Inner sleeve, Super, 2016

credit: © 2006 and 2026 Pet Shop Boys

For generations of music fans, Pet Shop Boys have been the soundtrack of their lives since their 1986 debut album, Please, and its smash single, “West End Girls.” The British synthpop duo of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe has gone on to sell 50 million records (include the hits “Opportunities,” “It’s a Sin,” “Domino Dancing,” “Rent” and “Can You Forgive Her?”) and become a popular live act whose shows are renowned for their eye-catching stage setting and costumes.

While the music has been fundamental to Pet Shop Boys’ success, the visual aspects of their duo’s career have been equally crucial to their identity. It’s the latter part that makes up Pet Shop Boys Volume, a newly published book featuring Pet Shop Boys’ stunning visual output from the last 40 years. In addition to detailed commentary for each of Tennant and Lowe’s album sleeves, singles covers, music videos and stage sets, Pet Shop Boys Volume features essays about and interviews with the duo.

One of the contributors to Volume is the British music journalist Chris Heath, who has covered Pet Shop Boys from the beginning of their career and has written two books about them, Pet Shop Boys, Literally and Pet Shop Boys versus America. He says that while Pet Shop Boys Volume is not a biography per se, it is an alternative way of telling a story through visuals in a conventional book format.

“It had a [2006] precursor called Catalogue that was a classic kind of coffee-table art book,” Heath says. “And it was very much the thought this time is, ‘How about doing it as a book that might signal to people, ‘You can read this.’”

As seen in the book, Pet Shop Boys’ visual presentation coexists with their music. “If you're sort of sort of serious about the creativity of doing that, all of these things are available to you,” Heath explains. “And in an ideal world, they're both sort of symbiotic with each other, but they all build on each other. They're all just amazing opportunities to make what you do more distinct and more special. It's not like some kind of extra icing or frosting on it. It's all part of it. But it doesn't mean that the music is sort of lesser or more central in any way at all.”

In surveying the numerous items in the compendium, one can interpret Pet Shop Boys’ visual aesthetic as a combination of detachment, seriousness and humor. “I think it's all those three and more, really,” Heath says. “The powerful thing about it is that there isn't a reductive kind of thing they're doing. They're constantly just trying to keep things interesting.”

“When you read the commentaries in Volume,” he continues, “you realize how much thought and creativity is going into making things that somehow react or respond or augment the record or tour or whatever else it is that's been created. So it's not some kind of abstract add-on.”

Though the duo’s photographs, fashions and music videos go back 40 years, they don’t appear dated but rather timeless in reflecting a modern/futuristic sensibility. “I think partly there’s almost a banal reason just that they're kind of good or effective,” Heath says. “They've always had a very strong kind of barometer and instinct not to do what other people are doing. Not in a bloody-minded way, but it just seems exciting to find your own way of expressing yourself.”

He adds, “I'm sure you can point to some things within the Pet Shop Boys' whole aesthetic that have aspects of that, but for the most part, that's not what they're trying to do, which is mirror their time. They're trying to, if they're mirroring anything, they're mirroring their own special world.”

An important part of Pet Shop Boys’ identity can be attributed to their longtime collaborator, the British graphic designer Mark Farrow. He has worked with the duo since the sleeve design of 1986’s Please, which distinctly features a photograph of the duo as a tiny square inside a white background.

“He's been an immensely important part of it,” Heath says of Farrow. “It's a collaboration between all of the people. Mark's incredibly talented, and he's got an incredible imagination. He's got a sensibility that, when they find the thing that works, dovetails with theirs. Mark's done amazing work with other people, but it's not the same as his work with the Pet Shop Boys.

“So he’s played a huge part. He’s designed, I’d say, over 90% of the sleeves in this book. But then, of course, that’s not the only part of their visual sensibility, either in the book or in life. He’s very important."

The book includes two lengthy interviews that Heath conducted with Tennant and Lowe in 2006 and 2024, in which they spoke about their look and visual design as well as their long career.

“One of the reasons why they're so interesting and pleasurable to talk to from my point of view,” Heath says, “and why it remains a fascinating thing for me to do is I remember sitting down for that most recent interview [in 2024] and sort of thinking like, ‘Oh, did we say everything on this subject last time? And am I going to know everything they're going to say?’ Obviously, it's edited and sculpted to a degree, but it's a pretty straight account of how the conversation went.

“And it was straight away into loads of really fascinating, interesting things that I don't think we ever had talked about in that way,” he continues, “because the conversations you have when you're not having that kind of interview are slightly different. I was sort of heartened by how easy it was for it to be interesting and new.”

As conveyed through the 2024 interview for Pet Shop Boys Volume, Tennant and Lowe do not appear to have any desire to slow down at this point in their history and remain active as creative artists and performers.

“You can’t fake that,” Heath says about Pet Shop Boys’ longevity. “You’re either interested in still doing things and excited about it, or you’re not. We’ve both spoken to plenty of people who you can tell that the sort of shine is off. There’s an ongoing economic opportunity, and they kind of nurse it onwards. [In the case of Pet Shop Boys], how fantastic to not be that, and to be excited about the things you can do.”