I was a teenage Pet Shop Boys fan. Decades later, they’re always on my mind

Between the ages of 12 and 16, I was shyly navigating the world while avoiding eye contact, but the music I played spoke volumes about me: above all, I was a Pet Shop Boys fan. The British synth-pop duo (aka Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe) had released several hits before it suddenly clicked that they were my favourite band, thanks to their show-stopping 1987 collab with Dusty Springfield, What Have I Done To Deserve This?; it was an electric epiphany, like a dress rehearsal for more grown-up emotions. 

My Iraqi Muslim family had just arrived in south London after years moving around the UK; my Baghdad birthplace felt very far away, but big city life sounded tantalisingly within reach, accompanied by the poetry, poignancy and electronic hooks of the PSBs’ songs. Their music and coolly surreal visuals captivated my geeky younger self. They also projected the West End Girl that I wished to become.

Pop fandom is a full-time dopamine rush, occasionally punctured by stuff like school and chores. I’d scour magazines like Smash Hits and Just Seventeen for PSB pin-ups and cuttings to decorate my room; the gay coding of the PSBs’ material didn’t preclude them from also being a band for infatuated girls. I’d giddily tape TV and radio appearances, memorise lyrics, and save my pocket money for remix vinyl. When I was 13, my family spent a year in Saudi Arabia: a rigidly strict environment where pop fandom was my secret freedom. I transplanted my bedroom posters from Wandsworth to Al-Khobar; I wore my PSB T-shirt under my abaya, and got music fixes through bootleg cassettes. Wherever I was, the PSBs represented a gateway to somewhere more exciting: the promise of all-night clubbing, art, adventure, romance, a defiant pride in being “different”.

When we grow up, we surrender childish things – though not entirely. Pop fandom, its obsessive detail and excitability, also revealed my latent music journalist tendencies. For my 16th birthday present, I watched the PSBs live, and almost keeled over Wembley Arena’s balcony because Neil Tennant smiled at me. At 21, I appeared composed when I interviewed them backstage, as a newbie writer for Time Out magazine; in my 30s, I feigned cool when I found myself sitting next to Tennant at a Liza Minnelli show. More recently, I spotted an advert for the duo’s latest gig residency, Obscure Pet Shop Boys (so called because the set lists centre B-sides and “deep cuts”), illustrated with a mid-1980s band shot. It sparked an instant sensation: a flashback to my poster-strewn teenage bedroom; the electricity of a pop culture awakening that still feels hard-wired in my system.

The Obscure Pet Shop Boys shows are a glorious celebration of fandom, as is a new book: Pet Shop Boys Volume (an extended version of their 2006 Catalogue) which transforms the archive collection I once dreamed of building into a beautiful art tome. Whatever the subject matter or trend, fandom is a universal force sustained across generations – and it's also the focus of Holy Pop!, an upcoming exhibition about pop culture devotion and the “modern shrines” we create for our heroes.

“It was really about reframing the idea of the ‘crazy fan’ and putting focus on the emotional reasons why we keep objects,” explains Holy Pop! curator Tory Turk. “What makes us human is to love, to feel – and a lot of our spirituality is placed in the tangible, especially if we’re not religious. It’s about feeling and uplifting, through the process of homage. There’s something innate about that stillness and care when you move or arrange objects.”

Turk has regularly focused on youth subcultures and fan-made collections, and her previous projects have ranged from the Design Museum’s Skateboard exhibition (2023) to archiving HyMag, the world’s largest magazine collection (53,000 issues, belonging to broadcaster and pop culture enthusiast James Hyman). 

“The museum is everywhere,” she says. At Holy Pop!, the teenage bedroom, such as my own PSB-themed haven, has a particular sanctity (“It’s that private space where you close the door and explore your own identity, navigate where you belong”), and “shrines” pay tribute to icons from Prince to Harry Potter characters – but, ultimately, they’re preserving our personal stories.

Last October, the music video network Vevo released a report, “Fandom = Cultural Currency”, analysing consumer loyalty and business longevity. Post-digital fan communities are explicitly branded (for example, Swifties or Beyhive and BTS ARMY members); my own youth was more loosely tribal (most of my schoolfriends were Brosettes; I loved that the PSBs were moody outliers to the boyband scene). Many of the Vevo insights seem timeless: young fans express how their favourite artists influence how they present themselves to the world, and make them feel more in tune with themselves. Clearly, older audiences also aren’t impervious to targeted ads or “needle-drop” tunes. But the data could never fully harness the energy of fandom, how exhilaratingly hormonal yet wholesome and all-encompassing it is.

In the 2023 film All of Us Strangers – directed by Andrew Haigh, another PSB devotee –  Andrew Scott’s main character intensely relives childhood events, including Christmas Day 1987, soundtracked by the PSBs on Top of the Pops. When I watched that scene, I replayed my own adolescent fervour. By the time I left home, I’d taken down my posters, but I kept the T-shirt and all my records and cassettes. I can still pinpoint each song from its opening bars: my ultimate is I Get Excited (You Get Excited Too) (the pulsing flipside to their 1988 single Heart, fact fans). I became a West End Girl and remained unabashedly geeky – and I have never stopped feeling thrilled by it all.

“Culture and music keeps you young,” says Turk. “If you haven’t grown out of it, it’s probably because it keeps you feeling alive. Even when you’re 50 or 60, it will always be part of the foundation of who you are.”

Pet Shop Boys Volume is published by Thames & Hudson on 7 April. Obscure Pet Shop Boys is at the Electric Ballroom, London NW1, from 6 to 10 April

Holy Pop! runs at Somerset House, London WC2 from 21 May to 9 August