prove my point and then some. There’s not a duff song to be heard, whether it’s bigger hits like ‘Go West’, ‘Absolutely Fabulous’ and ‘I’m With Stupid’ or lesser-known ones like ‘Home and Dry’, ‘Winner’ and ‘Love Is a Bourgeois Construct’. Hopefully, the set will also alert casual fans to the floaty wondrousness of ‘Leaving’ and the summery pop of ‘Did You See Me Coming’.

All formats and budgets are catered for. There are 3-CD and 6-LP sets, a 3-CD/2-Blu-ray edition, plus white vinyl and triple-cassette boxsets available exclusively from the Pet Shop Boys’ online store here.

Included is a glossy booklet in which Neil and Chris wax anecdotally about each track. ‘West End Girls’, Neil notes, was “about rough boys getting a bit of posh”. ‘I’m With Stupid’ was written about Bush and Blair. And as Chris says of the sublime ‘Being Boring’, which only just squeaked into the top twenty, “it just shows that chart positions aren’t the be-all and end-all”.

There have been other PSB collections before but none as extensive as this one. There are omissions, such as ‘How Can You Expect to be Taken Seriously?’, ‘Integral’, and ‘Burning the Heather’. But they’re included on the Blu-ray discs, along with a few other rarities, and it’s interesting to see their evolution as visual artists as well as master songwriters.

Way back in the early days, these pop kids sang about wanting to make lots of money. I’m sure they have made tonnes of it but en route they’ve also made some of the best pop songs ever.

SMASH – The Singles 1985-2020 is out now.