The Pet Shop Boys book Volume is a visual feast, exploring every inch of the icons’ creative legacy

English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys are always on our mind. Formed in 1981, the Pet Shop Boys are keyboardist Chris Lowe and vocalist Neil Tennant, and the band have never left the public consciousness, enjoying constant relevancy as an integral part of the new wave movement as well being a musical act that always sounded like the future. In this new, complete visual record of PSB, titled Volume (published by Thames & Hudson), the duo’s 2006 publication Catalogue gets a full creative update, collecting everything visual produced by PSB in the 20 years since then, including record artwork, photography, videos, stage designs – all in line with the 40th anniversary of PSB’s debut album, Please.

With over 2800 illustrations, the three-time Brit Award winners and six-time Grammy nominees are represented across so much media – a throwback to the sheer expansiveness of celebrity and artistic image back in the 80s especially, where MTV and music magazines pumped out iconic imagery day after day. In the foreword, written by Jeremy Deller, the conceptual, video and installation artist says: “It would have been unconscionable, in 1983, to create a pop group and not have an image that could mediate your message – if you had a message, that is; and clearly Pet Shop Boys did.” Combining English post-punk and “i-D street fashion” and melding them into a New York style, PSB were instantly fashionable, but crucially, the group was purposefully conceived as a self-conscious reaction to those groups – “they were about a dialectic between punk and show business,” says Jeremy.

Yes, PSB were often adorned in outlandish outfits, loud hairstyles, bubblegum-coloured editorial shoots – the duo were and still are characters – but Chris Lowe insists that “a lot of what we do is very literal” – so literal that it is presumed that PSB’s shtick must be ironic. In fact, PSB importantly represents the artificiality of pop music itself, in what George Melly calls a “revolt into style” – and PSB sure are stylish. The importance of creative direction in pop acts could not be overstated in Volume – it’s a critical element of the chameleonic, surrealist characters that the duo play from stage to television screens.

In Libby Sellers’ essay on the design of PSB, she creates a narrative thread that connects the duo’s musical and aesthetic attitudes. “The desire to deconstruct, to strip everything back to a few chords, some welded scrap metal or a bolt of distressed fabric was a deliberate reaction against the hyper-saturated and ornamental excesses of their time,” says Libby. “Framed within these chronicles, certain early Pet Shop Boys’ traits are instantly recognisable: the juxtaposition of shiny pop and urban decay in photographer and videographer Eric Watson’s imagery, the masterful austerity of their first Top of the Pops performances, and the elegantly detached, minimalist aesthetic of Pet Shop Boys’ record sleeves, designed by Mark Farrow.”

Vinyl sleeves for iconic tracks such as West End Girls were inspired by blocks of primary colours, following the Memphis school of aesthetics, and a decidedly transatlantic image was used across artworks – merging British loafers with anoraks. As you can see from all sorts of 80s figureheads, such as Duran Duran and Adam Ant, the decade was defined by remixing the past; the duo famously wore on the artwork for Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money) 50s-style shirts and American leather jackets, all rendered through Italian disco influences, which Neil called “sad melodies with a disco beat”. Even if you have never seen a PSB music video before, Volume includes detailed breakdowns of every motion image with colourful language, referring to the MV for Suburbia as caught in the “stratified light of California”, whilst the pages are rife with fascinating PSB lore, especially an anecdote where the duo split up for an evening during the shoot for the iconic and enduring track Rent.

Who knows that Always On My Mind is actually a Brenda Lee cover, made commercially successful by Elvis Presley? Any fans of the brilliant British film All Of Us Strangers (as well as this particularly lovely moment from the Xavier Dolan film Matthias & Maxime) will be familiar with the song, but Volume proves why this is the definitive retrospective for fans who missed the heyday of the iconic duo, as one chapter explains how the music video was created during the filming of It Couldn't Happen Here, originally conceived as an hour-long video based on 1987 album Actually, but it eventually evolved into a surreal, full-scale feature film directed by Jack Bond.

Volume is a sumptuous visual feast of every inch of Pet Shop Boys, including even Christmas cards from the band’s merchandising history. Featuring luminaries including Wolfgang Tillmans, the late Martin Parr, Bruce Weber, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Derek Jarman and Es Devlin, this is a must-have for fans of this exciting era.

Buy the book from Thames & Hudson here.