Back at the start of the 1980s, pop music was becoming as much about fashion as it was about the music itself (indeed, in some cases the fashion was so loud it drowned out the tune). Fighting his way through the melee of makeup and mascara was one Neil Tennant, reviewer of singles for UK teen music mag Smash Hits. By the time he left that job to devote himself full-time to the electronic dance duo he'd been pottering around with since 1981, Tennant would have seen and heard the best and worst of what pop music had to offer. No surprise then that the band he formed with keyboardist and programmer Chris Lowe, Pet Shop Boys, would turn out to be unlike any other outfit in English pop history.