Five good and five less good things about Pet Shop Boys’ new Dreamworld greatest hits tour then

*The Milan tour opener ran for two hours and featured 27 singles (26 PSB + Losing My Mind, which they produced for Liza Minnelli).

*Love Comes Quickly, Rent, Left To My Own Devices, Being Boring — at least twenty of the tracks are exquisite examples of some of the greatest pop music of the last 40 years.

*Thankfully, the setlist contains only one medley: a Bilingual 45 mash-up of Single-Se a vida é (That’s the Way Life Is).

*The now you see them-now you don’t live band add a great extra dimension to some of the tracks, especially French drummer Simon Tellier, a fantastique star in the making.

*The widescreen video wall fills the entire width of the stage and features a clever mix of archive promos, interview footage and occasionally dazzling special effects.

*Despite announcing it in 2019, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe chickened out of sequencing the setlist in reverse chronological order, which would have been rather marvellous, actually.

*Too many song and staging ideas have been recycled from recent performances, including opening with Suburbia yet again, and the core arrangements of It’s A Sin, West End Girls, Go West etc have been done to death.

*Conversely, the noughties have been ruthlessly ignored, despite the brilliant Miracles and Love Etc. being their last two bona fide hits.

*In their place, two singles from 2020’s Hotspot are present, despite neither Dreamland and Monkey Business even troubling the Top 100 charts. That they opted for them and the mood-killing I Don’t Know What You Want over a huge hit like I‘m Not Scared is bizarre.

*Is Stevie Wonder in charge of wardrobe? Neil Tennant is trying to conceal some serious Lockdown weight gain with a series of long coats, though with the new Nelly belly the shiny silver number is so unflattering it makes him look like a tinfoil Teletubby in a tarpaulin. In other words, another one who’s ballooned.