Party conference: why the Pet Shop Boys are worthy of academic consideration

For the past three decades, Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have – uniquely – written chart-topping music that’s as comfortable between the whistling lips of a milkman as booming from the speaker in a leather bar. Now, the electronic pop duo can add academia’s rarefied halls to that list. A two-day symposium in Edinburgh next week aims to celebrate and dissect their catalogue and influence, including talks on Disco Pastiche And The Haunting Of Aids and Musical Desire And Frustration In Two Early Songs. Happily enough, it all concludes with a disco.

Academic conferences around music are not exactly new (at one devoted to the Fall, notorious control freak Mark E Smith sent his mum along to keep an eye on proceedings) but often feature geeky fans earnestly discussing their vinyl collections over pints of mild. However, PSB symposium organiser Glyn Davis has a different take. “We wanted to focus attention on a band that was more ‘pop’,” he says, “but which had been equally pivotal to British culture of the last few decades.”

Indeed, there are few bands who’ve managed to combine the high art of elaborate stage shows and experimental videos with the hard business of flogging records (more than 50m worldwide since 1986) with the ease that the Pet Shop Boys have. It’s why they deserve an academic conference in a way that Oasis, say, never will.

A former music critic, Tennant has always been an acute observer of pop’s DNA, well placed to subvert it using other art forms. Take the rousing song It’s A Sin, with its video by director Derek Jarman. Controversially, it used Catholic imagery in a radical and defiant rejection of religious moralising in a more homophobic age than now. Every PSB tour, meanwhile, has been a theatrical extravaganza – with choreography, complicated sets and costumes – rather than a mere gig.

The Pet Shop Boys are still taking this hugely fun, collage approach, raiding both art and pop in the name of hits. Recent track Love Is A Bourgeois Construct, offers much to chew over, featuring EDM-inspired brash beats, Auto-Tune, a melody taken from 17th-century composer Henry Purcell and lyrics about “taking tea like Tony Benn”. And their new album Super will be followed by a residency at the grandiose Royal Opera House.

Ever ahead of the curve, the Pet Shop Boys point to a future in which more pop acts will have their work discussed by academics. Arguably, the signs are already there in the endless think pieces that spring up every time Beyoncé releases a video or Kanye boils an egg. In the future, perhaps we’ll finally be able to get our heads around the Bataillean implications of Lady Gaga’s meat dress.

The Pet Shop Boys Symposium is at University of Edinburgh, Thu & Fri (petshopboyssymposium.tumblr.com); Super is out on 1 April