Shout-out to Pet Shop Boys' music videos from the 'Very' era
The next album in my review queue is Pet Shop Boys' 1993 pop experience Very. When approaching an album review, I try to always go back a little to revisit music albums or performance videos from the relevant periods. Doing this for Very has been such a delight because it's been so many years since I had watched these videos (the PopArt DVD used to be regularly on in the background of my bedroom) and I'd forgotten how imaginative and fun they were. Very was the first PSB era where the duo immersed themselves in a particular visual theme, creating almost personas of sorts for the album cycle which would carry through the videos and other promotional material. The Further Listening reissue liner notes go into this in more detail:
For this phase of their career, the Pet Shop Boys decided that they would almost entirely change the way they presented themselves. They were tired of being naturalistic. Arma Andon, their American manager at the time, had asked them why they staged these elaborate, costumed, theatrical fantasies in concert, but rarely explored the same kind of presentation in videos or for records, and they begun to wonder the same thing themselves. "Also", says Neil, "I think we thought we'd done to death the classic Pet Shop Boys thing, and it was finally completely summed up on the cover of Discography, Chris stony-faced and me with an ironically-arched eyebrow. We kind of thought: right, we've just completely done that now, let's do something not real."
Another influence was the rise of increasingly realistic computer games -- "I was playing computer games a lot", says Chris, "and thinking, 'Wouldn't it be great if we became this thing removed from reality and existing in a non-real world?'"
The result was a series of increasingly whimsical videos, fully immersed in the possibilities of early 1990s CGI until they didn't even have to appear in the video ("Liberation" - though "Yesterday, When I Was Mad" took a decided step back to wind down the cycle). Essential pop viewing. My favourite is probably "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing".