History Music / PetShopBoys

* CoverVersion: "Always On My Mind" (Music/ElvisPresley), "It's Alright" (Sterling Void), "Where The Streets Have No Name/Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" (mashup of Music/U2 and Music/FrankieVali), "Go West" (Music/VillagePeople), "Losing My Mind" and "Somewhere" (Music/StephenSondheim), "If Love Were All" and "Sail Away" (Creator/NoelCoward), "Viva La Vida" (Coldplay), and "The Last to Die" (Music/BruceSpringsteen). Some music bits of "Se a vida é" were famously taken from a previous latin song.

*** Also, their cover version of "Always On My Mind" features the line "Maybe I didn't love you." without any qualifiers (which is the last lyric in both in the album version and the early-fade version of the single mix), which doesn't exactly change the meaning, but does make it substantially less ambiguous.
*** They actually stated their cover of "Always On My Mind" was done as they felt that the lyrics of the original unintentionally came across as very selfish and neglectful on the narrator's part, so in their cover made it as cold and unfeeling as possible.

* InnocentInnuendo: The beginning of "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" ("You always wanted a lover, I only wanted a job") may be this. As soon becomes apparent, that's ''[[IncrediblyLamePun actually]]'' "job" as in employment.

* LighterAndSofter: ''Introspective'' was a slight example of this after ''Actually'', as while its lyrics were still pretty dark, they weren't so to the extent of its predecessor's. The more upbeat, house-influenced style of this album was also this after ''Actually'''s often-gloomy SynthPop. On top of this, ''Introspective'' features a BittersweetEnding in "It's Alright" as opposed to the DownerEnding of ''Actually'''s "King's Cross".

* LongTitle: "Where The Streets Have No Name/Can't Take My Eyes Off of You", "I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Anymore", "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk", "This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave". Inverted with the album titles, which are always one word.

** "What have I Done To Deserve This" is about acquiring a job and falling in love with someone there, then getting dumped and losing his money.

** Their cover of "Where The Streets Have No Name" sounds really upbeat and even euphoric, however it's a pretty vicious deconstruction of both the original song, and 'rock 'n' roll' in general.
* MadnessMantra: The title line in "I Want To Wake Up", eventually morphing into "I want to wake up with you" as the narrator sounds increasingly terrified.

* MatingDance: "Tonight Is Forever", "Hit Music", "We All Feel Better In The Dark", and "The Boy Who Couldn't Keep His Clothes On" are all pretty much metaphors relating dancing to sex.

* MohsScaleOfRockAndMetalHardness: Not normally all that relevant for this band (the music they play is mostly electronic), but "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?", with its guitar feedback squalls and hard-edged beat, is a low 5, which is surprisingly hard for them (and proves they have the ability to do harder songs when they desire).
* MoneySong: Subverted in "Rent", "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)," "Shopping." Sadly, for some listeners who didn't get the joke, these songs cemented them falsely as amoral children of the profit-loving 80s.

** "Postscript", "The Night I Fell In Love", "Love, etc", "Legacy".

* SpokenWordInMusic: Done a couple of times, but most notably in "It's A Sin", where they sampled a NASA countdown [[RuleOfCool because it sounded cool]]. Also: the intro for "DJ Culture", their extended mix for "Somewhere", their 1986 "italian" mix for "Paninaro" (sampling Chris Lowe's words from a TV interview), some TV snippets on "Electricity" and Neil repeating "I hope it's gonna be alright" at the end of the album version of "It's Alright".

* StraightGay: "The Truck Driver And His Mate". Possibly Chris Lowe himself--he's never confirmed or denied one way or the other.

** Music/{{U2}}: PSB mashed up their very poppy cover of "Where The Streets Have No Name" with the very poppy "I Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You", and released it as a double A-side with "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?". U2 reportedly said "What have we done to deserve this?" But after that, U2 stopped taking themselves so seriously, and we got the wonderful ''Achtung Baby''.
*** "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously" is itself a TakeThat to pompous-but-shallow pop acts with a tendency to self-righteously spout off about various social issues without a great deal of understanding of them. Given the nature of the single the TakeThat to U2 is clear, but it also references a then-popular boy band double-act called Bros.
** Music/{{Eminem}}: Due to Mr. Mathers' rampant homophobia, they recorded "The Night I Fell In Love", a sweet AffectionateParody about a college kid having a one-night stand with an Eminem CaptainErsatz. (It could be about any rapper, but the lyrics reference "Stan", a single of his, and Music/DrDre, his producer.) In response, Eminem dedicated a line to them in "Canibitch":

* TotallyRadical: From "I Want To Wake Up": "Turning in my sleep, you called me a fool/To fall in love, is it so uncool?" Really [[MoodWhiplash breaks the mood]] in an otherwise haunting SanitySlippageSong.
** Averted in "The Night I Fell In Love"--for a 48-year-old singing the part of a maybe 19-year old, he sounds incredibly natural.

* {{Zeerust}}: Commented on in "This Used To Be The Future", and combined with IWantMyJetpack.

!!Pet Shop Tropes:

** The original version of "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)" ends with a DroneOfDread and Neil saying these downright eerie lines:

*** It's even longer in the 12" Mix.

*** They actually stated their cover of "Always On My Mind" was done as they felt that the lyrics of the original unintentionally came across as very selfish and neglectful on the narrator's part, so in their cover made it as cold and unfeeling as possible.

* BackToFront: "One Thing Leads To Another": The song begins with a man dying after a car crash, and ends with the man's girlfriend moving out to live with her mother. In between, the man falls into depression and loses his job, goes to a bar, gets drunk, picks up a woman and gets her in bed only to find [[UnsettlingGenderReveal she's a pre-op transsexual]], tries to drive home in drunken confusion, and wrecks. They did record a chronological-order version with the US single market in mind, they never released it but [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QKuf__2x6Q it has surfaced]].

** The insulting and pretentious [[StealthInsult Stealth Insults]] in "Yesterday, When I Was Mad" are apparently all real things that have been said to the Boys over the years.

*** They actually stated their cover of "Always On My Mind" was done as they felt that the lyrics of the original unintentionally came across as very selfish and neglectful on the narrator's part, so in their cover made it as cold and unfeeling as possible.

* CoverVersion: "Always On My Mind" (Music/ElvisPresley), "It's Alright" (Sterling Void), "Where The Streets Have No Name/Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" (mashup of U2 and Frankie Valli), "Go West" (Music/VillagePeople), "Losing My Mind" and "Somewhere" (Music/StephenSondheim), "If Love Were All" and "Sail Away" (Creator/NoelCoward), "Viva La Vida" (Coldplay), and "The Last to Die" (Music/BruceSpringsteen). Some music bits of "Se a vida é" were famously taken from a previous latin song.

* TitleTrack: [[AvertedTrope Averted throughout their career]], with [[DownplayedTrope a few borderline cases]]:

** Whereas "Pandemonium" ''did'' feature on ''Pandemonium'' ... as part of a medley. With ''Pandemonium'' being a live album.

** A more minor example in "The Theatre" clearly shows their opinion of Creator/AndrewLloydWebber: "I was only hoping for a bit of cash/From a patron of the arts--or at least ''Theatre/ThePhantomOfTheOpera''..."

* StepfordSuburbia: "[[CaptainObvious Suburbia"]] which discusses the endless boredom and consequent potential for trouble inherent in suburban life.

** The insulting and pretentious StealthInsults in "Yesterday, When I Was Mad" are apparently all real things that have been said to the Boys over the years.

* SpokenWordInMusic: Done a couple of times, but most notably in "It's A Sin", where they sampled a NASA countdown [[RuleOfCool because it sounded cool]]. Also: the intro for "DJ Culture", their extended mix for "Somewhere", their 1986 "italian" mix for "Paninaro" (sampling Chris Lowe's words from a TV interview), and some TV snippets on "Electricity".

* EpicRocking: The entirety of ''Introspective'', especially "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7apkXKEEwms Always On My Mind/In My House]]"(9:05) and "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh8ccKv2M98 It's Alright]]"(9:23). Also, some of the extended/12" mixes, eg "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIzbqk0zG6s It's A Sin]]"(7:40) or "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4a0xZMMlqE Suburbia (The Full Horror)]]".

* ConsciousHipHop: "West End Girls", one of the first rap songs to hit #1 on the Billboard chart (and possibly the only time a couple of nerdy white Brits have made it onto the US R&B charts), which drew heavy influence from GrandmasterFlash and the Furious Five's [[TropeMaker "The Message"]].

*** "Go West", released in 1993, added another layer of meaning to the original--the video makes it clear that it's also addressed to the former USSR. It also refers to how the gay utopia described in the Music/Village People's original had been all but destroyed by AIDS and homophobia in the ensuing years.

*** "Go West", released in 1993, added another layer of meaning to the original--the video makes it clear that it's also addressed to the former USSR.

* EpicRocking: The entirety of ''Introspective'', especially "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7apkXKEEwms Always On My Mind/In My House]]"(9:05) and "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh8ccKv2M98 It's Alright]]"(9:23). Also, some of the extended/12" mixes, eg "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIzbqk0zG6s It's A Sin]]"(7:40).

[[quoteright:239:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/petshopboys.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:239:"We were never being boring -- we were never being bored."]]

-->"Left to My Own Devices"

** Every album. In particular, every studio album without fail, but also most other album releases. Although other types of album get a bit more leeway, and limited releases even more so.

** Live albums (''Concrete'', ''Pandemonium'') and even live video releases (''Performance'', ''Somewhere'', ''Montage'', ''Cubism'', ''Pandemonium'') also follow the format, though ''[=DiscoVery=]'' [[ZigZaggedTrope plays with it somewhat]].

* GriefSong: "Your Funny Uncle", about a funeral of a friend of Neil's who succumbed to AIDs. It really, really shows in the vocals, and they only did one take because Neil broke down crying afterwards. "Being Boring", written about the same person, is also this to a lesser extent.

* GriefSong: "Your Funny Uncle". It really, really shows in the vocals, and they only did one take because Neil broke down crying afterwards.

* InnocentInnuendo: The beginning of "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" ("You always wanted a lover, I only wanted a job") may be this. That's ''[[IncrediblyLamePun actually]]'' "job" as in employment.

** "E-Mail" is about the spread of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU ILOVEYOU]] virus.

* NonAppearingTitle: "Postscript", "The Night I Fell In Love", "Love, etc", "Legacy". In fact, "Postscript" holds the distinction of the title not appearing... anywhere, in fact... for some time as an occupational hazard of being a [[HiddenTrack hidden track]] (the title eventually showed up in the commentary booklet with the 2001 rerelease and on the official lyrics on their website, prior to which it was known by its first line ("I believe in ecstasy")).

* ProtestSong: "Shopping" is about Thatcherism. "This Used To Be The Future" is about Iran and nukes. A lot on ''Fundamental'' is meant to protest the Iraq War and Tony Blair, especially "Integral", which is about the proposed national ID cards in the UK. It's the only song they've ever done where Neil sounds genuinely pissed off (well, maybe bar "The theatre" - another protest song), and one of their very few songs where the video correlates to the message of the song. See SurrealMusicVideo below. Not to mention "I'm With Stupid," which is a satire of the relationship between Tony Blair and George W. Bush done as a [[HoYay gay]] [[CrackPairing love song]].