Pet Shop Boys’ Relentless excursions into 90s dance
(Just a word to say that I wrote this at the start of September 2023, when Relentless hadn’t yet been re-released. It’s not quite so lost to history now. But the main points still stand.)
Few bands have straddled the divide between full-on mainstream pop and underground dance culture as artfully as the Pet Shop Boys. Right from the start, the English duo’s sound has drunk deep from club music, be it in the influence of hi-NRG innovator Bobby O, who produced the first version of West End Girls; the duo covering Sterling Void’s rave classic It’s Alright; Pet Shops Boys working with Stuart Price; or releasing four remix album, in the Disco series. At the same time, the duo’s singles have provided a reliable insight into what is happening in dance production, with most releases including remixes from the cream of the current electronic crop.
And yet one of the band’s most danceable albums, the one where, perhaps, they most obviously go dance without external aid, has been rather lost to history. Relentless — sometimes called Very Relentless — was a mini album released in 1993 with early editions of the Pet Shop Boys’ fifth album, Very. It features six, largely instrumental, tracks in which Chris Lowe stretches out his dance tendrils, abandoning the strict song structures of the band’s pop work in favour of extended grooves.
As Chris Lowe explained, “I had this studio in the country I was writing a lot of dance music which wouldn’t work as traditional verse-chorus pop music. I was writing stuff knowing that it wasn’t going to be on Very, some of which became Relentless, though there’s still some other tracks lying around, which I’m sure will never see the light of day.”
Or, as Neil Tennant explained in the 2006 book Pet Shop Boys, Catalogue, “We had done several instrumental tracks which for the most part I couldn’t think of any words for and couldn’t see the point of writing words for, because they sounded great.”
On the one hand, Tennant is right: these six songs do sound great. Relentless is a Pet Shop Boys dance-floor album straight from the early 90s, mixing the proto-trance riffs of Frankfurt clubbing with the deep, relentless percussion of New York City DJs and the dubby touches of early progressive house, marshalled by Chris Lowe’s excellent melodic instincts.
In fact, if you look at the remixes on the singles released from Very, they give a neat approximation of the Relentless sound: Murk plus MK, Junior Vasquez and Kevin Saunderson, stirred in with a soupçon of Jam & Spoon, Farley & Heller and Rollo. (You can find many of these on Disco 2, incidentally.)
On the other hand, Relentless isn’t really so far from the classic Pet Shop Boys’ pop sound. As Lowe says, the album has fewer song structures and more grooves; the drums hit harder, with a little added swing, and the band use more samples. But they have the same sense of melody, drama and epic ambition as the best of the band’s pop catalogue and (at least) two of the Relentless songs, Forever In Love and One Thing Leads To Another, could have slotted easily onto Very. (In fact, an early version of Forever In Love was apparently considered as a B side to Go West, while One Thing Leads To Another was at one point considered for single release.)
it is no coincidence that these two songs are the undoubted highlights of Relentless and the tunes with the most complete vocals. Forever In Love combines sweeping orchestral chords with a wonderfully skippy house beat, to which Neil adds a classically deadpan spoken word and a brilliantly nagging chorus. One Thing Leads To Another is the hidden gem, though, a song that simultaneously stands apart from and stands up to anything in the Pet Shop Boys’ catalogue. The song notably features a heavy breakbeat, something the Pet Shop Boys had experimented with before — see the Funky Drummer loop on My October Symphony — but never quite pushed to these exaggerated depths, employing a classic Amen break modulated in murk to incredible effect. I’ve heard it called the Pet Shop Boys’ jungle song, which it isn’t, but you can see why someone would say that. To this, they add a gorgeously hangdog vocal from Neil Tennant and a bridge filled with Italo house pianos that makes me want to punch the air with euphoria. I won’t be the first person to call it the Pet Shop Boys’ great lost song.
The album’s other four tracks aren’t quite at that level — how could they be? — but they give a fascinating insight into an alternative path for the Pet Shop Boys of the early 90s, as if they remixed themselves under the influence of their own 12 inch releases. My Head Is Spinning, which opens the album, is a New York / prog house cross over, where a Wild Pitch-esque beat with big snare rolls meets prog house riffs, a driving, although dubbed out, bass line and a great, one-line chorus from Neil.
We Came From Outer Space, KDX 125 and The Man Who Has Everything mine a similarly prog house / proto trance vein. KDX 125, apparently named after Chris’s motorbike, is the only entirely instrumental song on the album and also the only one that sounds unfinished. Or perhaps finished but boring, although the song’s gothic organ climax is fabulous.
We Came From Outer Space is notably weirder, sitting somewhere between progressive house and electro, with the slightest suggestion of a breakbeat sneaking out under four four drums. The song is, as the name suggests, rather spacey but incredibly warm and clean, as if Lowe can’t quite bring himself to wash away his pop instincts. It also has a genuinely magnificent choral breakdown that makes me think of It’s A Sin and which could, were the Pet Shop Boys to do it live, bring festival crowds to their mucky knees.
The Man Who Has Everything is where Relentless comes closest to the early trance sound that Sven Väth, Jam & Spoon, Cosmic Baby et al were cooking up in Frankfurt. The song’s sound is metallic, yet epic, with dramatic chords rubbing up against cut-up vocal samples, some of which come from First Choice’s disco classic Let No Man Put Asunder, and a fluttering synth pattern that sounds like scaling a stairway to heaven, in the way of the best Eye Q and Harthouse records.
The fact that Relentless was a limited edition makes you wonder how the Pet Shop Boys saw this album. Was it just a Chris Lowe experiment? A chance for the Boys to let their hair down? An adjunct to Very? Something best forgotten? Certainly, the duo’s next studio album, Bilingual, didn’t sound like it had taken many cues from Relentless.
But that, perhaps, is part of the enigmatic, unpredictable charm of the Pet Shop Boys. Relentless may be something of a dead end but for it is a key album in the Pet Shop Boys’ discography: it’s their early 90s dance album, much as Introspective was their 80s dance peak, and Electric the height of the electronic 2010s. It’s also the perfect accompaniment to Very — far more so, to my ears, than Disco 2, which came out in 1994 — which remains their biggest selling album. And it is a rare opportunity to hear what happens when Chris Lowe wigs out and Neil Tennant decides to go with the flow, confident in his long-term musical partner’s ability to spin a groove.
More than anything, though, Relentless makes me dream of a night out with the Pet Shop Boys in the splendour of the early 90s, a soundtrack to smartly-dressed decadence and endless grooves, before clubs became super and beats became boring, when clubbing was still something special, mysterious and unique in my teenage mind. Inventive, quirky and mysterious, Relentless offers anything but the bull-headed inflexibility that its title suggests.
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