It's been 25 years since Pet Shop Boys released a little ditty called West End Girls, a catchy electronica dance number loosely based on T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land that would later climb to the top of the charts.
Don't let their simple name — they had friends at the time who worked at a London pet shop, go figure — fool you into thinking this an irrelevant band of a bygone era. Unlike so many of their '80s pop brethren, the British duo of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe escaped the decade of one-hit wonders by spinning out one smart hit after another.
Original tunes like It's a Sin and Suburbia mix with bestselling covers of classics like Always On My Mind and Go West to form a music catalog punctuated with equal doses of biting social commentary, acid-laced humor, carefree romance and soul-crushing heartbreak.
And yeah, you can dance to them — big time — so much so that Rolling Stone once branded Pet Shop Boys as "Euro-disco's poet laureates."
Expect a lavish and theatrical production full of pulsing music, video, costume changes, dancers and — well, anything's possible — when Neil and Chris set up shop tonight at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, 1010 N MacInnes Place, Tampa, for a very rare Florida tour stop.
Tickets for the 8 p.m. show are $39.75 to $69.75. (813) 229-7827.
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