Though literally half a world away from the hi-fi shop on London’s King’s Road where Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe met in their 20s, Hong Kong has emerged as one of the more surprising running themes of the seminal synth-pop duo’s near-40-year career. It even gets a name-check on their latest EP. The band’s appearances in Hong Kong have unwittingly aligned with some of the most tumultuous periods of the region’s recent history. The first time they visited was soon after the bloody crackdown on student-led protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. They returned a quarter of a century later to perform on the evening that the Occupy Central protests officially kicked off in September 2014. This week, 30 years after the duo first set foot on stage at the Hong Kong Coliseum, they will re-acquaint themselves with the city with a fourth concert here. When the Pet Shop Boys arrived in Hong Kong on the first stop of their inaugural tour, three weeks after the Tiananmen incident, the city was in mourning. Andrew Bull, the Hong Kong promoter who booked the band, had a big decision on his hands. The Pet Shop Boys were one of the city’s most popular international acts, bolstered by the global success of two albums and having cemented themselves as one of the decade’s defining groups. Securing them at a time when Hong Kong was largely off the map for big musical acts had been a boon for Bull. “It was a period of sombre reflection in the city,” Bull says on the phone from Shanghai, where he relocated in the early 2000s. “Hong Kong was in a state of total devastation.” Boyzone’s Ronan Keating talks about life in a boy band and the end of the road Bull, a prominent club owner, DJ and fixture of Hong Kong nightlife in the 1980s, when the city was under British rule, shook off suggestions to cancel the planned two nights and decided the shows must go on. “It didn’t make any sense not to do it. We’d already sold a lot of tickets; they were hot around the world and it was the first show of the first tour they’d ever done,” he says. “It would have blown their whole tour if they couldn’t do the Hong Kong show because they’d have been too scared to perform it elsewhere. It was a glorified dress rehearsal and they were counting on us.” So the Pet Shop Boys came, and spent a week in the city to calm their nerves before performing an extravagant set for the first time. In between rehearsals they dined on seafood aboard sampans, wandered the streets unchaperoned, visited Bull’s famed Canton Disco club and took a guided tour of the newly built, Norman Foster-designed HSBC headquarters. Even by modern standards, the Pet Shop Boys’ gig would be regarded as daring: “A show of dynamic and eclectic proportions, combining drama, action, comedy, vaudeville [and] dance with a mind-bending sound and light display,” Kieven Yim wrote in the Sunday edition of the South China Morning Post after the show. The lavish set included six dancers, four backing singers, multiple costume changes and a video by filmmaker and gay rights activist Derek Jarman. Government censors, casting their eye over the clip before the concert, picked up on a scene that depicted two men kissing to be shown during the song It’s a Sin , one of the pair’s best-known hits. It was two years before homosexuality was decriminalised in Hong Kong, but they ruled the video could be shown – on the proviso that the projectionist covered the lens at that exact moment. Whether deliberately, as suggested by Tennant and the band’s biographer, Chris Heath, or by accident, as Bull insists, the video ran uncensored. Rumour has it Bull was arrested, something the promoter expressly denies. Meanwhile, Heath has suggested that he encouraged the band to declare their support for democracy on stage – a charge Bull also rejects. In short, the fallout from the incident may have been a little exaggerated. “No, there weren’t people screaming and rushing out of the door in hysterics,” says former Post columnist John Dykes with a laugh. Dykes, now a sports pundit with US television network Fox in Singapore, was sent to review the concert and claims he still gets mileage out of a memorable dinner in the Causeway Bay typhoon shelter he shared with Bull and the band. “Let’s face it: if you’re going to a Pet Shop Boys concert in the first place, you’re likely to be a pretty open-minded person anyway.” In a nod to the city’s significance to the band, Hong Kong is name-checked on the band’s latest EP, “Agenda”, a quartet of reactive tracks that shine a critical light on themes including the growing divide between rich and poor, social media addiction, the refugee crisis in Europe, and the dumbing down of global politics. In a press note, Tennant says the EP features “three satirical songs and one rather sad song – but they all have, broadly speaking, political themes. I think it’s because of the times we’re living through.” On track three, What Are We Going to Do About the Rich? , Tennant sings: “They say democracy is simply very bad for business/ While deploring student protests in the middle of Hong Kong.” It was an image held in the singer’s mind since September 2014, when the group were confronted by the civil unrest of Occupy Central (also known later as the “umbrella movement”), which saw thousands protesting against Beijing’s plan to pre-screen candidates in a forthcoming election for the semi-autonomous city’s leader. “I thought it was good what [protesters] were doing. It was very brave,” Tennant explains over the phone from his home in the British capital. “After we returned to London, I started to think about this lyric and then it turned into the starting point for this song.” “The mock protest song”, according to the band, lances the tax-dodging super-rich who buy media companies and football clubs “with absolute impunity” while “only giving to charity for maximum publicity”. Pop music is always better when it deals with creating the context for change rather than setting out the terms for change Neil Tennant Though accustomed to a degree of controversy stemming from their music, the band were surprised by the attention “Agenda” received. “Some people have taken the songs more seriously than we intended,” Tennant says. “There’s a certain exaggeration with satire; it’s like drawing a cartoon rather than painting a picture. Satire is meant to be funny and pertinent to current events.” Despite its occasionally clunky and heavy-handed lines, what “Agenda” lacks in lyrical finesse it makes up for in its well-timed ire. It signals a band who, in 38 years, have never been afraid to take a stand for their beliefs nor bended to the whims of the music industry by ever sounding like anyone other than themselves. Written last November, the four songs stood out among 23 tracks Tennant says the duo wrote while working on a forthcoming full-length album – their 14th. Despite claims of being more satirical than serious, there is a cathartic and vital nature to “Agenda” that echoes some of the band’s most powerful songs from years past. One of their first hits, Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) from 1986, poured scorn on what Tennant describes as “the money-based culture” emerging at the time. Their second album “Actually” featured Shopping and King’s Cross , which expressed discontentment with the government of Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister at the time. Over the years, the band would go on to deride George W. Bush and former British prime minister Tony Blair with subtly poised tracks such as I’m With Stupid , where the “special relationship” between the two leaders is lampooned in the guise of a love song. Tennant and Lowe have continually mastered the art of the musical Trojan horse: delivering hard-hitting themes within perfectly formed pop packages, shifting mindsets by virtue of their songs’ singalong nature. “Pop music is always better when it deals with creating the context for change rather than setting out the terms for change,” Tennant says. “These songs aren’t saying anything positive – they’re lighthearted criticism in a very danceable way with strong melodies,” he adds. “When you write lyrics, you spend a lot of time reacting to what’s going on around you, [but] day-to-day politics is too boring for pop music. You can make records that turn out to be political, without even planning for [them] to be. That’s the genius of pop music.” As the duo sang on It’s Alright , a single released in June 1989, “I think it’s gonna be alright/ ’cause the music plays forever.” Politics still roil Hong Kong, and the city has not yet legalised same-sex marriage. But in terms of progress over the years, that uncensored video certainly did the city no harm. Pet Shop Boys will perform at AsiaWorld-Expo on Thursday, March 28. Tickets from HK$588 at HKTicketing.com