USA TOUR

The Pet Shop Boys' American tour begun in Miami on 19th March. Or at least it should have. All afternoon there had been a problem with a very loud buzz through the PA and half an hour before the show was due to begin, and with the audience already gathered outside, it was decided that there was no option but to postpone the show until tomorrow.
A day late, the American tour began fairly triumphantly. Beforehand there had perhaps been a little apprehension about performing this show in America. The Pet Shop Boys are less well-known here than in most of the world, a lot of the songs in the set have never been hits here, and Neil and Chris have often been advised that in America such a theatrical show -especially one without a live drummer - would be frowned upon. (Even the two musicians who were playing and were supposed to be at the side of the stage, were often forced backstage in the smaller American theaters.)
They took the opposite view - that something so different would be appreciated all the more -and so it transpired. MTV flew down to Miami to interview the Pet Shop Boys and film two songs, "Opportunities" and "Where The Streets Have No Name". Their report, which aired repeatedly over the next few days and which just about everyone in America seemed to see, was loud and energetic, and closed with one of the Miami audience energetically proclaiming the show "a theatrical masterpiece".
Between Houston (where they played in an open air Fun fair) and San Francisco (in a club where on both nights members of the audience jumped on stage; the first night one leapt onto Chris's bed during "Your Funny Uncle", the second another hopped up to kiss Neil) they stopped over to record The Tonight Show, a famous American show along the lines of Wogan. The usual host is Johnny Carson but that night it was compared by his regular stand-in, comedian Jay Leno. The Pet Shop Boys had arranged to perform two songs live - "Where The Streets Have No Name" and "How Can
You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" - and to be interviewed. They were appearing with some of the concert cast - Sylvia Mason-James, Derek Green and Pam Steven on additional vocals, Trevor and Mark (in their angel costumes) dancing, J. J. Belle on guitar and Scott Davidson on keyboards - but had emphasized, both on the phone from New Orleans and during rehearsals, that they should clearly appear as a duo. During the first song ("Where The Streets ...") Chris noticed -watching a monitor showing the broadcast -that he hadn't appeared on camera once and, understandably miffed, walked off during the song. The people from the TV show refused to re-shoot the song and so the Pet Shop Boys refused to play their second song.
In Los Angeles they were visited backstage by rapper Young MC and - perhaps more unexpectedly - by Guns "N' Roses singer Axi Rose, who proclaimed the show "gorgeous", complained bitterly that they didn't play "Being Boring" and said that in between recording the new Guns "N' Roses LP he usually listened to Behavior. In New York Liza Minnelli and Bruce Weber both came to see them. In Montreal, where it had been raining, during "So Hard" lots of the audience put up their umbrellas in imitation of the action on-stage.
The American press agreed they had never seen anything like it. Some were horrified, but most were enthusiastic. Here is a selection of the reviews:
Barry Walters, San Francisco Examiner: "Sensational Pet project"
"When the new world order is firmly established and Madonna becomes president, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe
- the Pet Shop Boys - will be England's Prime Ministers. Their Wednesday show was the best, boldest pop spectacle to sweep through the Bay Area since Madonna 'S Blond Ambition tour. And like Madonna's staged extravaganza, this was more performance art than rock concert. This was the future of pop. It was opera. It was fabulous ... the result was meta-theater-theater about theater. The staging commented on itself at every turn ... The Pets and the Material Girl draw on similar sources - cabaret, disco escapism, post modern deconstruction, religion, sex, camp and the love of a good, gaudy show-stopper followed by another and another. If Madonna fulfilled the dream of her "Justify My. Love" video and became a male couple, she'd be the Pet Shop Boys."
Richard Cromelin, Los Angeles Times: "Rock- Theater Revival". "A slam-bang production in the Rock theater tradition that includes David Bowie 'S "Diamond Dogs" extravaganza, Genesis' concerts back when Peter Gabriel wore animal heads and silly costumes, Pink Floyd building "The Wall" and Madonna's parading her "Blond Ambition". Unlike those forerunners, though, the English duo's endeavor didn't really rely on a rock star's charisma ... in fact, except for Neil Tennant's prominence as lead singer, the show could pretty much go on the road while the Pet Shop Boys themselves relax at home -.. For all the underlying technology it's the human elements that linger. And for all the knowing edges and satirical thrusts of their tart social commentaries about class, sex, art, consumption and sex, the Pet Shop Boys managed to generate a sympathy - not for themselves as stars, certainly, and not even as stage characters, but for the confusing, sad world whose poets they've become."
Lori Butters, Salt Lake Tribune: "Pet Shop Boys unleash techno-pop assault."
"It was a stage show laced with violent and sexual undertones - a ballerina with a gun, a woman strangling herself with a telephone cord, simulated oral sex acts, and individuals with chains and whips...
Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune: "Pet Shop Boys' other-world concert engulfs fans.
"The Pet Shop Boys don't so much perform their music as participate in it ... their show was a mix. Of sly humor, wretched excesses, theatrical razzle-dazzle and digitally impeccable dance music that only incidentally at times included its two. "Stars" ... not all the jokes worked, however. It's A Sin" burned out on sexual overkill, and the shopping-cart-world-run-amok in "Suburbia" was more than a little obvious...
Jon Parales, New York Times: "Serious Spectacle From The Pet Shop Boys."
"In the era of the largely prerecorded, minutely planned pop spectacle, the Pet Shop Boys are masters. At Radio City Music Hall the two Pet Shop Boys and a troupe of dancers and singers unveiled a spectacle that was strange, doleful, funny and consistently absorbing. Even more unlikely, it added new dimensions to the songs. Madonna, David Bowie, Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd now have serious competition
Most of the Pet Shop Boys' songs are unassertive ditties set to unabashedly mechanical elector-pop, perking along with a light boom-chicka-boom. Neil Tennant sings in a thin, nasal voice about romance and a more unusual pop topic, the culture of consumption the performance showed that the Pet Shop Boys know all about artifice, yet they haven't forgotten that pop's formulas can crystallize genuine emotions."
Jim Farber, Daily News (New York): "Pet Shop Boys: Mind over motion."
"If you had to pick one word for this show -besides brilliant - it would be busy ... since so much of PSB's high-tech dance music is constructed by machines anyway, and since the stars are, by their own admission, about as charismatic as your tax accountant, it was practically a prerequisite to stress theatrics over musicianship ...Unlike other pop theatrical concerts by, say, Madonna, this extravaganza didn't try to rouse. It aimed to overwhelm, to inspire intellectual awe." Dan Aquilante, New York Post: "Call 'em Pet Slop Boys."
"In a stunning display of pretentiousness - so overdone, under-thought and outrageous that it was hardly recognizable as a pop-music performance - the Pet Shop Boys made their New York City debut ... The video-come-to-life routines included the revolting opening English schoolboy number which ended with simulated masturbation ... after a show like this Radio City Music Hall should install windows to air the place out. In another scene Tennant was strapped into an electric chair for a mock execution while fifth-wheel Lowe played a dog boy caged on the opposite side of the stage, Too bad concern director David Alden wasn't strapped into on' Sparky for a jolt or two himself. The show was a steaming heap of gobbledygook."
Barbara Jaeger, The Record (New York): "The Pet Shop Boys, unleashed and ugly."
"The Pet Shop Boys have come up with something unique, But they should never have taken it on the road ... There's no drama or humor to be found in the two-hour production, only a mindless, endless series of grotesque characters and disturbing angry images
Forcing people into cages and then jolting them with pseudo-electric shocks is not my idea of entertainment."
Vince Aleifti, The Village Voice (New York):
"Where the Boys Are."
"It sounds like some hell bent, low-rent David Lynch-meets-Robert Wilson Vaudeville freak show, but it's the closest pop has come to surrealist stagecraft since Jean-Paul Gouda concocted Grace Jones's radically theatrical One Man Shows ... Both Boys affected the glazed deadpan of runway models; no matter what happens (they're stuck in those cages, pawed over, kicked about, taunted, and elector shocked), they're blasé as shit ... the pacing of the show tended to frustrate applause, but nothing stifled the my-idol! screams these anti-idols got by merely stepping from the wings."
Rob Taunenbaum, Rolling Stone (reviewing New York):
This British duo faced a formidable challenge:
how to impress a legion of fans prone to staying at home and watching MIW. Their solution was to amplify the eclecticism that has become a postmodern cliché, to combine ideas from Twin Peaks and Las Vegas, Les Miserable and Car Wash, Robert Wilson's multimedia theater and the Jce Capades, and set a new standard for pop flamboyance and grandiosity. The Pet Shop Boys '91 will join Jim Hendrix '67, David Bowie '72 and the Romanies '76 as pivotal events in concert history. However it may also be remembered as an epic display of pretentiousness.
James Brown, New Muscle Express (reviewing New York): "Kinch Invasion"
"Performance incorporates the qualities of fine art, advertising, crime, sex, dancing, fame and, most importantly, color and sound. Addressing the ins and outs of everyday life, it fully realists the Pet Shop Boys' recorded achievements as a stage show...the Pet Shop Boys have surpassed themselves in achieving the desired step towards Broadway."
David Fricke, Melody Maker (reviewing New York): "West End Frills".
"It was "The Wall" on laughing gas; Laurie Anderson inhabited by the spirit of Busboy Berkeley; Sglvador Dali and Bob Fosse mounting a Broadway production of Ray Davies' "Arthur". It was an inspired glorious collision of theatrical imagination, cinematic gestures, art school nerve, topical gravity and unapologetic indulgence. It was a celebration of risk and a sublime examination of the sexual confusion, insatiable materialism and incurable ennui that makes schoolboys want to be pop-stars and pop stars aspire to be...well, something else."

BRUCE WEBER

The Pet Shop Boys first asked photographer and film maker Bruce Weber if he would make a video with them a couple of years ago when "Domino Dancing" was Corning out. They met him in New York whilst recording demos with Liza Minnelli. At the time he was keen, but too busy; he was working on his second documentary film, Let's Get Lost, (a Film about the late jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. His first film was about boxing, Broken Noses).
At the end of last year they bumped into his producer at Liza Minnelli's anniversary party and the producer reaffirmed that Bruce was interested. As we wrote Being Boring! we thought of Bruce Weber to make the video", remembers Neil "because we thought it would fit his style His work has this innocent quality and you also never know whether it's in the past or the present It has this timelessness." It was to be Bruce Weber's first video- They discussed some ideas over the phone.
Chris just said " I wanted it to he sexy - he laughed at that!' and Neil told him about the Zelda Fitzgerald quote that had inspired him It was filmed in one day at he beginning of October in a house in Long Island, just out side New York: Bruce Weber chose long Island because of its associations with Zelda and Scott F Fitzgerald. Bruce Weber had explained his idea of a wonderful party: he said be didn't want it to be street because he looked at MTV and everything was street and he thought it was corny He wanted it to be like this beautiful fantasy". When the Pet Shop Boys turned up they felt quite intimidated, all these beautiful people running around in towels.
(The cast were people Bruce Weber was friends with. Or knew the girlfriends or boyfriends of, or bad photographed before. They included Neneb Cherry's half-brother. Ex-TV presenter Eagle Eye, and Robert de Niro's daughter). Originally the video begun with everyone on the stairs with their eyes closed and Neil saying to the camera the Zelda Fitzgerald quote she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn't "need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted go do".
It turned out to be too complicated so the video eventually began with a handwritten message (written by one or Bruce Weber's friends) based on things Neil has said, reading I come from Newcastle in the North of England. We used to have lots of parties where everyone got dressed up. And on one party invitation was the quote "she was never bored because she Was never boring". The song is about growing up -the ideals that you have when you're young and how they turn out. The Pet Shop Boys" The video, of which Neil and Chris &e very proud, is, Neil observes, "in a way the video of the first verse or the song".
Literally talked to Bruce Weber about it.

What did you know about Pet shop Boys?
I'd listened to the music for a long time and I'd always loved it, because it always took me to another place. I think my images of them was that they were not just singers and songwriters hut had a kind of artful attitude about what they did. And I liked their charm and enthusiasm. I remember hearing "west End Girls" and I just loved that song so much. You know?

What had you deduced from their videos and photographs?
They were kind of my stenos. They always reflected to me a lot or the attitudes that were happening on the streets in England. I always feel that being on the street in London was a real inspirational place and they represented a lot of those feelings. You thought they need very English? Yes

What about them seen Like that ?
Oh... you know... (laughs)... they like black. What did you-a when you fin' met them? I thought they had to be great because they had that sensibility, and they were. You meet a lot or musicians and they're so chatty about themselves, and they weren't. They were really interested in what I thought Usually when you meet musicians to talk about a video they just care about what they think. What they're going to look like Exactly.

Why had you not done a video before?
Time and circumstance, and I also fell that I really wanted to fall in love with a song. Because t knew I was going to have to listen to it about a million times (laughs). I got the tape and I loved it; I had an immediate reaction to it. I thought it had a lot of musicales and a lot to say, I loved the lyrics and really felt that it was something I wanted to be part of.

Before you discussed it with them, what did you pick up that the song was about?
The feeling that times are different today, and that feeling of abandoned we can't have today because of the way the world is the whole sexual thing with AIDS, the feeling of different groups around the world trying to ban a lot of visual things. The world's really different from the times I think Neil and Chris are writing and singing about in the song. We talked about the lyrics and talked about (laughs) having a party, you know. r really wanted to show what the kind of panics were like that I used to go to- We found a house where the owner wasn't there much, and I think the man not being there gave a spirit of when I'd go to friends houses and we'd stay for two days. I wanted to give something like that back to a lot of kids who couldn't really do what I did when I was that age.

You'd got to parties like the one in the video?
Yeah! I used to have a lot of, you know, eccentric friends. And I was really inspired by the attitude of the way parties were in European films when I was growing up, he kind of things where people would stay for days. In American films they were always like a huge fraternity party but in French and Italian films... That sort of beautiful overindulgence? Right. And I really felt the song was about that loss of abandoned, and that fear of indulgence that is so prevalent now. We have to behave differently now. But we can't be afraid to look at things and to dream and he transported.

Why were there annual's there?
In certain films especially French films of Renoir - there was always a country animal brought as a pet. Like in he Bertolucci film where Dominique Sandra comes into the house on a horse. t always loved animals in houses, especially animals that don't really belong in houses. I kind of love the fantasy of it.

In the video are we Supposed to see Neil and Chris as fitting into the party, or are they observing It from the inside?
I always felt when I met then that they were like London kids on the street and I fell that no matter how old they are, or will be, they'll always have that wonderful child attitude about the way they see things. So it was really a little bit about the way I fell they see things. It was a little bit from their mind: "is the party really happening?" "who's upstairs in the bubble bath?" "who's in the bedroom?" "are the dancers really here?" "or are we sleeping on the staircases?

You tried to get Chris to dance, didn't you?
Yeah, And I saw him dance and he got real shy. It's kind or refreshing, because most musicians are desperate to be in every scene of their video. Also, a lot of rock Stan and pop stars do videos and never talk to the kids in them: they show up and are escorted in by a bodyguard and do a scene then go back to the trailer. Neil and Chris were banging out.

Is it frustrating 'making something a video -that is by its very nature a slave to the music?.
I think if I got a chance to do another I would talk to the people I was making it with and see if I could use the format of the music in a slightly different way. Maybe in the future people will say "come into the studio whilst we're recording this song", or even that a song might be written for a specify video. At the moment you are a slave to the music, but if you like the song that's airtight. And I really love the song.