Live Shots: New Order, Pet Shop Boys brought it all back at Chase Center

“I don’t think we’ve ever been on a stage at 7 o’clock,” said New Order frontman Bernard Sumner in wonder as the band took the stage. For some reason the October 12 San Francisco stop of the Unity Tour—’80s synth-pop giants New Order and the Pet Shop Boys, with DJ Paul Oakenfold filling the gaps between sets—had been pushed a half hour earlier than the announced start time, and please no jokes about the masses of middle-aged attendees needing to get to bed at a reasonable hour.

It wasn’t all graybeards in attendance, though—a surprising amount of younger people, especially of color, were attending, and with an arsenal of irresistible underground dance floor and bonafide pop hits like New Order and Pet Shop Boys command, it’s no wonder they are still attracting admirers.

New Order, who have always been a rock band with synthesizer tendencies, tore through bangers from the 1981’s “Temptation” (drawing a surprisingly emotional response from the crowd; it may be the song that lasts) through 2015’s “Plastic,” with stops at epochal hits “Blue Monday,” “Bizarre Love Triangle,” and “True Faith” on the way. That they played relative rarities “Your Silent Face,” ‘Vanishing Point,” and a live extended version of the Arthur Baker remix of “Sub-culture” was pure icing.

If Bernard’s sometimes cracking voice was a bit worse for wear (really a feature, not a bug since the early days of the band) and Gillian Gilbert persists in her humorously staid and dour presence at the keyboards, the MVP award goes to Stephen Morris, who remains a powerhouse drummer at 64. Bassist Peter Hook is always missed at these concerts—poignant tributes to former incarnation Joy Division and singer Ian Curtis came with “Transmission” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart”—but current bassist Tom Chapman with Phil Cunningham on extra guitar filled the part.

I could have done without some of the on-the-nose projections (song lyrics, literal interpretations, a giant Ukrainian flag), I’ve always loved the abstract mystery of the group, but you have to do something big when you scale up to an arena show in the 2020s. And absolutely nothing can compete with, or augment, the power of those songs.

Definitely not a rock band at heart, but thrillingly adding live musicians to their usual theatrical spectacle were Pet Shop Boys, who surprised a lot of people who had never seen them before with their dramatic presentation and cutting-edge technology light show. There was also a surprisingly deep well of hits, with folks who perhaps could only recall chart monsters “West End Girls,” “It’s a Sin,” and “You Were Always on My Mind” soon shouting along to “Domino Dancing,” “Opportunities,” “Can You Forgive Her,” and, rousingly, their perfect mashup of U2’s “Where the Streets have No Name” and Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”

Starting with a vague street-walker/”Singing in the Rain”/T.S. Eliot theme as the duo of Neil Tennant (in very fine voice) and Chris Lowe, stoic as ever, posed beneath giant street lamps in puffy trench coats and reflective masks beamed down from Sun Ra, the show radically opened up to a dazzling display of laser wizardry and a trio of terrific women musicians adding percussion, keyboards, and live backing vocals to fill out every track.

“We apologize that you had to wait two years for this,” said Tennant in that impeccably dry voice, referencing the show’s COVID rescheduling. “But so did we.” The gay energy was through the stadium roof, of course, as many of us were instantly transported back to our lonely teen bedrooms or terrible but, looking back, sweet gay club dance floors of the ’90s.

Of course, being theater queens who know from dramaturgy, PSB brought the spectacle back around to those simple street lamp props in the end. Cheers rang out when they substituted “From Mariupol to the Kyiv Station” in “West End Girls” for the iconic “from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station,” and the opening line of “It’s Alright”—”Dictation being forced in Afghanistan/ Revolution in South Africa taking a stand/ People in Eurasia on the brink of oppression”—seems both nostalgic and frighteningly contemporary.

I’m not sure I can forgive them for closing with “Being Boring,” one of the most poignant reflections on AIDS that’s been written, and whose stature has only grown with critics through time. It meant a good portion of us were wiping our eyes as the lights came on. Oh great, now I’m old and my eyes are watery.

Coming from an entirely different era of electronic music, rave behemoth Paul Oakenfold seemed a strange choice as tour DJ. One joke was that he was going to nostalgically play the originals of songs that he warped with trance remixes in the late ’90s. But he turned in a lovely performance of ’80s mainstays (“Pump Up the Jam”) and gentle remixes (a beat-rooted “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie), plus a few humorous head-scratchers (really, “Sandstorm“?) that kept things lively and interesting without going too oonce-oonce, not that there’s anything wrong with that. —Words: Marke B. Photos: Jon Bauer