Music The Pet Shop Boys are Twittering and tweeting on a sofa in a private members’ club in London. They’re converts to the new internet craze Twitter, a sort of micro-blogging network whose users exchange short messages with each other, and Chris Lowe is showing a handheld gadget to his fellow Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant with a “tweet” they’ve just received.
 |
| Neil Tennant |
“It just suggests gossip and nonsense,” Tennant says. “There’s something quite honest about that. Whereas blog” – he utters the word as if holding it with tongs – “it’s just some bloke with a beard rambling on about something. Such an ugly combination of letters.”
The Pet Shop Boys take frothy stuff seriously. At the Brit Awards last month they received an award to celebrate their status as one of the most successful pop duos ever, with sales of more than 50m records. They performed a medley of hits, during which a snippet of dialogue from a 1988 documentary film rang out. It was Lowe, in his younger days, explaining that he believed music should be about “making people happy and having a good time”, adding that that might be because he grew up in the gaudy northern seaside resort of Blackpool.
 |
| Chris Lowe |
Lowe is 49 while Tennant, from North Shields, near Newcastle, is 54. There hasn’t, in truth, been much to get euphoric about in their work in recent years, with sales dipping and their music losing focus, but their upbeat new album Yes signals an upswing in their fortunes. It comes at a time when 1980s synth-pop is back in fashion – at the Brits the duo were flanked by admiring acolytes Brandon Flowers of the Killers and current chart darling Lady Gaga – and it teams them with the production team Xenomania, makers of irresistibly glossy hits for the likes of Girls Aloud and Sugababes.
Yes was made in Xenomania’s headquarters, a house in Kent that once belonged to Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll’s inspiration for Alice in Wonderland. (“She died in the mixing room,” Tennant says ruminatively.) The results, in a characteristic Pet Shop Boys mix of high and low, combine hi-NRG dance-pop with references to Tchaikovsky, Daphne du Maurier and John Betjeman. One song is about gutter-press bohemians Kate Moss and Pete Doherty; another finds Tennant singing an opaque modernist commentary about Tony Blair’s legacy. The aim, in his words, was to make “an exciting pop record that’s also a bit weird.”
The pair have always been drawn to light and shade: pop escapism on one hand, lyricism and emotional nuance on the other. In their 1980s heyday they were called “the Smiths you can dance to” by the music press, though as the pair point out you were more likely to see dancing on stage at a Smiths concert than at their live shows, where they usually stand motionless behind their keyboards.
“So in fact the Smiths are the Pet Shop Boys you can dance to,” says Tennant. “After all these years we’ve finally corrected it,” Lowe adds with satisfaction.
The transplanted northerners first met in an electronics shop on the King’s Road in London in 1981. They project the easy charm of old friends, though like most forms of charm it exists partly as a mask. Little is known about their private lives, which before the interview I am warned they will not talk about.
Tennant came out as gay in 1994 and it’s widely assumed Lowe shares the same orientation, although he has never confirmed or denied it. In the past there was a misconception that the pair were romantically linked.
The ambiguity filters into their songs. Tennant’s vocals tend to vary between archness and longing, while Lowe, the musical maestro, likes to work string quartets, harps or male voice choirs into a synthetic electronic context, bringing an emotional or playful timbre to an often chilly form of music.
In the 1980s, hits such as “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)” and “Rent” – chorus “I love you, you pay my rent” – provided a soundtrack to Thatcherism, though their nuanced lyrics and the pair’s impassive appearance made it unclear whether they were criticising the era’s materialism or, as Lowe says, “living it”.
“Politics and society are the backdrop that we write against,” says Tennant, who was once a music journalist and has lots of theories about how pop operates. “There has always been an element of commentary. I’ve criticised direct political songs, because I don’t think they work. I think it kills the ‘pop’ element. But there’s always been a political content, right the way through.”
The duo are, or were, Labour supporters (2006’s Fundamental was full of unusually direct anti-Blair screeds). Yet their early work had an ambivalence that captured a general mood of uncertainty and excitement. “In the late 1980s, money was a real issue. Were you for or against money? By the 1990s, money was an assumption. And by this decade it was beyond an assumption. Is there anything else?” Tennant says.
From their first single “West End Girls” in 1984, with its girls and boys partying in a nocturnal “dead end world”, the Pet Shop Boys have been fascinated by brittle fantasies of glamour. Often there’s an undertow of anomie or sadness, as with their 1990 single “Being Boring”, which used a doughty quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda – “she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring” – to commemorate the devastation caused by Aids.
They are clearly intrigued by aspects of celebrity – “when people are slagging off Victoria Beckham, I’m just thinking of the work that’s gone into it, her life is one long photo shoot,” Tennant marvels – while also backing away from the public’s appetite for celebrity self-revelation.
“What worries me is whether artistry ceases to exist,” Tennant says. “When you have a complete social realism in somebody’s lyrics and are getting up, having a pee and shagging your boyfriend, the diary set to music, I don’t know whether artistically it’s that interesting. You can write the truth, but I always want poetry in it.”
He adds: “I like the way T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden or Philip Larkin bring everything down to earth. In ‘The Waste Land’ you’ve got the women talking at the back of the bus about having their teeth done. I’ve always liked that, the combination of poetic language and bringing things down to earth with a thump. It’s like the romantic fantasy we have of our own lives, our own potential, and then the reality.”
Following the pure-pop rush of Yes, their next project is to score a ballet for Sadler’s Wells. “There’s no fear of high culture in the Pet Shop Boys,” Tennant says. “Or low culture,” adds Lowe, as the pair collapse into laughter.
‘Yes’ is released in the US on April 21 and is out now elsewhere
