Pet Shop Boys
Pet Shop Boys are an English synth-pop duo formed in London in 1981. Consisting of keyboardist Chris Lowe and vocalist Neil Tennant, they have sold more than 100 million records worldwide and were listed as the most successful duo in British music history in the 1999 edition of The Guinness Book of Records. Furthermore, they are one of the best-selling bands of all time in the UK.
Pet Shop Boys have achieved 42 top 30 singles, including 22 top-10 hits on the UK singles chart, including four UK number-ones: "West End Girls" (also number one on the US Billboard Hot 100), "It's a Sin", a synth-pop version of "Always on My Mind", and "Heart". Other hit songs include a cover of "Go West", and their own "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)", and "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" in a duet with Dusty Springfield. With five US top 10 singles in the 1980s, they are associated with the Second British Invasion.
The duo is recognized as one of the most important pillars of electronic music. Their sound spans many genres, with synth-pop and dance-pop at its core. In their early days, they were heavily influenced by Hi-NRG and Italo disco, as well as the emerging New York hip-hop scene. They experimented with house music starting with the album Introspective (1988) and explored eurodance and techno on releases such as Very (1993) and Bilingual (1996) —the latter of which also ventured into Latin pop and Latin house. For Nightlife (1999), they collaborated with cutting-edge trance producers like Rollo from Faithless. In their trilogy of albums from the 2010s, they fully embraced EDM, working alongside Stuart Price. Additionally, the duo has often chosen to blend orchestral and acoustic elements with synthesizers across many of their works, most notably on Release (2002) and on certain tracks from Behaviour (1990).
Pet Shop Boys have been nominated for four Grammy Awards in the Dance/Electronic categories, and they have won three Brit Awards. They were presented with the award for Outstanding Contribution to Music at the 2009 Brit Awards. In 2016, Billboard named Pet Shop Boys the number one dance duo or group since the inception of the Hot Dance Club Play chart, where the duo achieved 11 number-one hits and 31 top-10 entries. In 2017, the duo received NME's Godlike Genius Award, and in 2024, they were awarded the Pop Pioneers award at the MTV Europe Music Awards.
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