- Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have not suddenly got “political”, as some have thought with the release of their latest compilation of new tunes. Pet Shop Boys have been political since they released Please in 1985, with songs about the rise of the yuppie class (Opportunities Let’s Make Lots Of Money) and the decay of the inner city and working class areas (Suburbia). On each subsequent album Tennant and Lowe have not failed to cast a withering glance and express a droll opinion on society and politics, skewering (mostly) the capitalist, right of centre – but occasionally the self-centred smugness of the British Left (Love Is A Bourgeois Construct from 2013’s Electric, for instance).
Agenda is a short EP – only four tracks, each of standard single length (three minutes or so) and three of the four are high, mocking satire. The opener is Give Stupidity A Chance which has lyrics that just drip irony like concentrated acid, “We’ve heard quite enough from experts and their dealings / Why face the facts, when you can just feel the feelings?” and “I don’t wanna think about the world / I wanna talk about myself!” and “We need a leader who knows that money means class / With an eye for a peach-perfect piece of ass”. Makes you wonder if they had someone in mind?
On Social Media has a number of PSB tropes, musically: the heavy bass beat, the disco-claps and the drive to carry a series of nursey rhyme like lyrics sung in Tennant’s straight forward vocal style, layered with deeper vocal harmonizing in the chorus. It lists all the things that social media brings the user – from having your tweets retweeted, thousands of likes, and the last words of the song “I feel so empowered!” show up how vacuous life lived artificially can be.
What Are We Going Do About The Rich? is another anthem, this one you can imagin dozens of burgeoning young socialists and their fellow-travellers chanting as they march on Parliament, demanding the end of the system as it is. Except, is it a bit twee? Maybe, but lyrically it's another essay on what's happening now, the same as Tennant and Lowe have always done.
The last track eschews the tub thumping – both musically and lyrically. The Forgotten Child has the sounds of A Different Point Of View from the 1993 Very album. It’s a slower ballad with a gently sung phrase. It also has a strong political point to make: looking at the refugee crises and how the West has used defenceless and traumatized people as a weapon to convince their own populations for the need of more security, more draconian laws, more surveillance, more anger and hate against the one who is different. In the middle of that, a child is lost, forgotten, abandoned and probably dead.
With the promise of a new full length album late this year, Agenda feels like a pressure-valve release from the Pet Shop Boys, getting out some of the anger and frustration at the ridiculousness of life in the modern world; where the rich, powerful and political classes are in charge, but showing no leadership, sense or compassion.
As it is said, if you didn’t laugh, you’d go mad – and Agenda provides a relief, of sorts, before returning to the barricades of contemporary existence. In the last instance it's a fight to stay sane, when idiotic iconoclasts become leaders and stupidity prevails over sound science and sense.
- Blair Martin.