Like their fellow 80s contemporary and occasional collaborator Madonna, the Pet Shop Boys have seen fit to bring us their fourteenth studio album, Hotspot, in time to, like Selena Gomez, enliven the bleak January malaise. With their long-standing distinctive perspective on life (nothing more than a dance floor where classism can’t prevail), Hotspot serves as a cap on the Stuart Price trilogy of albums that commenced with 2016’s Super. Yet the duo never seems to forget about the ephemerality of time, particularly their own (as addressed most overtly on Elysium), as evidenced on this record with the cover, which features Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe as a sort of blurred out impressionistic painting. As though there is no one more aware than they of how much their number is up. So why not live it up as much as possible, now more than ever? This is undoubtedly the very reason Tennant and Lowe live part-time in Berlin, so as to embrace a city that has always embraced the aging clubgoer.
With this picture of the two owning the dance floor of a nightclub like Berghain (something that seems loosely parodied in the video for their latest single, “Monkey Business”), some of the more overarching motifs of Hotspot are made all the more salient when conjuring this image of how the Pet Shop Boys live. That is to say, as they always have, regardless of age. Perhaps that’s why there can be no more perfect track to commence the record than “Will-o-the-Wisp,” which instantly name checks Berlin with the lyrics, “The U1 is such a party train (will-o-the-wisp)/From Uhland to Warschauerstraße (will-o-the-wisp)/Emerging from below past Nollendorfplatz (will-o-the-wisp)/In search of love and laughter.” Something that Tennant and Lowe have always tried to facilitate for people, even if said listeners were not ever necessarily aware of the sardonic tinge to their lyrics, made most recently unapologetically apparent on the 2019 EP, Agenda. Unlike subtler digs at the culture of narcissism and excess in Western civilization (most iconically on “Opportunities [Let’s Make Lots of Money]”), the songs on Agenda were more outrightly damning, as was the case on “Give stupidity a chance,” with Tennant doing a sendup of the average human being of the twenty-first century as follows: “I don’t wanna think about the world/I wanna talk about myself!/Instead of governing with thoughtful sensitivity/Let’s shock and awe the world/With idiotic bigotry.”
So yes, perhaps with Hotspot, PSB is trying to get back to a place of less rage, while of course still remaining completely tongue-in-cheek. Even the title itself offers a wink, with “hotspot” in the old sense of the term pertaining to clubs and restaurants, while, in the now, it is automatically associated with wi-fi or, even trendier, global warming. Climate change, if you will. Regardless, PSB still knows how to showcase a romantic side better than anyone, with “You are the one” being a prime such example. Again setting the stage for their tales on this album against the tableau of Berlin, Tennant describes, “Driving down to Zehlendorf/Lie by the lake on a summer afternoon/Laughing at some mistranslation/Order coffee and cake, then take the train/Back into Mitte to see a film/About love and liberation.” It’s almost as picturesque as the portrait painted on Yes’ “The Way It Used To Be,” a baleful ditty on which Tennant muses, “I can remember days of sun we knew our lives had just begun/We could do anything/We’re fearless when we’re young/Under the moon, address unknown/I can remember nights in Rome/I thought that love would last/A promise set in stone.” “You are the one” is more hopeful than this, with Tennant crooning his devotion to a life spent just this very way in Berlin with the same person (Lowe?).
The following track, “Happy people,” takes one straight back to 1980s Europe (with an intro one imagines soundtracking a ride on an aboveground U-Bahn). The chorus rues, “Happy people living in a sad world,” mimicking a certain Lana Del Rey-esque feel from “Beautiful People Beautiful Problems,” not to mention Tennant and Lowe also seem to have a penchant for mentioning summer quite a bit on this record, just as LDR always does, as though mentioning the season frequently might mitigate the fact that they’re in their winter. Of course, to avoid the reaper and his onset effects would be to live in a “Dreamland,” the fourth track on Hotspot, as well as the lead single that first introduced us to their 2020 vision. Like “Luna Park” from 2006’s Fundamental, Pet Shop Boys wield amusement park imagery as a metaphor for the false advertising the U.S. has long peddled about being a melting pot open to all who are willing to work for the “American dream.” Knowing full well, it’s a ruse, PSB and Years and Years’ Olly Alexander reimagine a world in which the U.S. actually backed up what it has been hawking with the sentiment, “We’re falling for pleasure in a garden where the sun still shines/And staying forever/Leaving all our worries behind It’s a kind of amnesia/Where all problems seem to disappear/And you don’t need a visa/You can come and go and still be here.” A Dreamland indeed, for, like utopia, it seems to signify the meaning “no place.”
Hence, “Hoping for a miracle,” a doleful, elegeiac-like piece that depicts a familiar scene to us all–even if a cliche we’ve never experienced as cinematically–standing alone on a bridge (in this instance, the Waterloo) at the nadir of our low point. Out of hope, out of luck and utterly desperate. Particularly when you’re the common sort in search of love and adulation via the fame route (a common affliction that’s only ramped up since the days when Andy Warhol predicted in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes) and find that you’ve missed the boat on any right to have such an aspiration. Meanwhile, you’re still foolishly hoping for a miracle, just as you were conditioned to when you were a child with such urgings to clap your hands to save Tinkerbell and she would be spared, so, too, do you naively continue to do so in adulthood, ergo Tennant’s poignant lines, “It’s been this way since life began/The child lives on inside the man/You have to eat, you have to sleep/You sometimes feel you’re in too deep.” More than you could ever know, Monsieur Tennant. And yes, it so often feels as though he’s speaking right to your very soul (or what’s left of what this earth hasn’t pillaged of it already).
As is the case on the intensely felt “I don’t wanna go out.” Communing with everyone who has ever been in no mood to leave their house (especially for those enduring the frigidity of a Berlin winter), Tennant, in a peak tone of impassioned insistence, declares, “I don’t wanna go out/I don’t wanna go dancing,” in between composing a narrative about a lonely, shy chap who “doesn’t feel that he has any sex appeal” and that “he’d rather sit alone and cry that no one understands this guy.” Who among us has not felt the same in our tenure of being expected to pull out our “life of the party” persona at a moment’s notice?
Lightening the mood with a more fanciful subject matter, “Monkey business,” the third single from the record, finds the Pet Shop Boys at their most playful–as further elucidated in the accompanying video, in which sailors, a drag queen and an aging disco dancer take the floor to revel in the music while Tennant and Lowe stoically observe (a scene one reckons is not totally unlike what actually happens when they go out). To be sure, one hasn’t seen them take nightlife so seriously since, well, the Nightlife record back in 1999. Not to say that Pet Shop Boys haven’t steadfastly persisted in bringing dance hit after dance hit with every album. Yet they’ve always been just as comfortable displaying their knack for lush balladry as well. “Only the dark” offers itself up as an exemplar of that, with Tennant ruminating once again on an intimate love that’s best shared not only alone, but in the dark (is he talking about being in the recording studio with Lowe?), as he declares, “It feels so good to be just the two of us/Anyone else around/Would be superfluous.” Further illuminating all the underrated benefits of the dark, Tennant adds, “Don’t be scared/For only the dark can show you the stars/I’ll be there the moment the dark reopens your heart.” Seems like an opinion Oscar Wilde would approve of.
“Burning the Heather,” another single from Hotspot, continues the slow, controlled pacing that began on “Only the dark,” with a more overt reflection upon the passage of time (again, seasons appear to be rather important to the majority of the lyrics Tennant so stirringly delivers). After all, “The truth must be the truth, unvarnished in its telling/Otherwise it’s just hype/You hope people won’t notice you’re peddling.” And PSB have never been ones for peddling lies, so much as sardonic vignettes grounded in the absurdity of existence. One that still espouses (no pun intended) the “importance” of marriage in order to validate one’s love. Even when you’re as cutting edge as Tennant and Lowe, apparently you’ve still got to champion and celebrate the antiquated institution (then again, Brits can’t help themselves with regard to enthusiasm about antiquated institutions). Originally written in 2015 for friends whose wedding they could not attend, Tennant and Lowe intermittently repurpose the original interpolation of Felix Mendelssohn (a German, naturally) “Wedding March” to express the ebullience of, “We’re getting married/Because we love each other/We’re getting married today/We’re getting married/Because the time feels right/We’re doing it without delay.” So it is that with this record, you the Pet Shop Boys wed. And, unquestionably, there are fans who have already been committed to them for decades and would not dream of a divorce.
Like Guy Ritchie (who references The Merchant of Venice in a très anti-Semitic way in The Gentlemen), the English can’t help but constantly turn to Shakespeare as a benchmark for how to artistically proceed. Therefore, Tennant remarked of closing the record with this song, “Shakespeare apparently said, ‘A comedy ends with a wedding.’ [Throughout] the whole album there’s a lot of lyrics about relationships and there’s an overall sense of longing that’s sort of released into the wedding at the end. And also there’s a little pun in the title because, you know, there’s a district in Berlin called Wedding [pronounced “vedding”], which is the same spelling, it’s just sort of funny.” Like Joker said, “Life is a comedy.” Yet now that we’re at the end of Hotspot, let us briefly go back to the first song on the record, for it seems only appropriate that PSB should describe their subject as a “will o’ the wisp,” better known as “a person or thing that’s difficult or impossible to find, catch or reach.” Just like a consistently worthwhile output that manages to always keep its finger on the pulse of pure and unmitigated European dance-pop. Somehow, Pet Shop Boys seem to be able to catch that will o’ the wisp phenomenon every time, decades on from when they first started. And perhaps a large reason for that stems from the fact that they’ve rarely strayed from their roots. Either that, or it’s simply a by-product of spending so much time in Berlin, where knowing what’s relevant on the dance floor is one of the prerequisites for being permitted to stay.
