YMMV / Pet Shop Boys

• Accidental Innuendo: "Did you see me coming", "Love comes quickly". PSB mention in the Yes iTunes commentary that they were concerned that the title "Did you see me coming" might unintentionally come across as lewd.
• Americans Hate Tingle: While they started off just as popular in the United States as in the United Kingdom and much of the rest of the world, their American success had declined to a much lower level, save for some successes on the dance charts by the early 1990s, thanks in part to how misunderstood their lyrics and their work in general had become by then, getting a reputation as a "gay band" when mainstream American culture was more homophobic. Their American support tends to be limited to urban areas with large LGBTQ+ populations like San Francisco or New York City. One popular website devoted to the Boys even cites 10 ways the Boys all but killed their American career.
• Anvilicious: The main criticisms of the Agenda EP were about its relative lack of subtlety and nuance in comparison to most of the more political albums and songs by the boys, such as "King's Cross" and "A Red Letter Day".
• Crowning Music of Awesome:
  • The medley they performed at the BRIT Awards. Imagine the CMoAs of their best hits (and mind you, there are lots of them) all smashed into thirteen minutes. Amazing.
  • Very is 53 minutes of pure, unadulterated awesome.
  • "Jealousy" is an excellent closer to Behaviour, especially with its big orchestral ending.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: "Being Boring", though only reaching #20 on the charts, remains the fans' favorite song. Album track "King's Cross" gets this too.
• Fan Nickname: The Pets, or the Boys. Fans themselves are called Petheads.
• Friendly Fandoms: With New Order, due to their similar style as well as both bands working with producer Stephen Hague. Neil Tennant has professed a love of Joy Division and New Order in interviews, as well as contributing vocals to Electronic's "Getting Away with It", "The Patience of a Saint", and "Disappointed". The bands were even set to tour together before being interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Also with Erasure for both also working with Hague and being Synth-Pop duos with openly gay frontmen.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: "Go West" is a classic in Israel.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Tons of them!
  • The video for Kings Cross (the It Couldn't Happen Here clip [1], not the Derek Jarman projection) shows a man on fire, whereas the song itself talks about the (presumably figurative) "dead and wounded on either side" all around Kings Cross station. Two months later, a fire kills 31 at the Kings Cross tube station.
  • Similarly with "Dreaming of the Queen," which features a dream image of Princess Diana saying "there are no more lovers left alive": it was released four years before she died with her lover in a car crash. (Of course the song was plenty harsh enough, being about AIDS and resulting bereavement.)
  • They mentioned Armani and Versace (the Italian designers) in their first version of "Paninaro" in 1986. When they re-released that song in 1995, the PSB didn't include Versace (but did include Armani) in its lyrics, (apparantly they thought he didn't fit well with the meaning of the song). A couple of years later, Versace was killed. Which sounds really creepy until you realise that it was only the 12" version (Disco, Please: Further Listening) that mentioned him to start with (the original 7" version features on Alternative).
  • In the liner notes for Alternative, Neil Tennant says of his guitar solo on "Decadence": "I guess Pet Shop Boys are not allowed to rock." Jon Savage concurs. Seven years later came Pet Shop Boys' pop-rock album Release. While not an outright failure, it is their least successful album to date—critics are still split on its quality.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The 2003 DVD release of PopArt has commentary for each music video. During the commentary for "Liberation", this exchange occurs:
  Chris Lowe: Looks kind of sexual, doesn't it?
  Neil: I think it's just psychedelic.
  Chris Heath: Doesn't everything mean something?
  Neil: Oh, I don't think so.
  • This became particularly funny in 2012, after the Pet Shop Boys released an entire song called "Everything Means Something" on Elysium.
• Ho Yay:
  • The sheer amout of hoyay in the "Domino Dancing" video pretty much shifted the entire demographic of their American fanbase.
  • As far as the songs go, "If Love Were All", "I'm With Stupid", "Euroboy", "Sexy Northerner", "Try It (I'm In Love With A Married Man)" and "The Truck Driver And His Mate" allude to homosexuality (the ambiguity in many of them being whether the narrator is male or female). Whereas "The Night I Fell In Love" and everything in Closer to Heaven are more specifically homosexually themed.
  • An unreleased song they performed live, "Homosexuality", has a pretty obvious song title.
  • The version of "In Private" they performed with Elton John is also quite hoyay as the song had been originally written to be performed by a woman (namely, Dusty Springfield).
  • Also some of it in "Girls Don't Cry".
• I Am Not Shazam: Neither of the band members ever worked in a pet shop. Some mutual friends of theirs did, and they thought "Pet Shop Boys" sounded like an English rap group, so they ran with it.
• LGBT Fanbase: The group has a large gay fanbase due to the gay content in a lot of their music.
• Nightmare Fuel: The "Full Horror" remix of "Suburbia" is this, Awesome Music and Tear Jerker rolled into one.
  • The original video for "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)" starts off pretty standard, with Chris walking around an empty parking garage and Neil 'in character' as the narrator of the song standing in a hole in front of a car with its headlights on. However as Neil gets to the chorus some fog covers the screen and as it fades away it reveals Neil looks ...off, with sickly greenish skin and glasses tinted so you can't see his eyes. Not helping matters is the stilted, awkward way he lip syncs, his constant twitching or the fact that his neck inflates like a frog every so often. Neil switches between looking normal and looking like this throughout the video until the very end, when he melts. It's downright unsettling from a band not normally known for being creepy.
  • The music video for "Yesterday, When I Was Mad" is Surreal Horror at its finest. There's too much strange and creepy imagery to list at once but special mention has to go to the creepy, deformed CGI heads of Chris and Neil which go rocketing straight into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley.
  • The dystopian lyrics and ominous music of "Integral" can give you chills.
    • The Black & White mix of this ups it wayyyyyy past 11.
• Questionable Casting: One of the decisions that, for better or worse, really set Release apart from the rest of their catalogue was the inclusion of Johnny Marr (of The Smiths) as a session musician for most of the tracks.
• Refrain from Assuming: "Opportunities" is often referred to by its subtitle, "Let's Make Lots Of Money".
• Retroactive Recognition: Before the band achieved stardom, Neil Tennant worked for Marvel Comics as editor for the Marvel UK line, including the launch of their first British superhero, Captain Britain. His name turns up a lot in the credits for those books.
  • Hence the Shout-Out to said superhero in "Building a Wall."
• Sampled Up: "In the Night", the b-side to "Opportunities", is noted for being reworked by the Bloodhound Gang as the basis for their hit "The Bad Touch".
• Signature Song: "West End Girls" and "Go West" for casual audiences; "Being Boring" for diehard fans.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Disco 2 contained remixes of a rather low overall level of faithfulness to the original songs (of which "Liberation" took the biscuit by inserting completely new vocals after eliminating all that was left of the original track (vocals included)), segued and often length edited. It is often considered the worst album they ever released.
  • The "Perfect Immaculate" remix of "Integral" (which, while preserving the song, majorly changed the style of music) was the version released as a digital single, in order to promote the remix album Disco 4. This provoked this reaction from fans of the original version from the Fundamental album.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "Your Funny Uncle", "Being Boring" (and a large chunk of Behaviour), "Home and Dry".
  • "King's Cross". Dear god is this song ever a tearjerker. It just sounds so broken down and melancholy, and its later association with the 1987 King's Cross fire doesn't help.
  • In a weird way their cover of "Go West" is this, despite being upbeat and energetic, it also sounds very melancholy.
    • It gets even more melancholy and bleak when you read that Neil Tennant agreed to recording it as a contrast with the Village People's 1978 original, showing how the gay utopia described in the original has been ravaged by AIDS and homophobia in the 15 years since, as well as nodding to the fall of communism.
  • "A Red Letter Day"
  • Their cover of "Losing My Mind". Hoo boy.
  • "The Survivors" can make anyone who's struggled with mental illness absolutely sob due to how close to home the lyrics hit, even though the song technically isn't about mental illness and instead is about AIDS.
    • Heck, the real meaning of the lyrics is arguably even more of a tearjerker.
  • "It Couldn't Happen Here", particularily if you know the meaning behind the title: Neil's friend said that the AIDS epidemic that was going on in America at the time wouldn't happen in Europe also. That same friend died of AIDS just a few years later.

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