One of the most controversial albums in the Pet Shop Boys catalogue, Elysium was the peak of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe trying an LP that wasn’t solely about the importance of pop…
The closest Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have come to doing things on someone else’s terms, certainly on the live side, came when Pet Shop Boys were the support act on Take That’s reunion tour in 2011. Given how Robbie Williams and Jason Orange have since departed, it’s easily forgotten now just how big Take That and their accompanying Progress album were at the start of the previous decade. At that point, it resulted in the highest-grossing tour in Britain ever.
More importantly in helping Pet Shop Boys overcome initial hesitancy at being a mere support act, there was genuine admiration for Tennant/Lowe among Take That, with Williams having covered My Robot Friend’s We’re The Pet Shop Boys with PSB’s help – on his Rudebox album five years earlier.
Gliding Atmosphere
Yet, if featuring second on the bill across the nation’s stadia was designed to remind casual pop fans of Pet Shop Boys’ brilliance, Elysium was not the album to capitalise on any returning customers. Lowe has joked of Elysium: “We’d had enough of shiny pop: we’d done it,” and even Tennant admits Elysium joins Release from a decade earlier as the most controversial album among Pet Shop Boys’ fans for alienating their audience. It only reached No.9, the lowest charting of all their studio albums.
Considering Behaviour is generally accepted as the critics’ favourite PSB album, it’s strange how the similarly reflective Release and Elysium are commonly regarded as the most unloved of their 15 LPs. True, some fans state that Elysium is their favourite Pet Shop Boys album, but these are generally the type of wilful contrarian who claim Prince’s best album is The Rainbow Children.
Yet, once Elysium’s genesis as Pet Shop Boys’ L.A. album is known, its gliding atmosphere suddenly makes sense. The album is named after the Elysian suburb of L.A. where the album’s photo session was shot. Its working title had been ‘Interstate’ – a far more descriptive name for its contents. Had the album explicitly signposted that Tennant & Lowe were taking on Hall & Oates with a name like ‘Interstate’, maybe listeners would have been more prepared for the luxurious mood of songs like Invisible and Breathing Space.
Winning Team
The duo were big fans of the Drive soundtrack, whose clean lines and cold sleekness are shot through Elysium’s atypically icy ambience. Indeed, Drive composer Cliff Martinez was due to have produced the album until cancelling at relatively short notice. It’s easy to say in hindsight, but Martinez seems like he would have been able to extract even more chills from Leaving and Memory Of The Future, though what he would have made of the panto bitchiness of Ego Music is anyone’s guess.
Instead, L.A. producer Andrew Dawson oversaw Elysium. Before Martinez, Tennant and Lowe had sought to work with Jeff Bhasker, admiring his work with Kanye West. By the time Bhasker belatedly confirmed he’d be interested, the Pets were already in the studio with Kanye’s longtime engineer instead.
Dawson had also previously worked with a plethora of other big-name rappers, including Rick Ross, Kid Cudi and Snoop Dogg. In the pop world, he was fresh from engineering Fun, the New York trio behind the chart-topping We Are Young and whose guitarist Jack Antonoff is now arguably the biggest producer in the world.
Go West
The idea of making an L.A. album had been suggested to Pet Shop Boys by Trevor Horn. Tennant told Classic Pop around the release of Smash: “Trevor Horn had always had the idea of us doing an L.A. album. What he really meant by that was, ‘Have you ever thought about doing an album with session musicians?’ There are some really good singers on Elysium.”
Tennant is right about the vocal talent on display. As well as the jazzy harmony five-piece Sonos, Elysium features three of the four acclaimed Waters siblings, Julia, Maxine and Oren. As well as starring in 20 Feet From Stardom, the trio have sung on albums from Thriller to 21.
Dawson also recruited players including Grammy-nominated jazz percussionist Lenny Castro and composer Joachim Horsley, the latter as conductor for the orchestra working at Capitol’s L.A. studio. Having been hired at fairly short notice, Dawson did well to recruit such talent. He explained Idolator: “Elysium has a very tight frame for finishing. We’ve had to make use of every day.” The producer was aware of the Pets’ L.A. aims, adding: “They’ve never done a record in Los Angeles before and they want that L.A. thing. They want to get that classic L.A. sound, with L.A. players.”
Elysium achieves that aim, though it had been written before arriving in L.A.. Give It A Go and arguably the album’s two most full-on pop songs, Winner and A Face Like That, were written during the Take That tour.
Left To Their Own Devices
They were the first Pet Shop Boys songs to be written on the road, Tennant explaining in the expanded reissue sleeve notes of Elysium in 2017 that not needing to arrive for a Take That show until 6.30pm each evening meant he and Lowe were left to their own devices on tour all day, so they might as well write a few songs in downtime.
A Face Like That is the clearest signpost of what was to follow Elysium, a banger perhaps more suitable for Electric. Yet calling it an outlier wouldn’t be entirely accurate: as ever, the Pets were writing a wide variety of songs and shaped the album from what best fitted thematically. Elysium’s expanded edition includes the demo for Vocal, which would eventually become one of the singles from Electric.
In fact, Elysium’s dramatic closer, Requiem In Denim And Leopardskin, was itself written for a previous album, having been created in 2008 during the Yes sessions. Although it’s hardly the same lengthy “Your time has finally arrived” process for a song as when Jealousy finally landed on Behaviour, Requiem In Denim And Leopardskin does have a different feel to most of its surrounding ballads.
Requiem In Denim And Leopardskin
Written as a tribute to Pet Shop Boys’ late make-up artist Lynne Easton, the track recalls both Being Boring for its evocation of lost friends and Nothing Has Been Proved in its recitation of names: in this instance, a long list including Adam Ant, Bryan Ferry, Derek Jarman and Ossie Clark.
One of the duo’s most moving songs in a career full of them, Requiem In Denim And Leopardskin is also one of their most musically complex, a string-soaked disco influenced by Sharon Redd. Something of a lost classic, it’s perhaps too out there to fit into the Pet Shop Boys maxim that singles should sound like hits, but it certainly deserves wider acclaim. (Unless they get a Saltburn-style moment, Elysium was the last period when Pet Shop Boys had any chance of getting near the singles Top 40, with Leaving getting to No.44.)
Despite its L.A. makeover, for the writing process, Elysium is Pet Shop Boys’ first Berlin album, the remainder of its songs written after buying their German apartment near the end of recording Yes. Electric is the first album to sound like it’s immersed in the Berlin nightlife of Berghain, while its predecessor spawned several superb Tennant/Lowe ballads: Chris Lowe says several of his favourite PSB album tracks are on Elysium.
Digging Deep
If Elysium is too obtuse a title to signify what kind of Pet Shop Boys album we’re in for, then career-long sleeve designers Farrow didn’t help either. Usually so on point in their cover art, for Elysium Mark Farrow’s team masked their rippling water imagery – redolent of Hollywood pools, in fairness – with a stark white rectangle dominating the sleeve.
Perhaps the duo didn’t want to make the L.A. association too explicit. For all the sophisticated sessioners involved, Elysium isn’t entirely a West Coast homage. A companion to Shameless, the riotous Ego Music is route-one pop with similarly winningly daft lyrics, while Winner sounded anthemic enough for the stadia it was written around, perfectly timed for the Olympics being held in London that summer.
Despite that variety, Elysium’s reception was muted among both fans and critics. As Tennant told CP of the era from Release to Elysium: “We had a dip where we got less poptastic and more deep.”
Depth suits Pet Shop Boys – look at Behaviour and Nonetheless – but the feeling of the passing of time that hangs over Elysium perhaps makes it appropriate that it was also their final album for Parlophone after 27 years, even though the duo were unaware at the time they’d soon become an indie band.
Newly independent, it was time for a complete reassessment of what Pet Shop Boys stood for. Less than a year after Elysium, the lasers were about to come back out…
The Songs
LEAVING
Currently the last Top 50 Pet Shop Boys single, Leaving was a good choice to open Elysium. A mid-paced shivering anthem, it introduces the Waters siblings with some of their most distinctive vocals on the album. As the title implies, Leaving also establishes the album’s theme of love’s lasting effects when someone has departed. One of Neil Tennant’s favourite PSB songs, Leaving is partly inspired by the death of his parents, who both passed during the time of making Yes and Elysium.
INVISIBLE
Possibly the ultimate song to espouse Neil Tennant’s belief that Pet Shop Boys eschewed pop to get deep around this period, Invisible is as mournful a song as Tennant/Lowe have ever written. One of Andrew Dawson’s best production moments, he recreates the minimalism of Kanye West’s 808s And Heartbreaks as Neil’s vocals are heartbreaking, doing the bare minimum to convey the melancholy of no longer being relevant, either as a band or to potential partners. You wouldn’t want this to be PSB’s whole ethos, but for one album it’s a stunning template.
WINNER
Having twice rejected approaches from the BBC to be Britain’s entry for Eurovision, Pet Shop Boys had promised to let them know if they ever wrote a suitable song. It led them to ask the then-new One Direction to perform Winner as Britain’s Eurovision entry. 1D never replied, so instead Winner became a No.86 non-smash for PSB. Tennant/Lowe claim it’s the anti-We Are The Champions in its lack of triumph, yet it’s powerful enough to merit more airplay when winners approach the podium at major sporting events.
YOUR EARLY STUFF
A lyrical companion to Go West’s absurdly catchy B-side Shameless, here the perils of the industry were far bleaker. Appropriately, Chris Lowe rewrote the original melody because it was too “jaunty”, the new version more fitting both for the rest of Elysium and the song’s idea that Pet Shop Boys themselves were being written off. Virtually every line has been said to Tennant by taxi drivers, resulting in one of the few songs where an artist effectively tells themselves to sod off and let the kids take over the charts instead. Bog off, grandad.
A FACE LIKE THAT
A simple pop song about an impossibly beautiful person, the first banger on Elysium could thematically only ever follow Your Early Stuff in the running order. Andrew Dawson championed its inclusion on Elysium when the Pets thought it was too uplifting. Their producer was right: like So Hard on Behaviour, it might be jarring but it also gives listeners a moment of energy after the preceding calm.
BREATHING SPACE
A rare example of a genuinely introspective Pet Shop Boys song, Breathing Space was written by Neil Tennant on acoustic guitar, about needing his rural home in Northumberland as a retreat from city life. It’s a pretty enough ballad, Tennant’s guitar offering an unusual Cat Stevens-style moment of relaxation, and it fits nicely into Elysium’s unhurried mood.
EGO MUSIC
If Your Early Stuff’s self-mockery has an air of melancholy, the catty Ego Music revels in looking outwards at artists who take their accomplishments far too seriously: something that, for Pet Shop Boys, would simply never do. An attack on musicians’ pomposity in general rather than aimed at any specific targets, only the line “I am my own demographic” was uttered by a particular musician: Tennant states he can’t remember who.
HOLD ON
As with Invisible, you wouldn’t want too many Pet Shop Boys songs to sound like Hold On, but as a one-off of Tennant/Lowe going fully optimistic, it’s a treat. More West End musical than West End Girls, Hold On throws everything into the mix in urging the listener not to give in to the gloom that, in 2012, was surrounding the recession. The Waters siblings are off the leash here in a song part gospel, weirdly also part Fiddler’s Dram’s Day Trip To Bangor. A song utterly bereft of ironic detachment.
GIVE IT A GO
Written from the perspective of a bumbling twit in a Richard Curtis film trying to chat up a glamorous woman, the line “I’m not saying that you can’t find yourself someone better, oh no/ But in the meantime, why not give it a go?” is peak ironic detachment after Hold On. It’s interesting that Neil Tennant pictures Give It A Go as being from a romcom, as melodically it has the air of an 80s sitcom theme like Just Good Friends or Ever Decreasing Circles.
MEMORY OF THE FUTURE
A straight-up love song, from its opening line “You seem to be inevitable to me” onwards, Memory Of The Future is unashamedly romantic. They didn’t know it at the time, but it makes for a strange choice as Pet Shop Boys’ final single for Parlophone after so long. Moreover, the sinister bop One Night is a B-side better than the single.
EVERYTHING MEANS SOMETHING
A lyrical cousin of So Hard, this slo-mo groove depicts a couple at odds over the supposedly trivial. One partner accuses the other of blowing things out of proportion, the other that apparently casual carelessness is typical of inherent thoughtlessness. It plays out over an appropriately doomy landscape that’s atypically industrial for PSB, Neil’s voice at its most stentorian.
REQUIEM IN DENIM AND LEOPARDSKIN
A masterpiece to end an occasionally uncertain album on, Requiem In Denim And Leopardskin is an appropriate full-stop for Pet Shop Boys both leaving Parlophone and for their era of embracing depth before going clubbing for their next two albums. As magnificent a producer as he was for a few years, Brian Higgins is a clot for refusing to consider this for Yes, apparently on the basis that it’s lyrically too similar to Nothing Has Been Proved. In fairness, it suits Elysium better anyway.
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