I attended the concert at Sheffield Arena and was embarrassed to see whole swathes of the auditorium screened off. I was already depressed when I arrived at the venue as somebody crashed into my car on the journey there; so finding the arena was completely lacking in atmosphere put the icing on the cake. As it transpired only 3,000 of the 13,000 seats in the venue had been sold.
When I went to look for my seat I realised it was on the front row, right in front of a speaker where I
could see absolutely nothing. I and the people around me grew agitated and called over one of the stewards. As you can imagine, there were plenty of
seats available for us to move to, but the vibes in the auditorium were not good.
The performance itself felt half hearted and it looked like everyone (audience included) were just going through the motions. Many years later I learned that during the interval for the show a depressed Neil Tennant suggested to Chris Lowe that they pack it all in and end the group. Fortunately Chris ignored the question and everything just carried on as normal. The date was 9th December 1999 and this moment is cited as the closet the Pet Shop Boys have ever come to splitting up.
Like Chris, I would never consider knocking it on the head, but in 1999 it wasn't as much fun being a Pet Shop Boys fan as it used to be. The care free days of listening to "Actually" on the way home from school or the excitement of dropping the needle on a new KLF remix of "So Hard" felt a million miles away. We hadn't yet reached the nadir of Neil and Chris's career, but it was clear something had changed.
This album is a disjointed affair that tries to pull on too many strings. There's the weird country styling of "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk", the disappointing Village People pastiche of "New York City Boy" and a desperate attempt to write for the American market resulted in the nonsense that is "Happiness is an option".
Where the boys try to be original they fall flat with "Boy Strange", "Footsteps" and "The Only One" being the worst examples. The production on these songs is not sympathetic to the material and everything sounds less contemporary than previously. The boys must have realised something was amiss as they haven't worked with any of the album's three producers since. The only successful songs are the dance tracks "Radiophonic", "Closer to Heaven" and "For your own good" which remain closer to the natural Pet Shop Boys sound.
I remember seeing this vinyl record on the shelves of HMV a few months after the CD was released and thinking, "Why on earth have they released it on LP? That is so old fashioned". Consequently I didn't get round to buying a copy until four years later when the official website began selling off stock that had been held by their previous management team (replete with 'Promotional only' stickers). The second copy seen here is the more common remastered version from 2017. 2/5
