Pet Shop Boys, Amsterdam Heineken Music Hall

June 22, 2009

You know it’s going to be an odd night: Pet Shop Boys fans, of all people, have taken it upon themselves to throw off the shackles of their designated seating and decide to pile to the foot of the stage the moment the lights go down. Appealing awkwardly to both the thumping Hi-NRG camp electro camp and melancholic wistful melodrama fans, the duo pull out all the stops to please all with varying degrees of success.

With a back catalogue so rammed with potential crowd pleasers such as ‘Heart’, ‘Left To My Own Devices’, ‘Go West’, ‘It’s A Sin’ and ‘You Were Always On My Mind’, it’s going to be nigh on impossible not to satisfy everybody at some stage. The ‘boys’ themselves stick to type and either a) stand behind a keyboard or b) hold a microphone and motion the songs along with the other hand. This while wearing an assortment of hats of varying taste. They wisely let dancers and a huge backdrop of interchangeable blocks and video projections provide the visual distraction.

The sound, as usual for the Amsterdam HMH, is immense, offering forgiveness for the use of the 80s basslines and clunky percussion. Even providing Neil Tennant’s nasal tones with a startling clarity, which is not always a positive thing. It’s for the earlier ‘Please’ era tracks that the sequencers are put on overdrive and really take over from the other distractions on stage. The dancing is immaculate, highly stylised with the use of boxes concealing the heads of the performers. Eventually we reach the final run-in of songs and boxes are cast aside; coloured gym wear appears and it all goes a bit freeform Spice Girls for an uncomfortable period of time.

They even manage a shoe-horned version of ‘Viva La Vida’ in there to provide the necessary crowd singalong, which manages to sound uncannily like it could have only come from the pen of the Pet Shop Boys.

However, the slick production around the stage set and performance somehow feels like we’re being force-fed a rich diet of West End show when a little more East End noise would have warmed us more to the events on stage. Ostensibly, we’re looking at a couple of middle aged men and a keyboard, and they are not so stupid as to believe that that in itself will suffice for the evening. Though somewhere, what is lost in the activity is the feeling that they are playing for us and not venue number eight of a tour totally over 50 dates.

By the time ‘West End Girls’ is thumped out for the encore, Amsterdam thanked for being “your beautiful city” and the silly hats depart once and for all, we’re left feeling a little bewildered. Which do you choose? A hard or soft option?