There are words some people will wait decades, even a lifetime, to hear: "I love you," "here's that money I owe you," "yes, I'm gay." Oh, and a few more... "Pet Shop Boys are coming to town."

Finally, that last one is happening. After eight studio albums, countless hits, and a career reaching back 25 years, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe—AKA UK pop duo Pet Shop Boys—are playing their first Seattle concert. It's about bloody time.

"Seattle is one of those places that has always eluded us, but we're very excited about it," insists Lowe. "I'm a huge fan of Frasier." And then he lets loose a hearty laugh. Lowe punctuates almost all his answers thusly. This comes as a welcome surprise. Despite his reputation as the quiet one, perpetually hidden behind a hat and dark glasses, Lowe proves quite gregarious. Goofy, even.

Most fans are grateful that PSB tour at all, however infrequently. It certainly wasn't part of the plan when the band formed in 1981. "We never considered playing live at all, for a long time," he admits. Their crisp, often complex electronic arrangements defied reproduction in concert, while going out with a busload of musicians seemed antithetical to their studiocentric aesthetic.

Finally, in 1989, they relented. "We got an offer to play Japan. We thought, 'If we're not going to get a band together, we should look at other ways of performing live.'" They recruited filmmaker Derek Jarman (Jubilee, Edward II) to oversee the production. "He put together this amazing show with projections and dancers, and it went down really well. From that moment, we got a bit of a taste for live performance, which we've kept ever since."

Philip Hoare is an old friend of Tennant and coauthor of Pet Shop Boys: Catalogue, a new book featuring almost 2,000 career-spanning visual images: record sleeves, photos, set designs. A veteran of many PSB concerts, he recalls highlights from all their elaborate stage shows. "But the opening sequence of the Performance tour is what stays with me longest," he writes via e-mail. "The utter thrill of the pounding intro, and knowing that the spectacle was about to unfold. The fact that I saw that one in London, Prague, New York, and Blackpool"—where Lowe grew up—"seemed to underline the panoptic glory of it: a psychosexual drama, beyond opera or pop."

At the Radio City Music Hall date on that 1990 world tour, Hoare sat behind Liza Minnelli—who had recorded her comeback album Results with PSB a year before—and had an epiphany. "Her presence seemed to turn the show into a seamless glam segue, from Cabaret to the [David Bowie's] Station to Station tour, and into the 21st century... all the things we ever dreamed of."

This sense of an aesthetic that transcends a specific era is essential to why Pet Shop Boys' early records hold up much better than those of many of their '80s peers, and why their new ones still occasionally surprise. "We concentrate on writing songs," says Lowe. "All of our songs, you can play on the piano." Even stripped of all their technological frippery, they still mesmerize; compare the synthesized original rendition of "Rent," from 1987's Actually, with Minnelli's stately reading cut two years later and see.

"Neil and Chris are both classicists in a way," observes Hoare. "Their pop sensibility is refined, honed... they kind of fell straight into it, fully formed. Neil's taste is certainly not mine (he likes the Beatles, for instance), but what he hears, I realize, is structure, and, to a certain extent, pop history. Chris is different. 'I'm clever,' Neil once told me, 'but Chris is a kind of genius.'"

Twenty-five years on, devotees still respond to those smarts. So do colleagues. Robbie Williams tapped the duo to produce a cover of the My Robot Friend homage "We're the Pet Shop Boys" for his latest album. And in Sweden earlier this year, two pretty young maids billed as West End Girls released a whole album of PSB covers. "Ooh, they're great," says Lowe of the latter. "We actually do 'Shopping' in our show because we heard their version of it." Rumors that the Girls would tour America supporting the Boys, however, proved false.

Oh well. There's another Pet Shop gig for Seattle fans to look forward to.