Did the Pet Shop Boys invent the ironic U2?
Seven months before the birth of Achtung Baby, in March 1991, the Pet Shop Boys released their Hi-NRG disco medley of U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” and the easy-listening cheese-pop number “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.” Intended as a mockery of U2’s pompous ’80s image, it seems the deadpan duo unwittingly predicted U2’s high-camp ’90s reinvention. Coincidence? “This is quite a sensitive subject,” PSBs’ Neil Tennant tells Uncut. “I once saw an interview with Adam Clayton slagging us off because an NME journalist actually said that to them. I think they got the idea we’d said that, which we hadn’t. We actually had the idea years before — originally we were going to do it with Patsy Kensit. But in 1990, when we made that record, the idea of applying humour to U2 seemed intriguingly sacrilegious. So we did it as a piece of humorous sacrilege. But it’s funny — if we’d done it three or four years later it wouldn’t have seemed humorously sacrilegious. By that time Bono had done Ma
