Birmingham, UK

The Pet Shop Boys second tour. It is put together in conjunction with director David Alden and designer David Fielding, best known for their avant garde opera productions. There are no musicians on stage, (though two, guitarists J.J. Belle and keyboard player Scott Davidson, do skulk in the wings), just three singers (Pamela Sheyne, Derek Green and Sylvia Mason-James) and ten dancers (Petee Aloysius, Trevor Henry, Craig Maguire, Catherine Malone, Mark Martin, leon Maurice Jones, Suki Miles, Katie Puckrick, Sarah Toner and Noal Wallace) choreographed by Jacob Marley.

Pet Shop Boys Performance This show represented for us an ambition finally achieved. We had decided early on in our career that when we toured it would be with a theatrical show in the tradition of David Bowie's Diamond Dogs or Grace Jones' One Man Show. To this end, we met with the opera director, David Alden, and the theatrical designer, David Fielding, in 1986 to discuss creating a show with them along the lines of the production they had built their reputations on for the English National Opera in London. For various reasons, mainly financial, this didn't happen for another five years.
Finally, in 1991, we toured the world with Performance, an ambitious pop music show with no visible musicians but in which every song was visualised and choreographed within the context of a narrative which stretched from childhood to death to afterlife (in the encores).
It was quite an achievement by our production crew just to put on such a complex show each night in a different city. Eric Watson's film of it was recorded over three nights (and days) in Birmingham and captures both the scope and the details of the production as well as the backstage drama. Looking at it now, it's wonderful to see an ambition realised.