SYNTH pop sophisticates Pet Shop Boys have done pretty much everything in their 31 years in the public eye. Number one singles. A film soundtrack, a ballet score, a musical, a children’s play, an opera score. The 2012 London Olympic Games closing ceremony. A gong last week for NME’s 2017 Godlike Genius Award.

Yet Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe had never, ever played Leeds, which seems extraordinary, given the city’s size. They rectified that anomaly last weekend, opening their six-date Super Tour at the First Direct Arena in a typically spectacular show that reprised the style and format of last year’s Royal Opera House shows staged by designer Es Devlin and choreographer Lynne Page.

Now 62 and 57 respectively, Tennant and Lowe once divided a compilation album into Pop and Art and their shows continue to straddle the two: the art coming in their brilliant use of lighting and video imagery and their highly choreographed presentation of themselves, in assorted metallic headgear, later mirrored by their three additional musicians on banks of electronica and percussion.

Electronica was once associated with being cold, unfeeling, distant, alien, robotic, but then came The Human League and Pet Shop Boys: pop music with and about the heart. As with The Human League at York Barbican last autumn, there was modernity and technology for the 21st century last Saturday night, but timeless concert values too: a showman frontman with plenty of wardrobe changes and a gift for conducting the audience’s reactions; a more enigmatic side man overseeing the musical flow; a responsive band and an equally responsive, middle-aged crowd that Tennant humorously dubbed “the Pop Kids”.

The 24-song set list gave air to the pick of last year’s Super album, opening with Inner Sanctum, later topped by The Dictator Decides, but cannily PSB represented all their eras, sprinkling the old big hitters such as Love Comes Quickly and West End Girls through the night, but also accommodating New York City Boy, The Sodom And Gomorrah Show and The Enigma from their Alan Turing opera. Godlike Geniuses? The NME is not wrong.