From London to Berlin: the Obscure Pet Shop Boys (p)review

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe will resume their unique Obscure non-singles shows with a pair of performances in Berlin this month. The two-night stand — officially Obskur Pet Shop Boys — will take place at Huxleys Neue Welt hall in Neukölln the same mid-July week as the more familiar Dreamworld nostalgiafest — which has been ploughing the world’s arenas off and on since 2022 — this time at the Waldbühne outdoor amphitheatre in the Westend area of the city. Yo ready for this?

The second staging of Obscure follows its April in London premiere, where the seminal pop duo played five subtly shifting sets of non-singles and fan faves.

There’s an inevitable circularity about all this, seeing as the German capital is also the city of their joint second home, and prior to that quiet purchase, London/Berlin was the working title of a mid-priced dance album the duo put out in 2003… that is until the side project’s photographer Wolfgang Tillmans suggested they make it the third remix collection in the PSB’s Disco series to clarify the theme, concentrate minds and no doubt add a few hundred sales into the bargain.

I say a few hundred —not exactly without a splash of Paffordian vinegar — as the turn of the millennium —Glasto, Miracles aside —is generally regarded as something of a low point in the Boys’ fortunes, both critically and commercially. 

In fact, live DVD combos and various artist compilations aside, Disco 3 is still the lowest charting PSB LP to date, and that in itself followed a pair of divisive under-achievers, 1999’s Nightlife and 2002’s Release. In historical terms, these pre and post fin de siècle sets were the Boys’ first studio albums not to make the top five in Britain, a cumulative effect that saw Tennant seriously wonder on both attendant tours if they should knock it on the head. Salutations Sheffield and Grimsby. What did they do for an encore? They stayed together, and it is, quite amazing. Miraculous even.

Two decades on, the duo are in much ruder health, and have spent the last few years crossing the Ts and dotting the Is on various aspects of PSB’s past: Obscure’s April quintet followed 2025’s fifth dance-focused remix album, unsurprisingly titled Disco 5. D5 was preceded by 2024’s Nonetheless — a deliciously downbeat yet alluring 15th album proper, which saw them pipped to the No.1 spot by the relentlessly ubiquitous Taylor Swift. 

A Manchester Camarata-aided reworking of 2014’s oratorio-in-all-but-name, A Man From The Future, based on the life of my Bletchley Park compatriot Alan Turing, is also tipped to see an album release before the year is out.

With its 1500 capacity, the Electric Ballroom in the heart of Camden Town is considerably smaller than the arenas and festivals the Boys are used to headlining, but their rapturously received quintet of sets, heavy on ballads and moody deep cuts, was quite a revelation.

Apparently paying homage to a Bronski Beat miners benefit show that Tennant and Lowe attended at the same venue in 1984, the PSB’s association with Camden goes right back to their earliest demo days when the likes of It’s A Sin and the basic backing track of West End Girls were created at Ray Roberts’ Camden 8 studio in Murray Mews, an upmarket minor road which runs directly behind the Regency-style townhouse in Camden Square where local ‘ledge’ Amy Winehouse took her last breaths.

Despite having known of the generally rock-based club since childhood — and later living as a Camden borough resident a mere 13 minutes drive away for a good decade and a half — this would be only my second gig at the venue. The first was a Siouxsie Sioux solo showcase in 2007, and, prior to that, as an Adam & The Ants-obsessed pre-teen I’d read with interest what a landmark moment their New Year 1979 into 1980 gig at the Electric was for the band, just before the dastardly highwayman Malcolm McLaren swiped the Ants from under Adam’s painted nose. 

Curiously, just five months later the now-unsigned insect warrior debuted an all-new line-up at the same venue — the formidable five-piece who would break though with Kings Of The Wild Frontier before the year was out — and illustrates what a pivotal place the Electric holds in rock history.

That I’ve hoped for a PSB + Siouxsie collab for aeons had me wondering if she might show up as a special guest during Obscure week. Seeing as the Antmeister himself is identified with Camden almost as much as his early 80s chart rivals Madness Catherine asked me if Mr Goddard might be a possibility.

A fascinating idea, and even though the venue is certainly associated with people who like rock rather than dance to disco, I thought it highly unlikely the not always charming prince would join forces with a sequenced synthpop outfit. The closest he came thus far was a bonkers barrage of yelps and yodelling on Gary Numan’s Cars a mile away at the King’s Cross Scala in 2010 — Numan being a slightly tragic Marilyn Dadson rawker these days, as opposed to the electronica pioneer “friend” of old.

Hmmm. If they wanted to keep things strictly Camden might the ballroom band be augmented by Suggs and Chas? Probably not on the same night though, as the latter stopped being a Nutty Boy after they turned in a drunkenly shambolic cameo at PSB’s charity event for their longtime staffer Dainton at Heaven back in 2008. Like Mystic Meg and her faithful pussy, Cath and I breezed through a few turns who might have some local connection and/or a history with Ver Boys. Girls Aloud? On indefinite hiatus. Amy Winehouse? Holy fabrication Mr Bond, that won’t happen (cough), not unless she’s projected as an ABBA-style Amytar. 

Not so much fading away as forever radiating one way or another, Boy George’s Gothic pile in Hampstead falls within the wider Camden borough. And famously he and his fellow Culture Clubbers engineered a verbal spat with Neil when nearby Koko was still the Camden Palace, and he a mere Smash Hits scribe who’d written something the drama chameleon objected to. Can’t see it though, especially as the only Dowd-PSB choon was a single, the beautifully evocative Crying Game.

Another Koko ‘queen’, the lovely Madonna was in London that week, prepping pre-promo for Confessions II with the mashmeister of the duo’s Electric-Super-Hotspot trilogy of albums, Stuart Price. Yet the one song all parties worked on, 2006’s Sorry, was quite a single — a UK No.1 to boot — so would the most calculatingly self-centred of acts reduce herself to a bit part player on a relative obscurity she wasn’t involved with?

On to an even more imperious figure then, if that’s possible. I was lucky enough to be at the Roundhouse, an even more iconic Camden arts centre, when Dame Shirley Bassey debuted The Performance Of My Life with Tennant and Lowe also seated upstairs. Alas, that was her last full length concert proper way back in 2009. Would the grand diva — now pushing 90 and all but retired from live appearances — jet over from Monaco to slum it at the grungier Electric? Would anyone miss her if she didn’t?

Longer shot still, but what about Brett Anderson, returning the favour to Neil for his rawkinist cameo with Suede at the same venue in 1996? I even remember listening to About the Pet Shop Boys live on Radio 1 as we drove to the circular engine shed in its unrestored state, slightly reluctantly entering what was my first gig at the Roundhouse before the documentary concluded. Did I have any idea Monsieur Tennant was going to trot out on stage that night? Did I bugger! 

Get this. I was only told by Suede HQ the they offered me the tickets the day before that “there’s a special guest who I think you’ll enjoy,” that was all they’d say. And for the record, the singers, who’d bonded over Bowie, underwent cooling of the ways thanks to Mr A divulging in the band’s official biography Love And Poison, that he’d bumped and grindrd the devil’s dandruff with Mr T. That the tome was penned by David Barnett, the very person who kindly arranged my access to the Roundhouse that ’96 day just adds to the insatiable incestuousness of it all. 

To emphasise the self-fulfilling circularity that little bit more, Suede’s final Coming Up concert was immortalised on film by PSB’s film director chum Mike Christie, a Jarman associate and neighbour of Chris Lowe’s in the Islington* days who’s known them so long that he possesses hours of video footage of some of the duo’s more one-off performances including Heaven and the Haçienda. Not only did he shoot a portion of Obscure week on a basic set-up, but he’s behind the new Wham! 10 days In China docu, too. 

I digress. We were clearly aiming for the stars when perhaps there might not be any at all. The only other time I witnessed both Pet Shop Boys perform in Camden was a one-off charidee event at the Barfly in 2004, which saw them debut live renditions of Try it (I’m In Love With A Married Man), the Dusty in Motown giveaway In Private and Nervously, none of them to be tackled again in any show to date. Neil remembers the last one, particularly.

“We actually rearranged all the songs. I think we did a great version of Nervously, from Behaviour, where we changed it completely. All of them we changed, actually.”

No turns were forthcoming, however. Mind you, there wasn’t really room to swing Chris Lowe’s new shaggy tabby hair extensions let alone a third leg, seeing as the venue — basically the upstairs of an old boozer — holds just 200 people.

In fact, in line with Obscure’s stripped down production, it transpired that in 2026 there would be three musical guests over four of the five nights. Two were indeed ‘rockers’ and one even warbled a tune or three but they were none of the above. Oh, you’ll have to wait for the night-by-night recap, which starts, well, in the subsequent post, actually.

Previewing the Berlin two-nighter, what follows is a five-by eyewitness account detailing what happened back amid the temperate backdrop of April in London. Helpfully, the title of the pre-recorded entry music the Boys entered the Electric Ballroom stage to each night (two B-sides, two LP cuts and one celebrity fan collab — a cover of their cover that did evolve into a single called Close My Eyes, albeit with no further PSB involvement) follows the relevant showdate.

The writers bringing you this six-part feature, which concludes on July 10, Neil Tennant’s 72nd birthday, are as follows: Catherine Walters (CW), Daniel Higgins (DH), our trusty new scribes Alycia Heath (AH) and Jane White (JW), aided and abetted by yours truly (SP).

See you tomorrow bright and early then. 

Steve Pafford