|
|
|
SCISSOR SISTERS February
17, 2007. As Neil searches for the Even more
worryingly, he doesn't really know "Oh,"
says Neil. "That's why those keyboards are there:' "God,
they look awful," says Neil, failing to appreciate fully the groundbreaking
fashion aspects Jeffrey points out. "We worked in Billy Currie's
studio once. We wrote 'So hard' there:' Still waiting - it's gone half past three and still no Scissor Sisters in sight - Neil talks about The Killers, and how Brandon's wife apparently plays "Home and dry" when her husband returns from trips, and about the latest flavour-of-the-moment, The Klaxons. "I bought the album and dutifully listened to it, because we all have to like it," he confesses, "and I can't remember anything about it." He'd hoped, for all the advance hullabaloo, that it might be one of those life- and opinion-changing records that make you think about music differently, but it wasn't. "I remember when we finished Release and Johnny Marr gave me Sigor Ros's album and I was, 'Uhhhhh... why didn't you give me that six months ago?"' Dave Dorrell
arrives. "It
doesn't fit my voice," argues Neil. "I don't bring me to the
party:' Neil tells
him that "It Can't Come Quickly Enough" has "a tricky melody". "I'll
try it at the soundcheck," says Neil, clearly still dubious. "It's
so... Scissor Sister-y. If I was Elton..." He lets this hang there.
"I don't think the crowd wants to hear me do this song:' "Serbia!"
exclaims Neil. "My birthday!" "That's
good:' says Neil eventually. rather do
it many more times. "Definitely?' This time it is Neil who messes
up the "Love Neil goes
home for a few hours, and returns a little after nine. On his way he has
picked up the fashion designer Hedi Slimane. This time it is Jake who
has been popping in every few minutes, wondering where Neil is. In Neil's
dressing room a keyboard has not only been set up - it is baianced on
top of two rubbish bins with a space between them - but has been left
on, emitting a fairly loud but quite pleasant pulsating ambient drone. Jake comes
in. He says that this is the Scissor Sisters' final show for a while,
and that tomorrow he will be retreating to his parents' farm in Virginia.
The keyboard player, wearing a t-shirt that says I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU
ARE TALKING The keyboard
player asks whether the keyboard sound is OK. Neil points to plates of unpalatable cheese and cold meats, still covered in cellophane and stacked on top of the fridge, and says to Hedi, "It's in our normal rider to ask for no food. Why do you want a plate of cheese with Clingfilm over it? But that's rock'n'roll..." He tells Hedi about the recent song writing he and Chris have been doing, and mentions double-tracking. Hedi asks what this is, and Neil explains in some detail what happens when you record a second vocal in unison with the first. "That's when I turn into me, when I double track," he points out. "When I put one track on, it doesn't really sound like Neil Tennant. About five
minutes after he left, Jake returns, ready for the stage, now wearing
a remarkable, garish multicoloured suit covered in Disney characters,
over an orange shirt. He says that he recently wore this outfit to Tokyo
Disneyland:
It all goes
well. There is much whooping when Neil appears. Jake forgets no lyrics,
though he does completely change the way the verse lyrics sit over the
music, following the first line immediately with the second, he waits
for the correct moment to sing the third line and rushes onto the fourth
line in the same way, so that it seems like an unusual stylistic decision
rather than a mistake. For "It Can't Come Quickly Enough", Neil
refers to the piece of paper in his hand whenever he needs to. At the
end, they hug, and Neil leaves the stage while the Scissor The going-into-town
plan has been abandoned, and so the after-show party turns out to be in
Neil's dressing room. The conversation wanders down a number of unpredictable
by-ways, so that someone wandering in for a moment might hear Neil tell
of how he used to put make-up on his teddy bear as a child ("I wasn't
very pleased with the results") or of how "about three times
a year I have a half of Guinness". Eventually Jake gets up to go,
triggering preparations from his security people. NEW YORK Tour rehearsals
in Bray, England Last autumn, the Pet Shop Boys passed through
"I've
lost the plot," he sighs. "I haven't been here for three years." Neil says
that he has seen her new movie, The Queen, which he thought "was
like very superior television They begin to run through the "So hard" / "It's a sin" medley, but soon stop. The music is unbalanced in Neil's in-ear monitors and no-one seems quite sure why this should be. While waiting, Chris discusses international phone rates, then they run through "Opportunities", "Integral" and "Can you forgive her?" Neil, the dancers and the choreographer discuss a choreography issue at some length, and consider whether it will be compromised by anyone falling off the front of the stage, then they run through most of "Integral" one more time. "'Home and dry'," instructs Neil, "and then we'll do 'Psychological', and that should be it." He puts on his acoustic guitar, and starts singing, but not "Home and dry". "Giant steps are what we take.. ." he begins, then says, "it's freezing inhere". They run through "Home and dry", "Psychological" and "Left to my own devices". Their choreographer suggests that, as they have ten minutes left, they should do "Numb".
"Food
glorious food," says Neil. On the way down to catering, Neil points
out that doing shows which start at eight o'clock completely messes up
his normal eating schedule, and leaves him hungry after the show. "And
then I have one of those famous Pet Shop Boys hot dogs. Or, as I have
been having, soup in the hotel." "We
know that nothing actually works," says Chris. Chris is
annoyed. "This
Kit-Kat is Hershey's," he complains. "No wonder it tastes wrong.
All I want is a decent bar of chocolate, and I get a basketful of..." "He didn't seem to hear it." There are other frustrations. Neil mentions how annoyed Chris (who has now gone to the other dressing room next door) has been getting in America at only ever being asked to sign vinyl copied of Please
and Actually. Chris mentioned this to a fan the other day and the fan
replied, unperturbed, "I only like the Eighties." "Apparently,"
says Dave, "we're not her demographic." Their agent
says that ticket sales are ahead of where they were at the same point
on the last tour - 30% to 40% up in most places. Detroit and Denver are
the only problems. "Psycho,"
Chris points out, and Neil agrees how this was one experience that did
work out well. But he wonders whether it would help if they put on Battleship
Potemkin in Los Angeles. "People use people who are perceived as
hip and contemporary... and that would at least impress people with the
scale..." He wonders whether they could do it at the legendary Hollywood
cinema, Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Their agent agrees that this would
mess impressively with people's heads. Neil nods.
"Scorsese would be better," he adds.
They discuss
how difficult some of the union people who work here can be, and how famous
they are for it. "Same
songs," says Chris, mischievously. The conversation
wanders, as it often does, and suddenly Neil is explaining how "Paninaro",
in its very earliest incitation, started off as a song they were writing
for their manager Tom Watkins who briefly was half of a recording duo
called The Hudson's. "Its original lyric went 'I never thought that
I would leave you /but I'm in love with a woman'. But Tom Watkins lost
interest in it, and it became 'Paninaro':' "Thank you very much - good evening, New York," says Neil to the audience, already on their feet as "Psychological" leads into "Left to my own devices". "It's wonderful to be back in Radio City. Tonight, we're going to do the old songs, the new songs, the in-between songs. And this song, which is called 'I'm with stupid..."' The first half breezes its way through - "I'm with stupid", "Suburbia", "Can you forgive her?", "Minimal", "Shopping", "Rent", "Dreaming of the Queen", "Heart" (popular enough here that everyone bounces back to their feet, as they do for most of the older or faster songs), "Opportunities"
and, finally, "Integral". At the interval, there is a recording
played giving instructions to the audience. Though the audience is not
told who is speaking, it is - remarkably - Sir Ian McKellen, who says:
"Ladies and gentlemen, pet shop boys and girls, there will now be
a 20-minute interval. 20 minutes! Thank you." "They
love us, they really love us," he says, melding, as he so often does,
irony and sincerity in an indissoluble alloy of his own. After a while,
Neil stands up and says, "Well, I'm ready:' He puts on his top hat. "I've
lost my laminate," Chris complains, and asks whether they're planning
to have hot dogs. "I thought
the follow spots were very professional tonight," Neil tells him.
"Last night I was, 'Hello! I'm over here!"' The queue
snakes back through the record shop as far as they can see. "It
does," agrees Neil. "I actually don't have a copy, though:'
(This has since been rectified.) 'Thank you
for playing one of my favourite songs, 'Home and dry'.. ." says another. "We
were there too," says Chris. NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY On the evening
of January 11, 2007, Neil appeared onstage at the National Portrait Gallery
at an event billed as Pet Shop Boys: Neil Tennant In Conversation. From
October 30 to March 4 the National Portrait Gallery had been showing a
small selection of photographs from the book Pet Shop Boys Catalogue in
the modest downstairs space next to their bookshop, and for tonight Neil
had agreed to talk about these and other Pet Shop Boys images and surrounding
issues. The onstage interviewing was done by the esteemed author and cultural
critic Michael Bracewell and alongside Neil, occasionally aiding and abetting,
were Philip Hoare and Chris Heath. (Literally, with a certain logical
inevitability, was also present at the event.) Towards the end, the audience
was invited to ask questions. Afterwards, everyone onstage was taken round
the closed galleries to see the exhibit of David Hockney portraits.
Michael Bracewell: This was the cover of your first single which came out in 1984, at which point you had been working on the other side, as it were, as the editor of Smash Hits, and you must have been very, very aware of the context into which you were trying to place your new project, Pet Shop Boys. Can you tell us a little bit about how this initial sleeve came about? Neil Tennant:
Well, the sleeve came about because of course we had the record coming
out, but the photograph had actually been taken a year before by Eric
Watson, who is actually here tonight. And we went to New York — we
made a record, probably everybody knows the story, with Bobby 0, but when
we were Michael Braceweli: By the time you came to have this [the second “West End girls” sleeve], because this was taken a year later, when the single was reissued you look to have far more of “a look” there. Had you, by that time, given some thought to image and so on? Neil Tennant: When the initial Bobby 0 version that we just saw came out again, famously, it was a hit in Belgium, and a minor hit in France, and I was still at Smash Hits, but we’d got Tom Watkins at this point to become our manager, and he had this company called Massive Management we were asked to go on a Belgian TV show. This was the first ever TV appearance we made. And Tom looked at us and said, “Maybe we should get some clothes together for it” And, again, for the only real time in our career we have a stylist now, but he just, like, goes shopping with us a guy called lain R. Webb, who later became fashion editor of the limes, went shopping with us, and complained that all Chris wanted to do was buy an expensive watch. Anyway, I lived over the road from the BOY shop. You can see the t-shirt Chris has got on the shop is still there, actually - is the BOY t-shirt. Michael Braceweli: On the King's Road? Neil Tennant: Yeah, on the King's Road. And we'd collected other clothes, and then lain R. Webb had this idea that we should wear new clothes and then vintage things, like the jeans Chris is wearing maybe, and the shirt round the waist. And I bought these trousers. And then Eric Watson who again took the picture, outside the studio - I'm wearing, I think, his shirt, and maybe his tie, or maybe the stylist did the tie. And the parka. We had a lot of discussions, us and Eric, at the beginning, about... you mentioned before that I worked at Smash Hits - what I got from Smash Hits was sort of a negative thing, which is true of how we work to this day: we tend to know what we don't want to be. And we didn't want to be Spandau and Duran and whoever, all the rest of these people who I'd all interviewed, and I thought made great records, records I still like, actually.., but we didn't want to do that. And we sort of had this idea that we wanted them to be a bit like film stills. And that extended to the music - "West End girls" begins with someone walking down the street and then the string chord comes in. We wanted to sound a bit like a film. And then EMI gave us the money and we did a two- or three-day, even, photo shoot in east London. Of course we were fascinated by east London and of course it was "East End boys, West End girls". I see you've got the video here ["West End girls" video still on screen] and again the coat, Chris is wearing the jacket that he bought with the stylist, and Chris hasn't really become Chris yet, if you know what I mean. Eric had the Stephen Linard coat, and I bought one at his recommendation, and I became me, I think, with this look. I mean, it's not really radically different from this [points to what he is wearing today]. But it was the coat. I liked the coat because the coat has got movement, and if you're not feeling confident it has a feeling a security and enormous power about it. And I wore that coat in two videos - I wore it in the video before, and wore it on Top Of The Pops, and it became a trademark thing. And what I think did get established in this video, which came from our personalities, and also the fact that I was the singer and Chris wasn't, is that Chris kind of loiters in the background, looking like he doesn't want to be there. The first video we did, of course, he famously announced he had a doctor's appointment at three o'clock in the afternoon. I don't think he did on this one. But it sort of worked. It's a very odd thing, you know, to make a video, when you're 30 years old or something, and suddenly you see yourself presented as a kind of product. Michael Braceweli: Because I mean, running forward of ourselves a little bit, I'm interested looking at this now, because it kind of signs up this particular relationship you've had with London. You've worked visually with a lot of London, right up to the stuff we'll look at later by Wolfgang Tilimans or Martin Parr. Was that something that you consciously wanted to do? That you felt very much you wanted it to be a London thing? That you wanted to declare a...? Neil Tennant:
It was something Chris and I... actually Chris talked about, really. When
we first started writing songs... I had written songs on my guitar in
my bedroom since I was a child really, and it was all kind of singer-songwriter.
Chris and I first met when Soft Cell had just happened, and Chris said,
"Can't you make the lyrics more sort of sexy, and write about Soho
and going out We used to go out a lot - we still do Michael Braceweli: It seems interesting that fairly soon after that, within a year - I mean, this is a Mark Farrow design, this sleeve [the "Opportunities" sleeve], and it's almost like one of the other components that we all come to know and love about Pet Shop Boys is that kind of love affair with minimalism as well, right through to the recent track "Minimal". The only song which contains a rhyme "decisional"... what can I say? Neil Tennant: Cheap rhyme. Michael Braceweli:
It pleases a certain kind of person. But was the minimalism... because,
Philip, one of the things you mention in your essay is that Factory, Philip Hoare: And the expression of the aesthetic of a group in a graphic sense, rather than in a photographic sense. I mean, I think in a way a cover like that says "Pet Shop Boys" as much as any photograph, as any of Eric's photographs does. Neil Tennant: Yeah, well I think you have to remember that of course Chris was a qualified architect and had quite a lot of interest. And Chris likes concrete. You know, the live album's called Concrete. And he likes that kind of minimal aesthetic. And I like it - I don't like it to live in. But if we were look at all the other records that came out the same week as this in 1986 they would have very elaborate sleeves. There was a designer called Malcolm Garrett who did a lot of work at the time, like Culture Club and Simple Minds, and they were very, very elaborate sleeves. In the way that in the songs - in this song, for instance, we just said "I've got the brains, you've got the looks, let's make lots of money", it was meant to be a very bleak statement of the obvious, the sort of thing people didn't say in songs, which was one thing we were trying to do with our songs - this sleeve sald this. In fact actually at the time Chris and I weren't that keen on this sleeve. I think we thought it was slightly bland. But the great thing is, it hasn't sort of aged, really. I think the album cover, Please - in these days, of course, albums were only on vinyl - that was a fantastically strong minimal statement, with the little photograph, like a postage stamp in the big white square, and we did that partly because Mark came up with it and we thought it was great, but also it was sort of a wind-up for the record company. Remember, a lot of what we did at the time.., it's always easy to think, "Wow, it must have been great then - everything was a hit," and actually everything was sort of a battle. Everything was a baffle. We were always criticised for not doing anything on the television, for having a sleeve like this ["Love comes quickiy"] with no title on it. That became a sort of clicbe; when this came out in 1986 people didn't do sleeves like this, unless maybe they were Factory records where they'd have an appropriated image from an old painting or something. And so it was always a bit of battle going on. Michael Braceweli: Chris, you've kind of over the years got this amazing sort of role as a writer, sort of as a literary project, you've kind of amongst other things been sort of Pet Shop Boys' writer-in-residence. I mean, I remember when you did the University tour - you may remember a few years ago Release came out and Pet Shop Boys did the University tour, and the idea was that this was all going to be terribly pared-down and straightforward, it was just going to be the band playing, and I took our son to go and see them in Keele, great show, great evening, so we thought maybe it'll be all pared-down and straightforward backstage. And Chris and Neil were backstage being filmed, photographed, their every word being written... it was like being on the set of a war film. Neil Tennant: Never done anything with it, mind. Michael Braceweil: I remember you were there, Chris, literally sort of filming everything. How did that role come about? Did you...? Chris Heath: It sort of came about slowly, over time, sort of a bit by accident, I think. I mean, I started working at Smash Hits just towards the end of Neil working there, and we got to know each other a little there, and Chris would come in at the end of the day and I knew him slightly, and then I'd interview... I think I wrote the first cover story for Smash Hits on the Pet Shop Boys, and would write about them, and then when they finally decided to go on tour in 1989,1 think your sort of impulse was: most people take a photographer on tour, why don't we take a writer? Neil Tennant: I was always obsessed by this book about the Beatles called Love Me Do... Chris Heath: Which had always obsessed me to. By Michael Braun. Neil Tenant: It was a book about the Beatles when they were just becoming famous in 1962, '63, and in fact I sold Faber & Faber a book by my friend Dave Rimmer about Culture Club, and again it was meant to be like Love Me Do. It's one of these great 'one idea's. And I think we thought about doing a book like that. And at the same time the reason Chris has always been around ever since is because we have this project, which is we do this magazine, which is meant to come out three times a year and probably comes out twice a year, also called Pet Shop Boys, Literally. And Chris writes it. And I think a lot of the fact that we've recorded in writing everything we've done since 1989, which is a long time now, I think we
probably couldn't have done the book really to some extent without giving
our thoughts at the time. Because of course you tend to revise maybe unconsciously
what you thought about something, and they're there in black in white.
And I think Chris has a personality similar to ours in that he has that
obsession thing to record it as it happens. Chris Heath: No, no, no, I have terrible recall. I manically write things down, endlessly. Michael Braceweil: Film? Chris Heath: Just occasionally. But on the first tour I had these great big notebooks, and I'd literally often be standing by people while they were dancing on the dance floor. Neil Tenant: With the notebook. Chris Heath: With the notebook, listening to what they were saying to the person they were dancing with. But amazingly, pretty quickly, everyone just got so used to it, it was unbelievable. Including me. I thought it was a normal way to act. Neil Tennant: Actually, people around us know that that happens. It is a bit weird. Michael Bracewell: This sleeve, the Actually sleeve, it seemed to me to sort of flag up one of those words that has drifted around your career which is the 'irony' word. And I know that you've long managed to weary, both you and Chris, of journalists asking you whether or not you're ironic. But I did read somewhere the rather great line by a writer who said that "it wasn't so much that Neil's voice was detached as semi-detached" which I thought was quite... Neil Tennant: You know what he means. Michael Bracewell: Was this just of a sort of accident, this image? Neil Tennant: The image itself was an accident. We were doing the video with Dusty Springfield for "What have I done to deserve this?" at Brixton Academy which Eric Watson was directing, and therefore we had a photographer. You know, in those days everything was less planned. So, for instance, this photograph was taken about six weeks before the album came out. Nowadays the record company would... it'd be on the Internet three-and-a-half months beforehand. And so we were pretty last-minute with this. Cindy Palmano took the photograph and it was a classic long shoot, got there at seven in the morning or something, and towards the end of the day it was time for Cindy Palmano's photographs and we sat down and I just yawned. And we were wearing these clothes in the video - Chris hates this picture by the way - and I yawned, and then she took endless reels of it, and Mark Farrow got the photographs in, and we all thought it was great because, again, it was a bit of a wind-up, in a way - saying to the record company that we're going to have a picture of me yawning on the front cover of this gorgeous shiny pop record. But also it was part of our attitude. Famously when "West End girls" was number one and we were on Top Of The Pops and the camera came over to me Chris hissed, "Don't look triumphant. " This is the same thing: don't look triumphant. And we had the title before we started making the record, Pet Shop Boys, actually, because we'd realised everyone thought we were very English and we didn't mind that they thought that. And also we'd taken on board the irony thing. Because we did write ". . . (let's make lots of money)" as a major ironic pop song. I mean, I've always thought the Pet Shop Boys is a kind of sustained exercise in romanticism, really, but it's leavened with humour and irony to get over the embarrassment of the level of commitment there is in a lot of the songs. I remember when the album Behaviour came out, I was embarrassed thinldng of sending it out to journalists. And so this: again, the record has some very romantic songs like "It couldn't happen here" and "King's Cross", political songs, and "What have I done to deserve this?", and so presenting it like this, in this seriously modem and slightly detached way... Philip Hoare:
It's very English thing though, as well, Neil Tennant: Yeah. The embarrassment... Philip Hoare: Because you don't want to feel as though you've set yourself up to fall. And also the notion of being slightly amateur about this sort of thing... Neil Tennant: Yeah. We were always suspicious, to this day, of professionalism. Or of professionalism being the point. Nowadays a lot of pop music is about professionalism. And of course in many ways we are very professional, but we don't think it should be about that. Michael Braceweli: Just coining back to what you were saying, Philip, just now... because this is one of my favourites... this is an Eric Watson portrait ["It's a sin" sleeve], fantastic for so many different reasons, but it seems to tap into what you've written about quite a lot, about this idea of the romantic, about how does,
Philip Hoare: Also, the lyrical notion of romanticism as well, because the way an image can pick up on the sense of place. And this is shot in the Presbytery, is it, Neil, of Christchurch? Neil Tennant: Yeah, we hired this church for an afternoon, and it cost £2,000 to hire it. And then we did most of the photographs in this little shitty office. I mean, the twelve-inch is in the church. This is not even the presbytery - it's the caretaker's office or something. I can't remember that Eric lit it or not - he probably did light it - but it's just a beautiful composition. I say in the book it reminds me of that painting Ennui by Sickert, which it does. It was when we established the fact that we weren't scared of looking bored - this is actually before Actually comes out. And again it was a very uncompromising image, and if you were to look at all the other singles coming out that week it would look ridiculously uncompromising. And also, you probably can't really see it, but we did this thing of putting the "It's a sin" in quote marks, trying to make the title of the record a caption to the photograph, so in other words there's a sort of implied narrative going on in the photograph. Philip Hoare: It's like a pre-Raphaelite painting. Neil Tennant: Yes, it's very like that. Michael Braceweil: Just kind of scooting ahead a little bit, because I'm slightly behind on time, this is famously the Derek Jannan video for "It's a sin". And in a lot of ways one of the things the Thames & Hudson Catalogue picks up on is that right from the beginning you and Chris have made a point of working with, if you want, big name contemporary artists. Derek Jarman... Neil Tennant:
Yes, but it's not so much... it's also the idea of going to people outside
pop music. In the way that in the songs we've tried to bring in subject
matter outside pop music, and not just the conventional subject matter
of pop music. We were finishing this record off " because
this record was so sort of Catholic, and Caravaggio... we suddenly thought
he could do a very Catholic-looking video. That was our brief. And the
idea was that I was going to be burnt at the stake at the end. Which is
actually implied at the Michael Braceweil: Duggie Fields at the top. Neil Tennant: Duggie Fields at the top, and Ron Moody, who of course played Fagin in Oliver is in it. Philip Hoare: Stephen Linard... Neil Tennant: Stephen Linard is in there. But yeah, we like the idea of people coming with a different aesthetic coming from outside; without a pop aesthetic. One of the problems about working with people outside pop when you get them to do a pop video is they often think, "Oh, you've got to do a pop video". We always say, "Don't look at any pop videos - we want you to do your thing?' Just like when Dusty Springfield said, "What do you want me to sound like?", we said, "Dusty Springfield?' With Derek Jarman, we said we wanted it to look like Derek Jarman. And it did, although he made a better film for it when we did the tour with him in 1989. Michael Braceweil: It's interesting, because we jump straight from that which is quite febrile and very recognisably Derek Jarman into this ["Rent" sleeve]. And we in the faculty of Pet Shop Boys studies, around about year two start looking at: Do Pet Shop Boys have a continued fascination with the tension between artifice and naturalism? Neil Tennant: Um... I don't know the answer to that question. Michael Braceweil: Well... Neil Tennant:
I think there's a lot of subtext goes on in Pet Shop Boys, there's a lot
of things that aren't said. And in this picture we're dealing with the
fact that we've got a single coming out and it's called "Rent",
which has evidently come from the phrase "rent boy" and it's
part of the romanticism of writing about the street, and making it romantic.
Although the song itself I can't remember really. I actually can't remember. I think it's great the way someone's holding a light behind us, which is causing the shadow, and you can't see him. Michael Braceweil: But, just in the Pet Shop Boys trivia stakes department, is it true that on a television event not dissimilar to this one that Chris Lowe actually fell asleep? Neil Tennant: That was when "West End girls" was just happening, I think - we were interviewed by Selina Scott on breakfast television. It was very early in the morning, it was like a quarter to eight. She had to wake him up to answer a question. Michael Braceweil: This is a fabulous image. It's on the set of the video for "Heart" with Sir Ian MeKellen in it. And I just wanted to ask you, Patrick - it's not often you get to look at pictures of the Pet Shop Boys next to an expert on the gothic, and I just wondered - do you think Pet Shop Boys play with the gothic a lot? Do you think it's a strand in their imagery? Philip Hoare: Well, it's funny, because what you've been talking about up till now just makes me increasingly think that they could be a nineteenth century pop group. That if there was a pop group around the time of Wilde, that is how they would have operated. Because what they're drawing on - very English themes, but there are always subtexts, and of course the gothic is always about subsumed sexuality in another form. I mean, that's what the vampire is about. And I think this video was directly based on Nosferatu, wasn't it? Neil Tennant: Yeah. Philip Hoare: So, yeah, increasingly when I look at them, and some of the later images as well I think are very nineteenth century in a way... and I don't know what it is. I mean, I don't know whether it's because I know Neil's own cultural references in private, as it were - what you read, the fact you've taken a single title from Trollope... I don't know. But those are the things that increasingly occur to me... Neil Tennant: Well, I think we also like the clothes. The sort of nineteenth century clothes. But at the time that video was made I was living, you may recall, in a flat in Fulham which was decorated in the sort of gothic style. I don't particularly like it now so much, but... Philip Hoare: But it's a great counterpoint because... Neil Tennant:
It is. I've always thought in pop music - and of course we had the sexuality
issue at this point - and I think the mystery of wondering about someone
is much more interesting than knowing everything about someone. And I
think it's one of the powerful things about the Pet Shop Boys in the late
Eighties that, Michael Braceweil: Again with this Bruce Weber portralt, an image taken on the set of "Being boring". Again, Patrick, it seems to remind me that it could be straight out of Beaton or Noel Coward, one of those house party shots from the 1920s. Philip Hoare: Sure. And I think that's what Bruce Weber was trying to recreate. Well, specifically he was taking the Fitzgerald quote out of "Being boring", it was shot in Long Island... and also that sense, again, of reticence and nostalgia and longing, and these things which militate against the emotion of probably my favourite Pet Shop Boys song in a way, and also one of the most emotional of Pet Shop Boys songs in a way. You have to strive to get to the emotion of the song, in a way, through the... Neil Tennant: I think Bruce Weber heard the song and just thought it was about youth. And he was right, because it's about what you wanted to be when you were young and what you became when you were older. That's kind of the idea of the song. And so he just went for the youth thing. And it says about having a party in the song. My friends in Newcastle used to have what we thought were sort of crazy parties. And Bruce Weber did this very glamorous party, and the fact that it's shot in black and white somehow made it look like the past in the present. It gave a slightly mythic feel to it. And also what we liked about it was it looked very luxurious. Michael Bracewell: It reminds me of Bailey and Lichfield's Ritz newspaper. Philip Hoare: Yes. Neil Tenants: Yes, it's a bit like that. Philip Hoare: But also you have to say that the shadow of AIDS is hanging over that image. Neil Tennant: Over the image? Do you think? It certainly hangs over the song. Philip Hoare: I think the film, too. Neil Tennant: Do you think? I don't get that. Philip Hoare: Well, because it's so sexually celebratory, in a very nostalgic way. You feel as though that's been lost. Neil Tennant:
Yes, that's a good point. I hadn't thought of that. Because they're sort
of shagging at the end of Michael Braceweil: Speaking of shagging... this is from the Performance tour, called the Thompson Twins outfits, and I actually wanted to ask you, Chris, a bit about this, because you were on the whole of the Performance tour. Chris Heath: The whole American part of it. Michael Braceweli: Most of it. And I suppose because you've probably studied Chris and Neil when they're actually working, closer than almost any other... certainly writer - do you think it's right to say that there's an incredible mix of, if you want, kind of high and low, fine art and popular culture, head and heart stuff going on in Pet Shop Boys. Do you think it is a sort of formula like that? Chris Heath:
Well, I think all of that's there, but it's not a formula in the sense
that I've ever heard anyone say, "Oh, we need a dollop of high art
now:' Chris Heath: Well, they might say it for humour... Neil Tennant: Yes. Chris Heath: ...but I think it's quite instinctual. I think that's why it works. I think, watching it really close up, it's amazing watching the incredibly pop elements and what might be seen as sort of arty intellectual just sort of pile in all at once and all together. Does that seem fair? Neil Tennant: Yes, and this is also David Fielding, who designed the Performance tour, it's his interpretation of us, or one of them. As you can see from all these photographs from this tour, he has the most fantastic sense of colour. And the moustaches were just really funny. And I think the Thompson Twins in Tintin are a very English archetype. And there was always the thing about us with Gilbert and George... Michael Braceweli: Yes, I was going to come onto that. Neil Tennant: .. and it's sort of a bit Gilbert and George-y in a way. Michael Braceweil: I think there's one interview that's in the Thames & Hudson book where you say - I don't know if the interview was done around this time - where you say that you were quite pleased with the comparison to Gilbert and George. Neil Tennant: I mean, they weren't deliberate, but when people said that we quite liked it, because we like Gilbert and George's work. And also they're such a sort of brand, aren't they, that we were quite flattered to be compared to them. But I think partly it's in the same way that we get compared to Sparks who neither of us has ever had much interest - because there's a keyboard player who doesn't smile and a singer. You've obviously got it all from Sparks. And you can say, "Oh, it obviously all comes from Gilbert and George." It's because there's two of you. Michael Braceweil: Pet Shop Boys trivia department again calling in: is it true that you once shouted through George's letterbox on Foamier Street? Neil Tennant: No, I looked through it. We were going to do a tour in 1986 and we had this idea that we would get Gilbert and George to design the poster for it. The tour never happened anyway. And so Chris, me, and Mark Farrow turned up - because of course everyone knows where they live - turned up at their house at nine o'clock in the morning and knocked on the door. So I looked through the letterbox. At this point.., who's the English one? Michael Braceweli: George. Neil Tennant: George answered the door as I was kneeling down at the letterbox. We explained who we were and all the rest of it, and I said, "We'd like to ask you if you'd design a poster for us:' And he said, "Oh, well, we don't do anything for a purpose' I was rather flummoxed by this, and Chris said, "Oh, that's OK, it doesn't have to have a purpose." And he said, "Oh, you d better come in then:' In fact Gilbert's father had died the night before, so our timing was very bad. And we went into their house with all the ceramics and everything, and that was it - we never heard anything. But I spoke to them about it many years later and they both remembered it. Michael Bracewell: It's interesting that by the time you get to 1991, Pet Shop Boys had become sufficiently, if you want, established kind of as an institution - certainly within pop music, and also I would say within broader culture - to the point that you could use fan folk art, little kind of major dolls of yourself, on the cover. ["Was it worth it?" sleeve] Was this a Japanese...? Neil Tennant: We toured Japan on the Performance tour, and we'd been given these dolls, and they were particularly good dolls. Actually over the years from Japan we've had some great dolls. We didn't have a new image for this - "Was it worth it?", isn't it? - and also it was Christmas, and it looks a bit Christmas-y, dolls, and they're just really cute, and also we liked the fact that it was someone else's... in the same way that "It's a sin" is Derek Jarman's representation of us, this is some Japanese fan's representation of us. Michael Braceweli: Would you ever - given how slippery pop culture is these days - would Chris and yourself ever endorse the idea of there being a Pet Shop Boys cartoon? Or Pet Shop Boys figurines? Or... Neil Tennant:
I don't think there's a market for figurines. I mean, we try to do cartoons
- we're probably going to come on to that, so maybe we'll talk about it.
I mean, this ["Can you forgive her... ?"] was our idea of...
this is two years after that, and we've got a new album coming out, we're
sort of thinking we're bored of being Pet Shop Boys as was, and our American
manager, called Arma Andon, said to us: What we were aiming for, and Chris particularly was aiming for, was that they'd have an artificial version of us so we wouldn't have to be in the videos. Howard Greenhalgh, the video director, his heart sank the day Chris said that to him. Because we did sort of finally get there. But these were meant to be like digital cartoons. And also we liked the fact that you had this trademark image with these pointy hats. To this day, in a Pet Shop Boys concert in Mexico City, there'll be five people wearing pointy hats. And we love that. Also, again, at the time, everyone just sort of remembers, "oh, yeah, the pointy hat thing It was quite a brave thing to do. Michael Braceweil: Particularly in Russia, where I gather that the ceiling height... Neil Tennant: We had to do a press conference wearing them in Russia and we came out and the ceiling was really low.., there were as many people as this there, and all the Russians just sat there and not one of them smiled. It was a bit embarrassing. Michael Braceweli: This is some of my absolutely favourite Pet Shop Boys imagery ["Go West" video Neil Tennant: Totally, yeah. In the early Nineties they had a season of Powell and Pressburger films on BBC or Channel 4 and I videoed them all, and I loved them and I still love them. We had a meeting at my house about the video for "Go West" and I put on A Matter Of life And Death, the famous scene where they're going to heaven on a big staircase. Howard Greenhalgh said, "Oh yeah, that's greaC' And David Fielding designed some new helmets and things, and we just went with the staircase. Again, this is super-cartoon-y. You probably don't imagine that someone like us would think like this, but we were always aware that we had quite a lot of young fans. Children used to like the Pet Shop Boys. And we liked the fact we were doing something that the children of friends of ours would like as much as adults thinking it was all ironic and funny. It had a Saturday morning cartoon-like feel about it. Michael Braceweil: One of the points you've made in the book, Catalogue, which I think is very good is that this work was being made in 1993 when in London young British art was really gathering speed, as a kind of cultural brand and so on. And that there's almost a sort of sense with this, it's the point at which you just go for images that don't have to mean anything, they become almost meaningless, and gloriously so. Did you have a sense then that you were kind of jettisoning the idea that it had to necessarily be about anything? It could just be... Neil Tennant: David Fielding always had an idea for what these things were about. Like, for instance, the pointy hats were dunces' caps, and it comes from the line in the song, the school reference. But yet we liked the fact that this was a glorious colourful.., notice that it's still a grid, of those surfboards in the background. Which is very Chris - Chris always likes a grid. But we liked the fact that it did have an abstract quality about it. I mean, Mark Farrow's team had a lot of fun just playing round with the various images. Like this one ["I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing" image], this is totally created by Mark Farrow and his team. We did all these photographs, David Fielding designed these outfits that looked a bit Sixties because the song sounds a bit Sixties, and we went with these wigs which I always really liked, for whatever reason... and Mark came up with this. It was meant to be terribly, tenably, terribly artificial. Michael Braceweil:
It's odd, actually - that previous image, I often wonder whether Tim Burton
maybe watched that prior to styling Willie Wonka, because there's aspects,
definitely. Have you see Charlie And The Chocolate Factory? Michael Braceweil: It's fantastic. The Oompa Loompas even
do your dance. Michael Braceweil: This is the Somewhere tour at the Savoy Theatre. Some of the staging was made by Sam Taylor-Wood; a very, very powerful piece, I think, and still one of my favourite pieces by Sam Taylor-Wood. Patrick, I remember you saying about how interesting you found seeing Pet Shop Boys in the Savoy Theatre in this very Cowardian kind of setting, under the arch, and so forth. Philip Hoare: That whole sort of silver art deco proscenium arch, framed like that, but within it having this ultimately extremely modern presentation - incredibly modern and incredibly minimalist, almost like one of the album covers comes to life, where you walk out of the film Sam had made of you partying with the YBAs, with Jay Jopling and Cerith Wyn Evans, and you walk out of the film into the stage, into this clinically-lit, very minimalist box. But, counter pointed with that, there was this incredible feeling of warmth, because the audience was there, as close as we are now. There wasn't that distance between us. So the whole relationship, which you lose in pop now so much, the relationship between the performer and the audience - and the one wouldn't exist without the other - that was so much back there. I'm sure many people here were at some of those performances, and it was an incredibly emotional performance. Neil Tennant: Yeah, it was unusual because, you're right, the audience was as close as this. And the interesting thing was, we did it for two and a half weeks - we did 15 performances on consecutive nights. And it was instead of doing a tour. Sam had the idea... we went and looked at the theatre, and Chris and I had this very complicated idea that we were going to call the show Somewhere so -. even then we were obsessed by CCTV cameras and that whole thing of always being spied on and filmed - we had the idea of having cameras in Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus. A very pop star-y, Nick Rhodes kind of idea. She said, "Yeah, I'll think about it," and then she came up with this much cleverer idea that there'd be two sofas and she'd film one this way and one that and Chris and I would walk out, and we'd film a party with the backing tracks so they'd exactiy sync in, and they'd get drunk and dance to it, Chris and I wandering in and out of the party. It was a very simple idea, and a very clever idea. Somewhere live show. Michael Braceweil:
But technically, for you and Chris, Neil Tennant: That was just a bit of luck, really. Either Chris or me once forgot to walk off at one point. And a lot of people thought there was a party backstage, because we wanted to give the idea of a CCTV camera or closed-circuit television or something. Philip Hoare: This was before Big Brother, wasn't it? Neil Tennant: Oh, ages before. And you mention the YBA thing - that's simply because they were the people that Sam hung round with. I mean, we knew Jay Joplmg, and we'd met Cereth Wyn Evans... and there's various other people... Johnny Shand-Kydd. Some of them were a bit embarrassed about it - I don't think they quite realised they were going to be at the Savoy Theatre for two-and-a-half weeks. They get really drunk by the end. Michael Braceweil: We've already hit eight o'clock and I've been instructed that we have to be out of here for ten past eight... I'm sure some of you have very good questions that you'd like to ask, and I want people to have a chance to do it. Anyone? What next for the Pet Shop Boys? Neil Tennant: What next? We're not really doing "next" at the moment. Although actually we're going in the studio next week - we haven't written any songs for two years, pretty much, so we're going to write some new songs. And we're touring more in the first half of this year, hut with the production we've been doing. And we're thinking of writing a ballet for a friend of ours. We'll see whether that actually happens. You know, we've never thought that far ahead. Often it's a perception that we plan things ahead - we tend to do things on the spur of the moment. You mentioned Brian Eno in your introduction - it would be a music fan's wet dream for the Pets to do an album with him. How come it's never happened? Neil Tennant: Well, we got to know Brian Eno right after the Somewhere shows - we went to St Petersburg when he was living there; that's why we went, actually, because we met him. And when we were starting to plan the musical Closer to Heaven, Brian Eno was going to produce the record of it. He had a great idea about making computers sounds human, and we did a day in the studio with him where he recorded a version with us of this song called "Something special" from the musical. And then we were going to do the album, and then I don't know what happened. He was living in St Petersburg and then the musical got delayed... it just never happened. But I agree, it would be an interesting idea. But Brian Eno has a thing he does. One his great things he does is he gives people strategies to write songs, if he's working with U2 or James or someone, and we arrived at this session with a cassette with 12 finished songs on it, so it would be a different sort of Brian Eno project, I think. The video of "Numb" is very interesting. Could you tell us more about it? Neil Tennant: Are you Russian? No, I'm Polish. Neil Tennant:
Polish, sony. The video for "Numb" came about because we had
this idea that "Numb" was going to come out in the winter, and
we had this sort of Russian snow idea. ["Numb" sleeve image
is projected] This is not from the video, even though it's a very interesting
image... It's probably the video we've had least to do with in our entire
career but it's very beautiful, but they took pieces of old Soviet black
and white feature films and edited them together with different backgrounds.
It's an incredibly beautiful and clever video.., for which I can take
no credit. Neil Tennant: Very rarely. I've probably sald this before, but there's a song we have called "Young offender" on the album Very, and Jam & Spoon did a remix and we definitely prefer that to our version. I think it's the best remix we ever had done. There might be a couple of others, but that's the one that springs to mind. In your DVD of A Life In Pop, there's scenes from the '89 tour that haven't been seen since '89 - does that mean the film of it is finally going to come out? Neil Tennant: Yes. Derek Jarman filmed the 1989 tour, and EMI at the time wouldn't pay for it to be shot on film so it was shot on high definition video and we really hated the way it looked. Anyway, we've decided to have another look at it, and maybe it will come out. The guy who actually made A Ltfe In Pop worked at PMI, which is EMI's video company, in those days, and he's kind of in charge of that. So it may do. It'd be nice if it did. Have you and Chris ever had an idea for an image where you thought, "that's a good image but it's just too over the top, almost"? Neil Tennant: I think, if you go back to the dogs picture ["I don't know what you want..." sleeve], I think this is an amazing picture. I wasn't at the marketing meeting at Parlophone, but our manager then, Mitch Clark, was, and I think it was quite a difficult meeting. It's brave, you know, but I think it's an amazing image. We were just trying to do something striking, sort of slightly alienating. Michael Braceweil: Because you even did performance interviews, didn't you, at the old St Pancras Hotel, where the writer would go up through the building... Neil Tennant: Ian MacNeil designed it, the light box we sat on, and we wore the clothes. It was great, actually. It was funny, actually, because most journalists didn't refer to it. I mean, they went into a deserted hotel, walked up this massive staircase, as soon as you opened the door dogs started to bark, and at the end of a dark corridor the video was playing, then you turned a corner and sitting on a light box were us, dressed like us. We did this for three days and I think one journalist mentioned it. It's incredible. We were just trying to do something, because when you're writing it's quite good to have context, you know, and we thought it gave quite good context to the album. Michael Bracewell: Is it true that a journalist from one of the papers who was a big fan turned up already wearing the same outfit? Neil Tennant: Yes. He was Spanish or something like that. So anyway, your question... and when we did this, we did actually alter it slightly. Originally the mouths were like rectangles, and we thought they looked too ugly, and then we changed the wigs to make them more sort of cosmetically attractive as the project went on. We wore these things at the Zaha Hadid tour. I think that when we did this video ["Home and dry" video still] - again, I wasn't at the marketing meeting at Parlophone - we approached Wolfgang Tillmans to do a video because we'd met him and liked his work, and we planned a whole video, and then we went to see it and he said, "You know, I had a different idea..." And he said, "I was just thinking about home and travel" And he showed us this. We thought it was great. I thought it was brilliant. If you haven't seen it, it's mice in Tottenham Court Road tube station. It seems a very clever image, of home - it's their home - and it's about travel. But the only MTV company that showed it was MTV Russia, to their enormous credit. Again, I think, in hindsight, I think it's really good. I think if it had been shot on film, and not shot on video.., because there's a thing about video, people think, "Oh, I could have done that... I could have done it on my telephone..." And you couldn't. You know, it took him five days just waiting for these blasted mice to appear. But I think if it had been shot on film and lit in a kind of a cute way... I thought it was like a sort of Walt Disney idea, to be honest. I thought you could have made a cartoon out of it. You touched on cartoons earlier~ Are we going to see a Pet Shop Boys visit South Park? Neil Tennant: No. Not at the moment. I think we could do a good cartoon, but there's no plans for it. Are there any plans to exhibit any of the costumes? Neil Tennant:
Actually this book, Catalogue, came about because this American curator,
Terry Meyers, had an idea for doing a show in American art museums based
on the collaborations of our live shows: Derek Jannan, Sam Taylor-Wood,
Zaha Hadid etc, and it was going to end with a new collaboration with
someone. Anyway, people are still talking about it but I don't Costumes, you know, always look disappointing, though, close to. Because costumes aren't fashion, they're costumes - they're meant to be seen from a distance. It's sort of interesting to see them, but they always look a bit rough and ready when you're looking close to them. I'd just like to ask, "It couldn't happen here", which is a very ambitious song on Actually, I was wondering why you didn't do it on Concrete when you had an orchestra? Neil Tennant: Well, on Concrete, which was the album we made with the BBC Concert Orchestra last year, we made a list of all of the songs with orchestras on, and actually there's quite a lot of them, you know. And we were going to do "It couldn't happen here"... and I can't remember why we didn't do it. We should have done it, probably. I don't know. Maybe the orchestra arrangement's too big or something. It's a shame we didn't, I agree. Do you have a favourite video and image, one that you're actually most proud of throughout this whole career of creativity? Neil Tennant: My favourite videos we've done are "It's alright", which is the one with all the babies, which I think is very beautiful - we had 50 babies in the studio, and I think it was a really good idea and it's beautifully shot and it's sort of moving. You can do those kind of very optimistic Michael Jackson-y kind of things which are really corny, whereas this is very disciplined and beautiful. I love the video for "Being boring" as well, and I love the video for "Can you forgive her?", because I think it's just a sort of perfect cartoon. It's also very ingenious. I don't know if you remember those bits where we're sitting at a table pushing things to each other. And it somehow doesn't look that contrived, weirdly. It's got a real flow about it. I like the imagery in it. All the three videos are really very different and represent different sides of us and our music. And the lady mentioned "Numb", I think "Numb" is a really great video as well. Michael Bracewell: That seems like a very good last question... Neil Tennant:
I thought we were here until nine o'clock. I'd have been talking faster... DESERT ISLAND DISCS
My castaway
this week is the Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant. He is as untypical a pop star
as you're likely to find, having hit stardom at the relatively Um, maybe to the outside world, yes. I became a singer by accident. I only was the singer in the Pet Shop Boys because Chris wasn't going to sing. I remember when we first did the video for "West End girls" we just did what we normally did, which was, I'd stride ahead and Chris walked slower than me, and I'm slightly taller than Chris. So that kind of image was kind of fixed by that. When you were on Top Of The Pops in those early days I remember certainly Chris - Chris Lowe, this is your partner in the Pet Shop Boys - on keyboards, static. It appeared he was using only one finger - I don't know if he was - and there you were in your big, black, severe coat. I mean, it was very much against the trend at the time, which had been the sort of big sound, the New Romantic trend, boys in a lot of make-up and frilly shirts. Yeah, we were trying to be ourselves, was the idea. In the first half of the Eighties, which was a great time for pop music, when I worked for a magazine called Smash Hits, it was very much a sort of party on Top Of The Pops - and it was great. But that phase was coming to an end. And we wanted to do something different, something that was more influenced by dance music. Our specific idea was to make dance music with kind of intelligent lyrics. In fact if you look at the footage now, Chris in fact is grooving quite a lot - I just guess at the time it didn't really seem like that. "West End girls" was the big hit. Did you think that it was going to be a big hit when you wrote it? I remember when we first recorded it in New York playing it to a close friend and he phoned me up and said, "You know, that record could be number one:' And I said, "Yeah, I know what you mean:' i said, "It won't be, though, but I know what you mean - it's sort of different, isn't it?" But when we first started writing, Chris and I, together, we didn't imagine we'd have success. We were just doing it because it was a thrill. We did it for the fun of it. This seems like a very good time then to ask you about your first record. My first record is... one of my first experiences of music is, we used to go on Sunday afternoons to my mother's father's house - my grandfather - and he was very into what you now call hi-fl. What even then you called hi-fl. And he had this very big record player in a sort of mahogany case... Those were stereogram's, weren't they? Yes, they were stereogram's... Huge things, upholstered in fake wood. Yes, because in those days record players were furniture. And we just had a little portable record player at that point. And at the time everyone's parents had the soundtrack of the musical My Fair Lady and I loved that way that Rex Harrison talked and sung sort of simultaneously. I also liked the wit. It's a very, very witty musical. The lyrics were really, really clever. And this is his first song, "Why Can't The English Teach Their Children How To Speak". Rex Harrison "Why Can't The English Teach Their Children How To Speak" Rex Harrison
as Henry Higgins and "Why Can't The English from the original soundtrack
to My Yeah, and the wit. Choosing that record to play today... it had never occurred to me before that the influence has just seeped into my bran from listening to something like that. Have the words always come easy to you? I mean, were you a wordy little boy? No, I wasn't
the sort of boy that wrote poetry. I wrote songs. I got a guitar when
I was 12 years old, and I taught myself the guitar chords, and then I
worked out how to play the guitar chords on the piano we had at home,
and I learned a lot about chord changes from playing Beatles music, really.
And after a while I couldn't be bothered to play those songs so I'd learn
a new chord and I would write a song around it. This was when I was 13
or I read that you wrote your first musical when you were nine. Is that right? Yes, but we made up the songs in our heads. Me and a girl at primary school decided we were going to do a musical. I mean, this would have been 1963 Musicals were very hot in those days. And so we wrote this musical called The Girl Who Pulled Tails about a naughty girl who used to pull the tails of cats and how she got into trouble doing this.~ So it took a firm sort of moral tone? Yeah, I think it did. It's a very hazy memory now. Can you remember any of the words? All I can remember is the first song was called "Has anyone seen my cat?". It was bit Rex Harrison-y. I can't really remember the words now. It was sort of, "Has anyone seen my cat, the one with the long tail?" I can't remember how it went after that. There was only one performance, in her back garden, and about two people came to see it, and they got a bit bored halfway through, but we carried on and finished it. Did you feel the thrill of performance as you were up there? No, I felt a slight disappointment that it wasn't quite good enough. So you were born in the mid-Fifties. You grew up on the outskirts of Newcastle? Yes, I was
born in North Shields which was a And you mentioned the piano at home. Was it a musical home? There was music around? Yes, there was always music, from both sides of my family. I was the end of that generation that grew up with the Light Programme where you would have this mad combination of music playing, so you'd be used to hearing Frank Chacksfield and his orchestra playing "Moon River" or something, and it would be followed by Gerry And The Pacemakers or Cliff Richard or what have you. So that there was that weird thing of easy listening and new pop music being played together. And so your second record is? My second record is to me the first pop record that really, really made me an obsessive pop fan. I mean, at the time this record was so famous it was like a nursery rhyme - you would hear children just singing it in the street. And it's "She Loves You". The Beatles "She Loves You" The Beatles and "She Loves You" from 1963. You mentioned listening to them on the radio. Did you watch them as well, on TV? Yes, I remember we were allowed to stay up and watch them on Sunday Night At The London Palladium, and on the television you could hear, from the street outside the London Palladium, you could hear crowds screaming. It was under siege from Beatles fans. It was the day Beatle mania started and it was live on the television. And it was a Catholic family. Was it a happy family? Yes, it was.
I have two brothers and a sister. My father was a sales rep. We used to like that, because in the summer holidays we used to travel with him, so he'd be going down to Darlington from Newcastle and my brother Simon and I would sit in the back of the car and get driven to Darlington and wander round Darlington. We used to go out to visit transport cafes for what I would now call lunch. What would you have called it then? I don't know - I'd probably call it dinner then, I think. It sounds all very secure. Yes, it was very secure. It was just the way the world was. And we were Catholic and I was an altar boy. From about the age of nine until I was 14 or 15. When I was at primary school I used to go and serve the eight o'clock mass so, at the age of nine, me and the priest would do the whole Latin mass in less than 20 minutes. And I used to like that because you didn't have to go to school assembly. You would take your breakfast in a little Tupperware box and, while they were having assembly, I'd be having this little breakfast my mother would have made for me. So you liked the church? I've always been interested in religion, and religions. Systems of belief. But I think when I was a teenager... you know, you start to question all of that. Of course one of your most famous records is "It's asin Yes, it is. When I was writing the lyrics I sort of meant it... as something like a joke. I didn't really take it very seriously, anyway. And the gist of the song, for people who are not aware of it...? The gist of it... I guess it just came from my subconscious that when we were at school you always seemed to be taught that everything was a sin. Everything you wanted to do was a sin. And so I put that in a song. Did you feel that, given that you were a good Catholic boy and given that you got this reaction once the song was released, did you feel any sort of residual guilt? Do you think: I've given them a bad press and they don't deserve it? No. [Laughs.] No, I didn't. I mean, "It's a sin" was also an early example of the Pet Shop Boys trying to bring a different kind of subject matter into pop music. Did you enjoy riling the Catholic Church then? I don't know that they were riled. I wouldn't have minded if I had. But I was just surprised that actually there was a sort of minor debate about it. We were on the cover of the Salvation Army's magazine, the War Cry - they thought it was wonderful that we'd brought sin back into the public agenda. Tell us about your next record. The next record... all of my adult life I've listened to classical music as much as pop music. And the first classical music I can really remember affecting me was when I was at school, St Cuthbert's Grammar School in Newcastle, one day... we used to have the music lesson, for some reason, in the big hall where assembly was held, and he said he was going to play this music, and it was Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis", which is a very English piece of music, and he put it on and I just felt I'd never heard anything like this before. The richness of the harmony with this plaintive folk melody really hit me sort of physically. I was just really, really moved by it. Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Talus" Part of Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis" played by the Symphonic of London conducted by Sir John Barbirolli. What about formal music tuition then? You said that the first time you heard that Vaughan Williams it almost hit you physically when you were a young boy in school. Did you have any tuition? No. We did
music the first three years and then you dropped it, you know. But I learned
the cello - I played the cello for three years at school. One of the reasons
I liked playing the cello was because And you were a bright boy and you passed your eleven-plus and you got a scholarship? Yes, I was sort of relatively bright. The school I went to was a difficult school for me in a way because it was a very sort of sporty school. You know, Newcastle's a great football place and I wasn't really interested in football. And were you lonely in school? Were you isolated? No. No, I wasn't. I always had a couple of good friends. I liked the feeling of not belonging. It consolidated that feeling in me that I wasn't like the rest of them and that I was going to do something special with my life, and I would do whatever I wanted and I would have no fear about it. Did you think - and this is a very interesting point and sometimes comes up when you speak to people who 'ye been very successful - they say that as a youngster, as a child even, they always knew something was going to happen. I always
used to tell people when I was about 16, The difficulty with those sort of pronouncements though, if you dare say them when you're 16 or 17, is that people think you're snooty, or you perceive yourself as superior~ and it makes people not like you. Yeah, when I was at school I was a bit snooty. But that was a protection device, I think. And also I wasn't really that bothered about being liked. All my friends - I had a very tight group of friends from all around Newcastle, and we used to go to The People's Theatre which is this very big amateur theatre company and that's where I formed my first group which was a folk group called Dust. At that point I was writing songs really quite seriously - from the age of 16, I would say, I was quite a serious songwriter at that point. Tell me about your next piece of music. The next piece of music is by David Bowie. There was this terrible period at the end of the Sixties, the beginning of the Seventies, where the most popular music was progressive rock and I really hated that period. And then the dark ages at the beginning of 1972 when we were watching The Old Grey Whistle Test and David Bowie came on, and he was charismatic and I just found him completely entrancing. He was an amazing performer and there was something very, very thrilling... We used to go to the main record shop in Newcastle and they had these stereo booths you could listen to classical music in, and we used to go after school and go to the classical bit - "Oh yes, you can go in there," - and we'd say, "Oh, can we hear Hunky Dory by David Bowie, please?" and they'd be really narked. The opening of this song, "Changes", used to sound so amazing in this stereo booth, marvellous speakers. I still think it's a brilliant song, this. David Bowie "Changes" David Bowie
and "Changes". How would Neil Well, when that record came out I was at school, but that year I left school and moved down to London to go to college. And I remember I got a summer job. So I went for an interview at the British Museum, and I was dressed head to foot in white - I had white Oxford bag trousers which we wore in 1973 and a white shirt and a white tank top, and on my feet I was wearing sort of multicolour shoes, yellow and blue shoes with wedge heels, which were actually women's shoes, very thick soles. What size were they then? They were one size too small for me. So you were suffering? I was suffering. And I had my hair dyed red as a sort of David Bowie tribute. That's quite a look. Yeah. And no one said anything, and they gave me the job. Through all
of this, though, in the back of your mind, still the plan to be a pop
star? So you thought it might never happen? Yes. But nonetheless I carried on doing it. Had you at any point in this period actually tried to launch yourself as a singer-songwriter and get out there and do it? Yes. When I came to London in 1972 I used to visit music publishers. And it seems impossible to imagine this now, because people just wouldn't let you do this anymore, but I would go there with my guitar and I would sit in front of their desk and play them three songs, and then play one on the piano in the office. I went to see Rocket Records when Elton John founded that in the early Seventies. And did these people ever give you any sort of encouragement and say, "you know, you've got a bit of talent there, Neil" or 'frankly, go off and work for Marvel Comics"? Yes, they said - and this was when I was a student, actually, still - they said "you've got something, but I think it's not quite developed yet". And actually they were right. Because it would have been a catastrophe actually if I had released a record in 1974 that would have done nothing by this singer-songwriter called Neil Tennant, a rather wistful album of piano ballads. It would have been a catastrophe because it would have just killed me off, probably, creatively. Tell me about your next record. In the Eighties I was sent by Smash Hits to America to launch the American version of Smash Hits which was called Star Hits. And this record is by Shannon and it's just typical of the sound of the time. What I really like about it is it has the inherent drama I've always liked in music, but it's got this hard, street, New York sound. And it's got this keyboard - "ding-dingdinnng, ding-ding-de-dinnng" - which also became pretty much a stable of the early Pet Shop Boys' sound. Shannon "Give Me Tonight" Shannon and "Give Me Tonight ". Let's talk about that infamous meeting then with Chris. You were living on the King's Road and you went to, well, a little electrical shop on the King's Road to try to... Yes. Chris Lowe, it turned out, was studying architecture - he was working in an architecture practice in Chelsea, just off the Kings Road, and I lived in this little studio flat on the Kings Road. So I went to the electrical store on the Kings Road in Chelsea and Chris Lowe walked in and we started talking about music and I thought he was very funny and he lived round the corner. And I told him I wrote songs and I gave him my phone number, and about a week later he phoned me up, and we met in a pub over the road. And we started writing songs literally immediately. You said a little while ago that if you had had any early success with any of those record companies that you'd knocked on the door of and sat across the desk from the executive playing your guitar, had given you a record deal, it would have been a disaster When you met Chris did you feel that the part of the jigsaw that you needed to put in place was then finished. Did you think "I can make music with this man - I can make music that will sell"? Yes, I thought I would be able to... we would be able to make music that was more relevant. That was different. And yes, I did feel that I had a second chance now with this. And so Chris and I now for years - '82, '83, '84 - would go into the studio two or three nights a week and we'd write a song. And in a period at the beginning of 1983 we wrote "West End girls", "It's a sin", "Rent", "Love comes quickly", a lot of other stuff - we were really getting somewhere. Tell me about your next record. My next record
is a totally different side of music. I think my favourite singers tend
to be women, and in the early Seventies we had in our flat in Tottenham
a record called Billie Holiday, The Lady Sings The Blues, and someone
had knocked together a compilation of Billie Holiday to tie in with the
film. And we used to play this record back to back with Ziggy Stardust
and Transformer by Lou Reed, and Billie Holiday has this power to Billie Holiday "Good Morning Heartache" Billie Holiday and "Good Morning Heartache". So, Neil, how did you come to write "West End girls"? Well, I was at my cousin's house one night and we'd watched some old James Cagney gangster movie, and as I got into bed and turned the light off this line came to my head: "Sometimes you're better off dead / there's a gun in your hand and it's pointing at your head". I think it was inspired by the movie. And I thought, "Oh, that's quite good," so I got up and wrote it down, and then I carried it on and wrote this whole rap piece which I then recited to Chris. And then Chris and I wrote this other instrumental piece of music one day - very big rich string chords and this "dum dum dumdum" bassline - and I realised when I got home that I could say the rap over it, but then when the music changed you would sing the "in a West End town..." bit. I thought, "Oh, that's good isn't it?" So it's a record that wasn't deliberately written - it's a song that came together. I described it in your introduction as a classic onehit wonder song - it was one of those songs at the time that sort of smacked everybody between the eyes, but you thought "well, that will be that then I think our record company maybe thought we'd be a one-hit wonder. And obviously a difficult record to follow up because it's very unusual. But of course what Chris and I knew was that we had up our sleeve all these other songs like "It's a sin and what have you. And once you've had a big hit and another big hit, and then you have another big hit, which with the next record was "It's a sin"~ you feel slightly more secure. Although, you can never feel secure in pop music. I'm thinking about that 17-year-old boy who said to his friends in a moment of blatant confidence, "I'm going to be a pop star" When you were onstage at Top Of The Pops or when you were looking out at the crowds of the people who knew all the lyrics to the songs you'd written, how did that feel? Well, it's a funny feeling, because it's a slightly insecure feeling, because one thing that happened is that suddenly we became performers, and I'd had very little performing experience of music, and so it was a funny feeling of insecurity and self-consciousness. And, at the same time, excitement. I remember when "West End girls" was number one and we were on Top Of The Pops and, as the camera was panning over to us, Chris hissed at me, "Don't look triumphant." Because the Eighties was a triumph list kind of time, and we didn't want to be part of that. So I didn't look triumphant. I don't know if I was going to anyway, but I certainly didn't after that. Of course importantly also we must remember, too, that you were 30. Thirty's quite a strange age to suddenly become a pop star. When I left Smash Hits to be in a pop group at the age of 30 - actually almost 31 in fact - I felt myself there was something slightly embarrassing about it. That it was sort of a ridiculous thing to do. But at the same time I had a confidence in us. And I thought, well, at the very least I'll get the gap year I've never had. And they wrote a funny sort of obituary about me in Smash Hits saying "he'll be back in a year". And I sort of think.., that was a joke, but it was also sort of serious as well. It was pretty much how I felt about it. You've sold tens of millions of records... have you made millions and millions of pounds? Yeah, but we've also spent a lot on our career. On tours. Making videos. You invest a lot of it back in the career. And what you do you spend it on in your real life, if I can call it that. Your personal life? In my real life, I have a very nice house in London, I have a house in the country, in the North-East, I buy paintings... Because I'm not imagining Neil Tennant driving his car into a swimming pool. Well, Neil
Tennant doesn't drive... He'd be in a Dial-a-Cab. What's your next piece of music? The next piece of music is by probably my favourite singer of all time who we were very lucky enough to work with, Dusty Springfield. It's a great song called "I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore". Dusty Springfield "I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore~~ Dusty Springfield and "I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore" from 1969. And when you worked with Dusty Springfield that was towards the midEighties, sort of '86? End of '86 when we first worked with her, yes. And her career was nowhere. She was all washed up. Yeah, it's funny, that's not how we thought of her, because Dusty was to us - and to a lot of people probably - a legend, and when she came into the studio, they finally tracked her down... Where did they find her? She was in Los Angeles. When we actually met Dusty she was living in a pay-by-day Hollywood motel. She was really at rock bottom. And it was just a sublime moment hearing Dusty Springfield sing our music. You also recorded with Liza Minnelli? Yeah, we were asked to work with Liza Minnelli by her record company. That was an amazing thing. You chose these women with notable historical baggage - they were women who'd travelled, they are women who are iconic survivors of the lives that they've led. They are two gay icons. Now I know that you always bristle at any... I hate the phrase "gay icon". Why? Because I don't really believe in it. I don't really believe that people's musical taste is totally rooted in their sexuality, that's why. And also the gay icon thing always implies that to be gay, there's something a bit tragic about it so you like tragic music. And what about being out yourself? It wasn't a big deal for me, that. I mean, when we were first pop stars I actually liked the fact that people will speculate about you. I've spent my whole life trying not to be stereotype~ but people will think of you as "gay". It's the first thing you might think about the Pet Shop Boys: gay. If someone is heterosexual is the first thing you think "he's heterosexual"? It's not, is it? You just assume their sexuality. No, but the life that they lead does indeed have an impact on how you interpret the word that they do. I mean, I'm a married mother of two children and some of the questions I ask, people think, "Well, of course, she's asking that because she's a married mother of two children - that's her take on it." If you sing a song somebody might think well, of course, that is uniquely an experience that comes from the perspective of somebody who's from Newcastle and is gay Yes, I think
the big difference - and you've just hit on it there with your "married
mother or two" thing Would you have liked to have had children? Yeah... it's not too late. I've chosen not to, I suppose. But not necessarily not to in the future. I probably have ruled it out now. I used to think about it quite a lot at one time. Yeah... no, it won't happen now, I don't think. Does that make you sad? No, not really.
It's just not what my life is. Shostakovich Symphony No 5 in D Minor Part of the first movement of Shostakovich 's Symphony No S in D Minor played by the New York Philharmonic and conducted by Leonard Bernstein. So, of course, we give you, Neil Tennant, The Bible, The Complete Works Of Shakespeare. You're allowed to pick one book to take with you. What would it be? It is one book, really, but it's in many volumes, it's The Human Comedy - the Comedie Humaine - by Balzac. Which is actually about 25 books, I think. It's a fantastic picture of France in the Napoleonic period up to the mid-nineteenth century. It's the story of thing you need a lot of time... it's a lot of different, fascinating stories. I know that once you'd got to the end of it, you could just start again. Well, it's sort of cheating... Yes. ...but we'll give you that. What about your luxury? My luxury is going to be a DVD projector and a huge box of DVDs, so I can sit on my desert island and tie a sheet up to a pair of trees and sit there at night watching fabulous movies. And of course you've chosen eight discs but I'm going to ask you, ~f the waves were to wash onto the shore and threaten to take away your discs, which one would you run rapidly through the sands to save? It's a difficult choice but I think I'll keep Dusty. Neil Tennant,
thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. CHRIS LOWE
What sort
of mood are you in? Do you really
hate being famous? What kind
of public reactions annoy you the most? Do you think
you're better friends with Neil now than before the Pet Shop Boys became
successful? Do you think
you'd be friends if you weren't in a group together? cinema.., food. You know, all those sort of things. Do you still go out raving all the time? No, not as much. I find it hard to go out for two or three nights on the trot now. And I don't find clubbing as exciting as I did back in '87, '88, '89, when it was all totally new really. A new thing came along and swept away what was there before it. So, no, I don't enjoy it as much as I did. But I still do it - maybe you're still trying to find the next thing that's going to excite you. And also I don't like to feel like I'm missing out on something - a scene that might have developed. But I'm not as excited as I was. I was very lucky, I think, because when I first started clubbing it was disco, and then there was new romantics, which I loved, and then New York disco and early hip hop and electro, and then acid house and house and all of that. It was a pretty good run, wasn't it? It was pretty much one thing after the next, and it was all very exciting. Right the way through to trance which you're not supposed to say you like but which I kind of liked as well. But when it got a bit progressive and a bit too serious I went off it slightly. And then r'n'b became the dominant dance music of youngsters, and so the sort of dance music I like, its world was inhabited by quite old people and so you didn't have that level of youthful exuberance that I like in a scene because the kids are into indie rock or r'n'b, and house music is actually the music of their parents. It doesn't feel young and fresh and exciting in the way that it did. Does it annoy
you when Neil listens to lots of classical music? Do you wish
the Pet Shop Boys just made demented dance records? Do you care
what Neil's lyrics say? Which do
you like best? Are you annoyed
when Neil does things without you? Do you ever
think you're too old to be a pop star? they just go? They've had their turn." Though it's ridiculous that pop music is the only thing like that. Do you want to make a solo album? Urn... I could. It might be crap, though, mightn't it? I'd hate to be judged on it. I wouldn't say no.1 don't know really. If Neil was doing one. It probably wouldn't be very song-based, because I'm a grammar school-educated boy and I always like messing around with time signatures and things like that. How would you feel if Neil made one? Well, if Neil did one, I'd do one, so it'd probably be quite a good thing really. But I wouldn't think of doing one otherwise. And it'd be terrible if it became competitive. Actually, I think generally it would be a bad thing, because if one did better... if they both failed, it would great, and if they both did really well it'd be good, but if one did better than the other one then the power with the group would be disturbed. It'd be, like, "Well, your opinions are just worthless, aren't they?" And it could go either way. So, thinking about it, actually it wouldn't be such a good idea. I think we both bring something to the group and the combination of the two of us is greater than the two individuals. Does Neil ever really annoy you? Oooh, let me think. Now's the time... [thinks a moment] No, not really. There's only one mildly irritating thing Neil does sometimes - actually, officially, we refuse to do this in interviews.., anyway, it doesn't really bother me. Is Neil too
bossy? What do you think you do that annoys him most? Oh, I can be stroppy... sulky... pedantic... argumentative... contrary... a complete wind-up merchant... say that I don't want to do things when I actually do really kind of want to do them. I can generally be very annoying, I think. Do you think
of songs all the time? So you try
and cork it up until you want to get some out? Why do you
have a Porsche? Do you really go and watch Arsenal all the time? Not as often as I used to. I moved away from Highbury so I wasn't as close, and we've been really busy so I've spent a lot of time out of London. I've been to the new stadium a few times and I really like it, actually. I was quite surprised - I didn't think I would like it because you kind of get used to the old. But actually it's got a really good atmosphere, and the fact that it's not all compartmentalised like it was before - North, East, West and Clock End - is good. if someone started singing before it tended to stay in their own little bit but now, with it being circular, the whole ground now tends to sing as one so it's actually a lot louder. Though it's more like going to a regular pop concert than a football match in the way - it's the same audience that would go to see Robbie Williams going to see a football match. It doesn't seem as unique to football, it just seems like "an event". But I've still got a season ticket. The last big game I went to was going to Paris to watch Arsenal play Barcelona where we unfortunately lost in the Champions League final. I've always liked going to away games m Europe. Of the current team, I like Fibreglass, Luneburg, Henry obviously, and van Persie. We've got a team of lookers at the moment, whereas we used to... not have. Why did you
get your haircut so short? When did
you last cry? When do you
feel happiest? How have you changed over the last 15 years? I don't know if you really change much at all. I think you come out of the womb fully-formed. I really think that. I think that all my characteristics were there from day one. All my negative qualities. I mean, there's a picture of me painted by the next door neighbour when I was four, and it's just clearly me, in a mood, with a massive gob on. And you can just see that those qualities have just never really changed. And, apart from the obvious ageing, I don't think you change. I don't think you become more wise, even, really. You just get older. I think that things do stress you out less, and you learn how to deal with your responses to things better, and let things go easier, but the initial feeling - the pang of annoyance, or jealousy, or envy - I think they're the same. The initial gut reaction to anything, and the mood, are the same as when you were born. I don't think we're on a curve. I don't think it is a journey. Do you ever
think about the Pet Shop Boys splitting up? So you think
the Pet Shop Boys might goon more |