Rotating into view from behind two large white screens, dressed in black and sporting spherical metallic helmets that make their heads look like they’re hooked up to high-powered magnets, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe could be gameshow hosts from a dystopian future.

The voltage is progressively cranked up on Inner Sanctum and Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) during another not exactly understated stage show, as a video screen beams intense shapes and colours and lasers slice through plumes of dry ice. But it’s Pet Shop Boys’ third song of the night, The Pop Kids (the linchpin of their latest album, Super) that more subtly captures the wistfully triumphant headspace in which this most definitively 1980s of British electronic pop acts operates.

“They called us the pop kids / ‘Cause we loved the pop hits / And quoted the best bits,” sings Tennant over thumping Hacienda beats, invoking the tide of out-and-proud poptimism on which this band rose to prominence, and with it a little of the origin story of the ex-Smash Hits journalist who crossed the lines to write some of that title’s wit and irreverence all over the global charts, to the tune of 50m sales.

Photograph: Andrew Benge/Redferns

Veterans and progenitors of pop’s big pushback against rock chin-strokery, Pet Shop Boys seem as worthy as ever of the Godlike Genius award they were given last week by NME (especially in an age when that once most rockist of magazines is putting Zara Larsson, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars on its covers). It’d be more than a mite overgenerous to suggest that Tennant and Lowe are still making especially modern music – the trancey builds and beats of Vocal (all the lasers for this one) would be iffy coming from some young EDM producer, let alone two men comfortably old enough to remember trance the first time round. But when it comes to presenting a multi-sensory synth-pop live experience full of brains, brawn and interesting headgear, they remain peerless.

Tennant pads around during Love Is a Bourgeois Construct with an unflustered nonchalance that makes a gentle mockery of the button-prodding industriousness which his three backing musicians on synths and drum pads pile into their performances. The fabulously unmoving and unsmiling Lowe meanwhile still makes performing from behind a bank of equipment look as much of a reluctant hassle as it seemed on Top of the Pops in 1985. It’s Pet Shop Boys’ breakout hit of that year, the stealthiest of massive bangers, West End Girls, that finally convinces a majority of backsides to part with seats at the set’s halfway point.

It’s a Sin keeps them on their feet, as do retooled versions of Left to My Own Devices and Go West (the latter not exactly enhanced by the sound of a tremendously drunk woman bellowing “Fred Weeeeeest” over the choruses). Always on My Mind delivers a last giddy headrush of swooning romance and fist-pumping Euro disco, before The Pop Kids is invoked again in remix form while Tennant and Lowe slip off into the shadows, kids no more but still as wide-eyed to pop’s irresistible power as ever.