All Hits And Zero Misses As Pet Shop Boys Bring Dreamworld To The Dublin 3Arena

“This is Dreamland where Che Guevara and Claude Debussy are behind the bike sheds together and being boring is a sin.”

That’s Neil Tennant welcoming us to Dreamworld, the parallel universe the Pet Shop Boys have created for their Greatest Hits tour, a tech-heavy spectacle – I’ve Kraftwerk, Daft Punk, The Matrix, Blade Runner and Doctor Who written in my notebook – that also manages to be intensely human.

Taking to a stage that’s previously been bathed in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, Tennant and Chris Lowe spend the next two hours mining a back catalogue which features over half of the 44 PSB singles that have made it into the UK Top 40 – an even bigger tally than The Beatles.

The show starts with the duo stood beside each on a neon-lit street, which is the perfect backdrop to the opening ‘Suburbia’ whose “Let’s take a ride, and run with the dogs tonight” refrain remains one of pop’s most inviting invitations.

Resplendent in a snow white greatcoat (Neil) and an equally ghostly puffa jacket (Chris) and wearing their Dreamworld face masks, they follow that up with the double-jab of ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ and ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)’, the latter a reminder that the Pet Shop Boys have spent a goodly part of their career with tongues planted firmly in cheeks.

Another example of that is their deliciously camp take on ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’, which includes its usual mid-song ‘I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ mash-up.

‘Rent’ takes us back to the time when the Pet Shop Boys were both Smash Hits darlings and standard-bearers for a gay community that because of police homophobia, queer bashing, Maggie Thatcher’s loathsome Section 28 and the then stigma of HIV/AIDS still had to be wary of putting its head above the parapet.

While some of his contemporaries are struggling now to hit the high notes, Tennant’s voice throughout is immaculate with Lowe the super-cool Charlie Watts of the keyboards.

Seven songs in, the urban street scene gives way to the full everything including the kitchen-sink stage set, which gives us a first proper look at their all-singing, all-dancing, all-banging (as in percussion) band.

Their presence is keenly felt on ‘Se A Vida É (That’s The Way Life Is)’, which sounds like it’s just flown in from the Rio Carnival and ‘New York City Boy’, a homage to Donna Summer, Odyssey, Chic and the rest of the Studio 54 generation.

‘Always On My Mind’ is another example of how the Pet Shop Boys succeed in making classic songs their own, with Tennant grinning from ear to ear when the crowd takes over the singing of it.

By now the duo are decked out in metallic silver lame numbers, which shimmer under the lights as ‘Go West’ and ‘It’s A Sin’ are similarly bellowed back to them by the partying masses.

Most bands would quit while they're comprehensively ahead, but the Pet Shop Boys display that fragile human side of theirs on the encore versions of the song which started it all for them in 1984, ‘West End Girls’, and ‘Being Boring’ – they’re not, ever – which includes that heart-wrenching line: “All the people I was kissing/ Some are here and some are missing.”

Harry Styles was close to pop perfection at Slane, but the Pet Shop Boys have just gone and bettered it.

STUART CLARK