PSB Music Videos - Capsule Descriptions
Here I provide very brief subjective descriptions of each of the Pet Shop Boys' promo music videos. Because I deal with the songs themselves in their primary entries on this website, I don't go into detail concerning the songs' or the videos' "meanings." I simply want to provide basic information and some of my own opinions.
Note: The
"Fans' ratings" reflect the outcome of online polls that I've conducted in which I've asked my site visitors to rate each
of the "primary videos" on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 indicating "one of the worst PSB videos"
and 5 indicating "one of their best." I then correlated
the resulting average ratings to a five-star system, with the videos with average
ratings above 4.250 (among them the highest-rated video of all, "Being Boring")
given a five-star rating ★★★★★ and those with average ratings below 2.000 (the only two being "Home and Dry" and "Winner") given a no-star ("bomb") rating 
,
with gradations every 0.250 points. Half-star ratings (½) are included, so that the
full range of star ratings is no stars (bomb), half-star (the only one in that category being "Did You See Me Coming?"), one star, one-and-a-half stars,
two stars, and so on, up to five stars. I also offer my own personal ratings, although mine do not employ half-stars. Also, my own ratings correlate very closely with the number of stars (that is, my rating of 1 equals 1 star, my rating of 2 equals 2 stars, and so on), with the only deviation being my assigning of a theoretical zero rating (and thus a "bomb") to my single least-favorite PSB video, "Home and Dry." But since the averages for my site visitors' ratings, being averages, cannot possibly hit the extremes of 1 and 5, an average rating of, say, ★½ actually indicates a higher numerical figure than my own personal rating of ★★. In other words, it doesn't make much sense to compare the fan average rating for any one video to my own rating for that same video. It makes much more sense to compare average ratings for different videos to each other, and my own personal ratings for videos to each other as well.
| Opportunities (Version 1) In their first video—though you wouldn't know it from watching Videography—Neil appears vaguely Hasidic (what's up with that?) while standing chest-deep in the service pit of an auto garage, periodically morphing into what appears to be a disintegrating mummy. He eventually crumbles into dust, while Chris merely hovers about looking rather sexily detached from it all. A curious beginning. |
| West
End Girls The classic PSB "look and feel" is established with Neil and Chris walking the streets of London, Neil singing and Chris looking sullen from behind while occasionally "fading" away. Literal in some ways, enigmatic in others, this video proved fundamental in turning the Boys into stars. In fact, it has supplied its share of iconic imagery and has been parodied on more than one occasion. |
| Love
Comes Quickly A surprisingly effective rush job (generated in the wake of the success of "West End Girls") featuring close face or head-and-shoulders shots of various people interspersed with Neil (and occasionally Chris), while Chris rolls around on a superimposed grid of some sort. Quite arty, actually. |
| Opportunities (Version 2) Chris, dressed like a construction worker (complete with hardhat—shades of the Village People!), and Neil, at times sporting an "Uncle Sam hat," exchange items and revel in impressive-for-the-time camera trickery. It hasn't aged well, however. In retrospect, it's surprisingly cheap-looking, especially considering the "name director" and the expense involved. |
| Suburbia The Boys walk about and pose in a rather humdrum, rundown suburban Los Angeles landscape, alternating between looking fashionably out-of-place and miserably domestic together (with a German shepherd, perhaps playing upon the name of their duo?) in a metaphorical living room. This is where the rumors may have begun. |
| Paninaro A "homemade" affair filmed by Chris and Neil themselves using a hand-held camera on the streets of Milan. Rather nondescript but nonetheless oddly fascinating. |
| It's
a Sin What a difference a few hits make—namely, a much bigger budget. Neil is on trial for his life before a medieval inquisition, with Chris serving as his jailer. The personified Seven Deadly Sins make cameo appearances. The implication at the very end is that Neil has been burned at the stake, but that's open to interpretation. |
| What
Have I Done to Deserve This? One of the archetypal documents of their "imperial phase." Our Boys are dressed in tuxes amidst the goings-on backstage just before the curtain goes up, complete with big-band musicians and scads of Vegas-style showgirls. Chris nearly holds his own with Neil and Dusty Springfield (who pops up at regular intervals for her various solos) as he mimes a couple notes on his trombone (which he can actually play) and does a quick dancing leap. Blink and you may miss it. |
| Rent Neil serves as chauffeur for a well-off but unhappy "kept woman" who is actually in love with "poor man" Chris, whom she meets and kisses at the train station. Somewhat cinematic, as befitting a director of Jarman's stature, but oddly unaffecting. |
| Always
on My Mind The Boys pick up and engage in a cryptic exchange with psychotic hitchhiker Joss Ackland amidst various brief scenes, delivered in the style of a movie trailer, from their film It Couldn't Happen Here. All music videos are, in effect, "commercials," but this one seems even more like a commercial than most. |
| Heart Chauffeured by Chris, aristocratic groom Neil brings his new bride to his Eastern European castle, only to have her stolen away by a Dracula-like vampire portrayed by Ian McKellen. This thing is fraught with psychosexual overtones. |
| Domino
Dancing Even more psychosexuality in one of the Boys' most infamous videos—often a target of discussion and criticism. A tropical setting finds Chris and Neil looking on as two often-shirtless young men (clearly themselves posited as sex-objects) vie for the attentions of a lovely but callous young woman. The shirtless lads wind up wrestling each other in the surf. More rumors ensued. An extended version of this video simply draws the drama out a little more. |
| Left
to My Own Devices The Boys stand upon and look down through clear plexiglass flooring as images of performing gymnasts are superimposed above them. After the preceding extravaganzas, this has all the looks of intentional scaling-back. U.S. MTV refused to air it, reportedly because they considered it "too dark." (It makes you wonder whether better lighting might have extended PSB's run as mainstream hitmakers in the States.) |
| It's
Alright Chris and Neil share the screen with lots of babies who are obviously meant to represent the future that's presumably going to be "alright." The highlight is the part where a baby briefly "dances" to the beat. |
| So
Hard A drama of jealousy unfolds among a group of young men and women as the Boys disjointedly look on, flanked by two large black men (one of them their friend and "handler" Dainton Connell) who, in a perhaps mild parody of contemporaneous Public Enemy videos, appear to serve as their bodyguards. Again there's an extended version that provides more of the same. |
| Being
Boring One of their most acclaimed videos, in which Chris and Neil appear only fleetingly amidst beautiful young people (often scantily clothed, when clothed at all) cavorting about during a fabulous weekend at a Long Island mansion—a setting apparently chosen on account of its connection to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the husband of Zelda Fitzgerald, who provided the quotation that inspired the song in the first place. Got all that? Incidentally, there are two versions: one uncensored and the other—the so-called "U.S. version" apparently created for MTV, which wasn't showing it anyway since the song wasn't a U.S. hit—that censors out flashes of male rear nudity near the beginning, as if most Americans would've given a damn. (But of course all it takes is a sufficiently vocal minority.) This censored version would surface on the Smash Blu-ray disc. |
| How
Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously? Against a plain white background and video projections, and assisted by a couple of models and a pair of break/lock dancers, the Boys parody preachy, pretentious rock stars. |
| Where
the Streets Have No Name (I Can't Take My Eyes Off You) In an obvious sequel or continuation of the preceding video, that plain white backdrop reappears as the setting for more of the Boys' antics, as this time they have fun with assorted forms of "mythic American" imagery—the West, driving about in a convertible, Las Vegas showgirls, and the like—clearly inspired by (and perhaps effectively commenting on) U2's own The Joshua Tree-era dalliance with mythic Americana. |
| Jealousy Another drama of jealousy, this time erupting into violence on two fronts (heterosexual and homosexual) in a rather posh nightclub where Neil and Chris are performing. Notice the prominent use of green—the color of envy. |
| DJ
Culture An amalgam of surreal imagery underscores the song's critique of superficiality in both pop and political culture, with Neil portraying (among others) Oscar Wilde, a soccer referee, and a fat-farm doctor, and Chris portraying (among others) the judge at Wilde's trial, a soccer fan, and a fat-farm attendant. In this writer's opinion, this is the PSB music video that most greatly enhances the song it promotes—which was already pretty terrific to begin with. |
| Was
It Worth It? The Boys perform in a joyous, raucous nightclub populated by all manner of youthful humanity, many in bizarre costumes, and prominently featuring drag queens. For part of the video, in keeping with the dress code, Chris wears his oddest hat ever—which is saying a lot considering the competition, including the next video. |
| Can
You Forgive Her? One of the strangest PSB videos, in which Chris and Neil, in orange jumpsuits and pointy hats, appear alternately in real and computer-generated landscapes that they share with an emu, a large blue egg, flying orange balls, and assorted other oddities—all of which seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with the song itself. And that, my friends, is the whole point. |
| Go
West In another computer-generated environment, the Boys (including a chorus of Chrises) expand the multiple levels of meaning in this song by commenting satirically on the collapse of communism in Russia, suggesting that the former Soviets are now "going West." This is the third PSB video to offer an extended version, in this case launching into a kaleidoscopic visual feast set to the Brothers in Rhythm "Ming's Gone West Second Movement." |
| I
Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing So far each Very video is more computer-generated than the one before it. This one features Neil and Chris as a moptopped digital-age Lennon and McCartney, becoming characters in a video game and cavorting amidst a frenzy of techno-psychedelia, complete with a pair of banged, catsuited go-go dancers. In short, a coalescence of 1960s style and sensibilities with 1990s technology. One of the greatest PSB videos, at least in this writer's opinion. |
| Liberation The ultimate totally computer-generated video, in which the Boys (aside from a few quick headshots of Neil singing) don't appear at all except as digitized facsimiles of themselves, again with pointy hats but this time with wings, flying through a cyberscape of constant, dizzying motion—a visual expression of the song's title. |
| Yesterday,
When I Was Mad The computer stuff is toned down a few notches, but it's still there. Chris's only appearance is as disembodied heads, while Neil plays dual roles as a bitchy commentator on the Boys' live performances and as himself, now straightjacketed and confined to a hellish mental hospital. There's even, in the form of those twin girls, an allusion to the classic 1980 psychological horror film The Shining, the central character of which indeed goes mad. (Note: I had originally rated it just three stars, but my opinion has improved since then; I now rate it a four-star video.) |
| Absolutely
Fabulous Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley, in their Ab Fab roles of Eddy and Patsy, guest star in a thoroughly (and appropriately) silly homage to their comedy hit, which alternates between footage from the show and new sequences with the Boys dressed in dazzling white baker-dervish costumes. I love the ad-libbed bit where Chris reacts with amused, unguarded shock when "Eddy" lifts his fez. |
| Paninaro
'95 Light-years beyond the "homemade" original, this video focuses primarily on Chris, who shares the limelight with sculpted male dancers (possibly the same ones who joined them on the DiscoVery tour) and background-singing Neil, who seems to be undergoing significant stress as he constantly morphs back and forth between his usual appearance and that of some kind of spikey creature. I think most would agree that this is the most homoerotic PSB video, "Domino Dancing" notwithstanding. (At least the DD video had a heterosexual veneer. This one doesn't even have that.) |
| Before Neil and a trio of background vocalists sing while commingling with computer-manipulated graphic imagery. Chris is just "there" now and then. Attractive enough but rather dull. |
| Se
A Vida É (That's the Way Life Is) In a video worthy of the Beach Boys, Chris and Neil enjoy themselves with a variety of young people at a Florida waterpark. In what may not be a first but certainly a rarity in imagery created by Bruce Weber, less-than-svelte people actually make fleeting appearances. |
| Single-Bilingual A comic turn set an airport, with Neil portraying a hapless, mildly geeky Euro-businessman and Chris a security guard amidst a chorus of drummers. There's an especially nice moment when Neil tries in vain to pick up a young woman in the hotel bar. |
| A
Red Letter Day Heavy-handed but effective symbolism, with the Boys just two of seemingly thousands of everyday people standing in endless lines, waiting for something that is obviously long overdue in coming. |
| Somewhere The excerpted performance of the West Side Story classic from the Boys' Somewhere shows at the Savoy Theatre, as seen in the Somewhere VHS/DVD, intercut with preparatory and backstage footage. |
| I
Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Any More Neil and Chris are gradually transformed into "Nightlife beings" with spikey orange hair, wide black eyebrows, and very unusual costumes partly inspired by Japanese samurai. This look will reappear (in slightly modified form) in the next two videos as well. Much of the imagery in this particular video owes a debt to the 1971 George Lucas film THX 1138 (with a brief touch of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey as well). A slightly altered version of the video was created for the sake of those outlets that, in an arguably over-sensitive impulse, refused to show the hypodermic needle. |
| New
York City Boy A teenager is encouraged by the singing Neil to explore the streets of Manhattan, highlighted by a visit to a time-warp-resurrected Studio 54 complete with reasonable facsimiles of Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, John Travolta (as his Saturday Night Fever alter ego, Tony Manero), and various other period/scene habitués. My personal favorite is the checker-jacketed clone of Roy Lichtenstein, who would sometimes turn himself into his own work of pop art. Once again two versions were made—one "censored" and the other "uncensored"—though the variance is so minor that you risk driving yourself mad simply trying to differentiate one version from the other. |
| You
Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk The Boys—repeatedly replicated via digital trickery—appear amidst a throng of unconscious bodies that suddenly spring to life and begin dancing mid-song, only to collapse again. Most unusually, Chris lip-synchs Neil's singing during one short scene. Just as with the other Nightlife-era videos, there are two versions that are barely distinguishable. In this case, the edit apparently removes an extremely brief flash of partial nudity that, despite my repeated attempts to "catch" it, has always escaped me. |
| Home
and Dry Surely the most self-consciously "arty" PSB video, focusing on mice that inhabit London's subway tunnels. Just to remind you that it is indeed a Pet Shop Boys video, Chris and Neil make a couple of brief cameo appearances, miming the song playing in the background. You either love it or hate it—and it seems that a lot more fans have the latter feelings than the former. It's noteworthy, however, that this is the first music promo video to show Neil playing guitar. |
| I
Get Along Party preparations amongst the young and almost creepily beautiful creatures who tend to inhabit Bruce Weber videos. Again, the Boys appear only briefly. It all seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the lyrics. The extended version of this video includes a portion of the song "E-mail" tacked onto the end. |
| London The best of the Release-era videos is comparatively generous in showing lots of Neil and Chris, presenting them as humble street-musicians playing for spare change on the streets and in the subways of London. Neil again plays guitar; Chris holds a small portable keyboard in his lap. They actually earned a few dollars from passers-by while filming the video. Meanwhile, bit-players portray the Russian emigrees described in the lyrics. |
| Miracles Brief headshots of Neil singing (and occasionally Chris just "being") mixed in amidst elaborate hyper-slo-mo imagery involving models and lots of water. It's obviously meant to convey an overall sense of beauty and wonder—appropriately enough given the song's lyrics and mood. But, despite a few lovely moments, it's not an especially memorable video. |
| Flamboyant One of the Boys' funnier vids. They appear in several faux ads—parodying the phenomenon known as "Japandering," in which celebrities who wouldn't be caught dead in a TV commercial in their native land gladly hawk all manner of goods on "foreign" (especially Asian) television—interspersed with excerpts from an actual Japanese game show in which contestants perform elaborate visual stunts, focusing on one team's preparations for their own moment in the sun. |
| I'm
with Stupid Little Britain comedians Matt Lucas and David Walliams—the latter a professed major PSB fan—star in low-budget spoofs of the "Can You Forgive Her?" and "Go West" videos, with Neil and Chris themselves providing a captive audience. (It makes you wonder whether they actually consider themselves captives of their fame.) Many fans would have preferred something more directly related to what this song was really about. Or would that just have made it too obvious? |
| Minimal A marvelously stylish affair in which Neil and Chris mime a performance of the song, playing a much larger role than they did in the preceding vid. It's in color, but you'd hardly know it considering the overwheming black and white of the costumes and sets; only the fleshtones give it away. In keeping with the gist of the song, it's both minimalistic and very arty. |
| Numb An extremely (and appropriately) somber black-and-white sequence of frozen imagery largely borrowed from classic Soviet films of the 1920s and '30s (but not Battleship Potemkin, as some believe). The Boys don't even appear until the last twenty seconds or so. |
| Integral In a world obsessed with security and surveillance, all of our actions, our images, even our very identities can be captured onto little cards that may come to dominate our lives. Highly innovative, even by PSB standards, this video includes (1) embedded coding that provides the technologically savvy with interactive links to thematically associated websites and (2) quick digitized images of the faces of dozens of fans who showed up as "extras." It comes in two versions: a |
| Love etc. In the Boys' first cartoon/animated video (if you don't count the computer animation of "Liberation"), we find them literally bouncing around in a videogame-like world. It's certainly appropriate for such a bouncy track. Life is the game and love is the prize—but only if you can maneuver around all the distractions. There's so much going on that it demands repeat viewings just to take it all in. |
| Did You See Me Coming? Neil and Chris, often in silhouette, mime the song against an ever-changing backdrop of black-and-white geometric Pop Art projections. Though it hails from a similar aesthetic, it's not as much a "'Minimal' video revisited" as that brief description and a still shot suggests. But I wonder why they didn't go the full Pop Art route and use lots of color, which would have minimized the "Minimal" resemblance. I do, however, like the way they take advantage of the lyric's repeated "It was just the two of us" to focus entirely on just the two of them. |
| All Over the World Closely akin to a good old-fashioned live "performance video," a rarity for PSB. (Any video at all was a surprise considering they didn't bother to produce one for the preceding German-only "Beautiful People" single.) Employing live footage from one of their Pandemonium Tour concerts (though the audio is the studio recording), it intersperses segments of them performing the song with scattered bits from other numbers. Hardly groundbreaking, but it does manage to convey pretty effectively just how much fun a PSB show can be. |
| Together Shot at five separate locations in and near Tallinn, Estonia. Chris and Neil make short appearances near the start and end, with the storyline focusing on a group of male street dancers and female classical dancers. At first they appear in virtual competition with each other in a "dance-off," but then they begin to work together (appropriately enough) to their personal, social, and artistic benefit. At the end, however, it seems the whole thing may have been only in the imagination of one of the young men, an everyday laborer. Ah, but there's an enigmatic touch: a lipstick-kiss now on his cheek. With its rather large scope compared to the previous several PSB music videos, this is a refreshing throwback to the larger-scaled vids of the Boys' "imperial phase." |
| Invisible A somber and vaguely disturbing piece by artist Brian Bress, adapted from his pre-extant video art-piece Fancy Dress Ball (Brian), which had caught the Boys' eyes at a gallery in Los Angeles. It depicts a series of abstract, slowly moving human figures camoflauged against equally abstract backdrops, rendering them difficult to see clearly. So while they're not as "invisible" as the song suggests, they're highly suggestive of looming invisibility. Neither Chris nor Neil put in an appearance—no, that's not them in the abstract costumes, but rather the artist, Mr. Bress—which makes our musical heroes the truly invisible figures in this video. |
| Winner The video's storyline focuses on a female roller-derby team, and specifically on one member, a young transgender person who dresses in roller-derby drag. The Boys, who (again) don't appear at all, expand the song's "victory canvas" to include not only the winning roller-derby team but also the personal victory of that one character's gender nonconformity and the acceptance exemplified by their teammates. A curious but also quite daring approach. |
| Leaving Footage from a live performance during the Elysium album launch event in Berlin, rendered in black-and-white and "mashed" with shots from the city's mass transit system (probably intended to suggest a means of "leaving"). Imagine the entire thing in color instead of black-and-white, and then answer this question: which seems "classier"? Yes, that's why they removed the color, and that's why this is such a nice video. Not exceptional, but nice. Well, that plus the fact that the Boys themselves are featured extensively in it. |
| Axis A visually stunning cornucopia of "techno-pagan" imagery, blending modern technology with ancient, mythical sexuality, perhaps suggesting dance as the environment (or the axis?) where the two meet. It's got lasers, tunnel effects, dancers (sometimes wearing buffalo heads, making them, as astutely noted by one commentator, minotaurs), and two silhouetted figures walking toward the camera. Clearly meant to represent Chris and Neil themselves (if it isn't actually them), they're dressed in appropriately science-fictionish garb. For all we know, this all may not really "mean" anything, but it sure as heck gets the juices flowing. And in case you haven't noticed, it starts and ends with an axis made of light. |
| Vocal Created, as described on the official PSB website, from "authentic amateur film footage shot at various raves in the late 80s, along with some footage from the Haçienda in Manchester," this video certainly befits the song's celebration of dance music. Understandably, there's no sign of the Boys, and the whole thing practically cries out "low budget." But, hey, times have changed, so we might as well get used to it. |
| Thursday Having forgone a video for the immediately preceding single, "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct," the Boys come back with a clip filmed in Shanghai during the Asian leg of their Electric Tour. It's dominated by concert crowd shots and recurring images of Neil—as well as a disco-ball-headed Chris, guest vocalist Example, and the tour's two dancers—appearing on Jumbotron screens overlooking the city's streets. I'm just not terribly fond of the exaggerated shoulder pads of Neil's suit: they evoke memories of Joan Collins in Dynasty. |
| Twenty-something It's not the first time that a PSB video took its song in an unexpected direction, even to the point of shifting its interpretation more than a few degrees. (See "Go West" for a notable example.) Likely inspired by the song's Latin stylistic origins, the video for the second single from Super—but the first to receive the "full video treatment"—focuses not on the yuppie-esque figures that seem to inhabit the lyrics but instead on a down-and-out Latino family coping with the harsh socio-economic realities of their Southern California urban environment. This video has two official versions, the second (with additional footage) set to the Los Evo Jedis mix. |
| On Social Media With the exception of this, the official lyric videos released for the Boys' 2019 EP Agenda were unimaginative and disappointing, just big red letters printed against stock footage, so they're hardly worth noting. But "On Social Media" stood out from the rest—the one into which real thought, effort, and, yes, probably expense was invested. It very cleverly presented the song's lyrics as Twitter-like texts on a smartphone, complete with texting shorthand, hashtags, emojis, and other familiar accoutrements of the sort of social media the song itself takes to task. It's so good, in fact, that I'm not relegating it to the "peripheral" section below. On the contrary, in my estimation it qualifies as a "full-fledged" music video that can appear proudly among their classics! |
| Dreamland Following in the wake of "On Social Media" came another extremely clever lyric video, set in a Berlin subway station. (The metro map of Berlin appears in the video, with the word "Berlin" replaced by "Dreamland.") As we go on a horizontal jaunt through the station, the song's lyrics flow past in graffiti, on wall posters, on the sides of train cars, on electronic announcement boards, and in other suitable ways, often accompanied by photos of Neil, Chris, and guest vocalist Olly Alexander of Years & Years. If this indeed is the future of PSB music videos, I suppose there are worse alternatives—such as all the others from Agenda except "On Social Media." |
| Monkey Business The Boys' first "traditional" (that is, non-lyric) music video since 2016, and the first in which they appear in something other than a still shot since 2013. Set in an all-inclusive nightclub (men, women, gay, straight, bisexual, drag queens, etc.)—just the sort of place the song's hedonistic, hard-partying narrator might readily be found—the video depicts Neil and Chris among the clientele (or are they the proprietors?). A number of them, Neil included, lip-sync the lyrics, while Chris gets a chance to do more dancing than we've ever seen him do before in a vid. It looks like fun, but the overt sleaziness of some of the characters adds a darkly comic edge, well befitting the lyrics. Oh—and rumors that it would include a chimpanzee proved false. (If you want a chimp—on roller skates, no less!—watch "Being Boring.") |
| I Don't Wanna Back to the lyric videos. But, like the one for "On Social Media," it's somewhat more creative and imaginative than many if not most of its genre. This time it takes the form of a manga-inspired comic book or graphic novel, each panel depicting the plight of the song's protagonist, a young man who—you guessed it!—doesn't wanna go out. An uncommonly literal illustration of the lyrics, there's really no more to it than that: simple, straightforward, and a genuine pleasure to watch at least a couple of times. (A most interesting sidenote: one of my site visitors observed that the dance club depicted near the end of this cartoon video appears to be the same one as in the immediately preceding live-action video for "Monkey Business." Compare, for instance, their design of the floor. Coincidence?) |
Living in the Past Stark, washed-out, high-contrast black-and-white news footage of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and the unveiling of a bust of Stalin in Volgograd on February 2, 2023 provide a visual backdrop to an equally stark narrative—with Neil singing in Putin's "own voice," as it were—about his presumably testosterone-driven ambitions both for himself and his nation. And that spells trouble. The video makes it perfectly clear, as if the song itself weren't enough. |
Loneliness Mostly young people, both heterosexual and homosexual, often gazing longingly at each other, sometimes actually "connecting," deal in various ways with loneliness in accordance with the song's lyrics. Neil and Chris make brief appearances in what seem to be funhouse mirrors (though probably actually just kaleidoscopic camera work) within a carnival setting. On account of some unabashedly sexual content and a bit of "non-graphic" nudity, this video is age-restricted in YouTube. |
Dancing Star Historical footage of Rudolf Nureyev (with more modern "effects" added), Amalfi, and 1960s London is interspersed with new shots of the Boys standing stock-still. Neil sings while Chris, a step or two behind him off to one side, simply stands there. Considering that, as some have suggested, the arrangement of this song harkens back to the PSB 'eighties style, could it be that this visual presentation of themselves is similarly a nod to Chris's early image of "doing nothing"? |
"Peripheral" PSB Music Videos A few additional items don't belong to the "main corpus" of PSB music videos, but they're still worth noting. |
| Always
on My Mind The Boys first recorded "Always on My Mind" for the 1987 U.K. television special Love Me Tender, which commemorated the tenth anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. Rather than perform live, they mimed it in specially created footage very much in the style of a music video. It's accented by hot lighting, deep shadows, studio fog, and a railroad motif that may stem from the song's highly propulsive arrangement. Chris and Neil appear in what amounts to leather drag, probably inspired by popular images of "tough" early Elvis in the 1950s—though I wouldn't rule out other inspirations as well. Personally, I find this visually arresting "quasi-video" preferable in many ways to the "official" vid described above. |
| Casting
a Shadow Created to accompany the instrumental track that the Boys created for play during the 1999 total solar eclipse. This video appears as a bonus on an enhanced CD single of "New York City Boy." It simply offers actual filmed footage of the eclipse itself. |
| For
Your Own Good The Pet Shop Boys' 1999 tour opened with this song, accompanied by a stage projection showing highly processed images of their "Nightlife heads" rotating back and forth as assorted "electric" and lighting effects flashed around them. This sequence later appeared as a "bonus video" on the 2001 Montage DVD. |
| She's Madonna The Boys don't appear at all in this video—which many fans would say is a good thing. But it deserves inclusion here because the song was recorded and released credited to "Robbie Williams featuring Pet Shop Boys." So, from that angle, it's a "PSB music video." Robbie spends much of the time in drag and shares the screen with a bevy of drag queens. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Sure, Robbie pushed the envelope and generated publicity. But it did nothing to enhance the song's success. In fact, it proved to be one of Robbie's lowest-charting singles, peaking at only #16 in the U.K. It also did nothing to combat widespread public perception of PSB as a "gay act." |
| Did You See Me Coming? (experiment) Chris and Neil got their tour manager, Andy Crookston, to use his cell phone to capture them walking around the German film studio Babelsberg. Neil appears to be singing into his own cell phone, though perhaps he's just listening to the song so as to facilitate his lip-synching. Apparently they thought the resulting low-quality footage might serve as all or part of the single's video. But it turned out to be too low in quality to use. |
| Memory of the Future (lyric video) The only "official" video created for this single simply showed the lyrics scrolling back—à la the opening of Star Wars—against a rather ominously cloudy sky. A major disappointment for many if not most fans, it begs a question: why only a "lyric video" rather than a "standard" music video? To put it another way, what might this suggest about the state of the Pet Shop Boys' career, the status of music videos, and/or the current pop music industry in general? |
| Inner Sanctum Super launch video On January 21, 2016, to formally announce the April 1 release of their new album Super, the Pet Shop Boys debuted a very short video (just 57 seconds) showing young people dancing in ecstasy amidst lasers (thus maintaining the "banging and lasers" motif of their preceding album, Electric), interpersed with shots from the interior of London's Royal Opera House, where the Boys would be performing in a four-night "residency" the following July—all set to an excerpt of the Super "taster" track, "Inner Sanctum." It would seem an effective tool for depicting and generating excitement. I'll have to leave judgment as to how effective it actually was to others. |
| The Pop Kids (lyric video) As with "Memory of the Future," our musical heroes opted for only a lyric video for their first single from their 2016 album Super. A sign of the times, no doubt. But as bright and colorful as it is, most fans would likely be inclined to agree with one among their number who opined, "Not so super." |
| Burning the Heather (lyric video) An appropriately somber lyric video dominated by B&W and sepia imagery taken from the stark northern Britain landscapes and villages that inspired the song. |
Purple Zone Befitting the lyrics, this video intersperses clips of the members of Soft Cell and the Pet Shop Boys (Marc Almond and Neil Tennant in particular, with their respective partners David Ball and Chris Lowe taking far more peripheral roles) in mundane, everyday tasks—Marc staffing an ice cream truck, Neil pulling pints in a pub—with those of several other people either trapped in dull lives or making efforts to escape. Some fans have speculated that the shots of the four principals playing dominos in the pub may be a nod to "Domino Dancing," but I suspect it's simply meant to be emblematic of the sort of activities that might be favored by people caught in "the purple zone." Then again, Chris does do a little "dance" while sitting at the table. |
| The Lost Room The lyrics are keyed reasonably well to footage from 1966 German film Der junge Törless ("The Young Törless"), which, like the song itself, is based on the 1906 novel The Confusions of Young Törless by the Austrian author Robert Musil. (The film was directed by Volker Schlöndorff, credited as such at the end of the video, though whether he can be described as the director of the video is rather questionable.) |
Relentless "Visualizer" videos Shortly before the late 2023 re-release of the Pet Shop Boys' legendary, limited-edition, and increasingly rare Relentless album, they posted on their official YouTube channel simple animated videos for each of its tracks. Like all videos created with the ubiquitous Visualizer app, they're mere loops that repeat over and over again for the entire length of the song. Most are based on classic arcade videogame imagery, and each features moving images of Neil's and Chris's heads wearing their "Go West" helmets:
|
Heart (previously unreleased 2021 version) While in Bogotá, Colombia, on the Latin American leg of their 2023 Dreamworld Tour, Neil and Chris filmed a "homemade" video of scenes from the city (including quite a few shots of themselves) to accompany a recording of a previously unreleased 2021 arrangement of "Heart" that they had recently taken to performing live. It's considerably better than their previous self-made video ("Paninaro"), but one would certainly hope and expect that to be the case given all the time that had elapsed since then. After all, not only had video technology improved greatly, but the Boys themselves had grown in sophistication as well. |
Derek Jarman's PSB Projection Videos Filmmaker
and artist Derek Jarman, who had directed the promo videos described above for
"It's a Sin" and "Rent," also created a series of rear-screen
"projection videos" for the Pet Shop Boys' 1989 tour. These served as
backdrops to the performances of various songs onstage. These short films—which
really aren't "music videos" in the conventional sense—were released
in 1993 on the VHS tape After going for years without my own copy of Projections, I finally picked one up in August 2008 from Amazon.com. In summary, Jarman's projections are generally artier than "official" PSB music videos, but that doesn't mean that they're better. In my opinion, they're decidedly inferior. But, then again, they really weren't meant to be viewed as standalone works, so it's unfair to judge them as such. In fact, as can be observed in the Highlights video record of the 1989 tour, they're quite effective in their "stage backdrop" context. |
| Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money) Images of an attractive model, ostentatiously luxuriating in her wardrobe, furs, jewelry, and other accoutrements of wealth—interspersed with assorted other imagery, such as bits of sparkler-type fireworks, gold coins, and people working with account books and calculating machines—dominate this rather uninteresting piece. |
| Heart Lots of happy people—including Jarman himself—dancing around a moving camera. A considerably simpler yet happier affair than the original "vampire video," let me tell you. No psychosexual dramas here! |
| Paninaro A really strange sequence that seems to suggest a close relationship between fashion and violence. Intercut with Italianate scenery (both natural and man-made), two female models fight with knives, eventually killing each other. Meanwhile, a male model—whom, I believe, is supposed to represent a "paninaro"—adjusts his sunglasses, combs his hair, hugs a dog (a Dalmatian, to be precise), and generally looks very pleased with himself. A funeral for one of the dead women, who appears to ascend into heaven, brings it all to a close. I did mention that it was strange, didn't I? |
| It's
a Sin Although Jarman had also directed the original "Neil-at-the-inquisition" video, he created a new sequence for concert backdrop purposes—essentially a montage alternating between presumed sin and decadence and nightmarish imagery. Does it buy into the idea that two young men being, shall we say, intimate is sinful, does it parody that very notion, or does it merely suggest that sinfulness is something that can accompany homosexual as well as heterosexual relationships without being an essential component of them? |
| Domino
Dancing An extremely arch-looking Spanish flamenco dancer and scenes from a bullfight. Interesting for about 30 seconds, but it gets old real fast. Give me the original. |
| King's
Cross Black-and-white footage shot in and around the titular London railway/subway station. In some ways a companion piece to Jarman's "Rent" music video, it even features some of the same shots of Chris, or at least very similar ones, obviously filmed at the same time. Unfortunately, there's little else to it, though it befits the song's somber mood. |
| Always
on My Mind Just an animated collage of fluctuating colors (I'm tempted to call it "kaleidoscopic," but it's hardly reminiscent of a kaleidoscope) that finally becomes a little more interesting toward the end when black-and-white headshot footage of made-up Neil and Chris—first Neil, then Chris, and ending with them staring at each other, all the while looking about as dour as they've ever appeared, and that's saying a lot—is superimposed atop the still-animated, still-colorful backdrop. |
| Violence Photos and old film stock related to Egypt inexplicably juxtaposed with shots of an oddly made-up man smoking and a guy wielding a whip. Surpassingly strange—and surprisingly amateurish-looking until you understand that Jarman was working with a very small budget and derived this video from a short film titled Garden of Luxor that he created early in his career, back in 1972, when indeed he was little more than an amateur. |
| Being Boring Jarman again dips into his own history, taking grainy black-and-white footage from his very first film, Studio Bankside, to accompany one of the Pet Shop Boys' greatest tracks. While it certainly doesn't compare to the original video, it oddly works, apropos to the song's air of melancholy. Even the people who appear in it—friends and acquaintances from the director's younger days—seem like less glamorous, more bohemian, and more fully clothed counterparts to the characters in the original Bruce Weber vid. |
The Pandemonioum Tour Projection Videos For their 2009 Pandemonium Tour, the Pet Shop Boys commissioned the U.K. firm onedotzero industries (I'm never sure how I should capitalize the names of businesses that engage in that cutesy all-lower-case affectation in their print and online materials) to create new background videos for a number of the songs. Among them are the following. |
| Heart Large-scale pixelation evolves into heartrate-monitor imagery and then floating heart-shaped balloons. It's all quite attractive, if a tad obvious. Then again, if forced to choose between attractive obviousness and unattractive abstraction, I'll take the former any day. |
| Pandemonium/Can You Forgive Her? (mashup) Chris and Neil stand in boxes that constantly flash alternating fluorescent colors, looking up at the camera whenever Neil sings, surrounded by dancers and increasingly invasive large-scale pixelation (again). It's almost claustrophoblic. But more than claustrophobia, I suspect it's actually meant to convey the pandemonium described in the more dominant of the mashup's two songs. If that's indeed the case, then it succeeds admirably. |
| Love etc. It's the "Love etc." music video, Part 2, employing precisely the same imagery, though in a somewhat altered form. In fact, it's almost as if we were looking at the original video from a different angle. I'm pretty sure that's not really the case, but it's an extremely tempting conceit. |
| Two Divided by Zero For all of its conceptual simplicity—perhaps even because of it—this is a singularly effective background vid. Take panoramic nighttime shots of New York City (chosen no doubt because it's mentioned in the lyrics), computer-render the buildings, bridges, trains, and airplanes with wildly active colors—as if they'd been taken over by neon lights brought to life on steroids—and synchronize it all to music. You get this striking visual display that captures the escapist mood of the song perfectly. |
| Suburbia Countless cube-headed, business-suited figures ride infinite escalators, forming kalaidescopic patterns of red, black, white, and gray. Incredibly simple in one sense, yet just as incredibly complex in another, it makes for a nearly overwhelming kinetic backdrop that breathes new life into a song that has, at least in the minds of some fans, become something of a "PSB chestnut." Perhaps that's even why it received this marvelous treatment. |
| West End Girls The most abstract of the Pandemonium Tour vids consists almost entirely of bands of laser-like lights shooting about in near chaos. It's the computer-generated equivalent of those "dancing waters" shows that used to be so popular in Las Vegas before they started popping up in so many other venues, thereby cementing their status as the clichés they quickly became. In other words, it's all very nice to look at, but it's even nicer to look at the thing for which it serves as a backdrop. Basically, it does its work subliminally. From a purely existential viewpoint, it's damn near brilliant at achieving its purpose: to disappear into the overall experience, contributing greatly without calling attention to itself. |
PSB Guest Appearances in Other Artists' Music Videos Nothing
Has Been Proved - Dusty Springfield Neil and Chris are reporters—the former taking notes, the latter snapping photos—as Dusty sings this atmospheric number written and produced by the Boys for the film Scandal, scenes from which are interspersed throughout the video. |
| Getting
Away with It (Version 1) - Electronic Undoubtedly a very inexpensive video to produce, but nevertheless effective—especially compared to the alternate version that came afterward. Bernard Sumner, Johnny Marr, and Neil Tennant just sit in the studio performing (OK, miming) the track. Clear, crisp, and extremely enjoyable in its disarmingly low-key way. I just wish Bernard had a better haircut, that's all. |
| Getting
Away with It (Version 2) - Electronic Bernard just stands there singing and looking somewhat forlorn, Neil sings backup (but doesn't actually appear until about halfway through the video), and Johnny plays the guitar—though he was apparently filmed separately because of another commitment at the time. Abstract non sequitur graphics weave around them. Bernard and Neil then take turns lying down and spinning on some sort of giant wheel—or at least that's it looks like. They apparently made this as an alternative to the original because somebody felt it would have a greater chance getting airplay on U.S. MTV. |
| Disappointed - Electronic Neil, now handling lead vocals, stands in a wheat field as two dancers don't really do much dancing but instead do other things, such as run with flags and twirl giant censers. Bernard holds letters up to the camera, spelling "Electronic" out of sequence. Johnny plays guitar again. Rest assured, it looks much better than I make it sound. Most notably, this may be where Neil first encountered director Howard Greenhalgh, whom the Boys would soon tap to helm the remarkable Very videos. |
| Do
the Right Thing - Ian Wright Wright dominates this video, as he should. But Chris, who co-wrote and produced the track for the U.K. soccer/media star, makes a couple of fleeting appearances by himself, with the two of them appearing together in black-and-white footage only briefly at the very end. Chris waves cards at the camera—and, at the end, at Ian himself—playfully mimicking a soccer referee warning or penalizing a player for fouls or otherwise inappropriate behavior. (During his football career, Wright had a knack for earning a lot of such cards from the refs.) |
| Hallo
Spaceboy - David Bowie Since you never see them together, I strongly suspect that Bowie and the Boys were filmed separately for this vid, which would have been vastly better if the powers that be hadn't inserted all manner of additional footage sampled from a variety of sources (for instance, a brief snippet of Bela Lugosi, I believe from either The Raven or Devil Bat). Cool lighting effects, though. |
| I Can Change - Brandon Flowers Mr. Tennant makes a fleeting cameo appearance in the lyric video for this song by The Killers' lead vocalist Brandon Flowers from his second solo album, The Desired Effect. Neil mouths the words of his equally brief spoken contribution to the recording: "And when you're looking for a change…." |
Honorable Mention for the Director Cicero
- Heaven Must Have Sent You Back to Me Although he doesn't appear in it, Chris directed this video for one of the singles by the Boys' early 1990s protégé Cicero. The generous amusement park footage may be an homage to Chris's resort hometown of Blackpool. You're free to speculate about the inspiration for the equally generous shots of the singer's bare chest. |
…and if we really stretch it — Success
- Sigue Sigue Sputnik A still shot of Neil and Chris, lifted from the "West End Girls" video—or perhaps from a publicity photo taken from the video—appears for a split second along with those of several other artists (including Boy George) in this video by Tony James and company. No problem: the two acts were on the same label. The site visitor who told me about this recalls seeing a version in which the Boys actually mouth the song's "Sex, Fun, Success" refrain, but that's not what's currently running on YouTube. Does anyone else recall seeing this? |
| I've Got Your Music
- Saint Etienne A delightful little video in which everyday people display copies of what are apparently meant to represent their favorite vinyl records. PSB releases, most of which feature images of one or both Boys, appear with pleasant regularity. (Somehow I doubt that any of those instances were shot in the United States, though I'd love to be proven wrong on that point.) |
| Meet Me in a House of Love
- Cut Copy The face shot of Neil from the cover of Discography can be seen within a Sgt. Pepper-ish montage of celebrity faces that repeatedly appears in this video by this Australian band led by Dan Whitford. |
Finally, a couple of "wannabes" often mistakenly identified as official PSB videos: It's
a Sin (unofficial) A really well-made, professional-looking video featuring a dancing nun and a dimly lit dormitory full of underwear-clad young men and women. Likely inspired by the Boys' own performance of the song in their famous Performance stage show, it has appeared on YouTube and elsewhere, often touted as an "official" PSB video. Considering its high quality, it's an understandable error. But an error it is: this is not an "official" Pet Shop Boys video. |
| The Survivors (unofficial) This computer-generated vid—clearly inspired by and very much in the style of the official "Liberation" video—was an unsolicited piece created by a couple of guys in an effort to earn a PSB commission. They did it, as Neil has said, "to show us what they were capable of." But the Boys decided against asking them to work for them. So while this video was the result of a highly professional effort to become "official," it actually isn't. |
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