31 years ago today a magazine editor from Newcastle called Neil Tennant and a trained architect called Chris Lowe met by chance in a shop on the King’s Road in London. It was not a pet shop. Within 5 years they would be globally famous and getting stuck into their new job expanding the musical, intellectual and emotional boundaries of pop music, and adding countless new songs of near perfection to its canon.

If you’ve been following our blog since its infancy (three weeks ago – time moves fast online, you know) you’ll know we are Pet Shop Boys fanatics and will have either been bowled over or bored senseless by the thousands of words we’ve already spilled on the subject. Still, some of you are new, and it is a special occasion, so here’s a brief summary of what we’ve blogged on the boys…

Pet Shop Boys Winner – a brief and frankly underwhelmed review of the new Pet Shop Boys single which got us thinking what the real winners were

Pet Shop Boys Definitively – our 20 greatest PSB songs listed with bias and love

Pet Shop Boys Distinctively – at the request of readers a couple of blogs on lost gems from the back catalogue

Pet Shop Boys to the rescue – a review of the rubbish Olympic closing ceremony which reserves special praise for the dynamic duo

And coming soon from the duo themselves: their latest studio album, Elysium. If its as good as the last one, Yes, their finest in many years, then we’ll be very happy bloggists indeed.

Happy Birthday Pet Shop Boys!