More than 16 years after their first No 1 single, the Pet Shop Boys are still making music with attitude. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe seem to have emerged unscathed from pop's recent dumbing down, and they now represent a last bastion of wit and intelligence, writes Alexis Petridis
As its name suggests, Brewery Way, in north London, is not a road dripping with glamour and refined allure. Lacking even the seedy frisson of nearby King's Cross, it is windy and anonymous, lined with trucks waiting for access to its array of depots and warehouses. It is so nondescript that even its solitary greasy-spoon café has no name. If you were scouring London to find the Pet Shop Boys, this is the last place you would look. After all, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have founded a 17-year career on a particularly cultured, sophisticated brand of pop music. They may well be the only band in history to name a top-10 hit after an Anthony Trollope novel: Can You Forgive Her?, No 7 in the summer of 1993.
Their chosen collaborators are not Hollywood stars but highbrow names from the art world: the late Derek Jarman made films for their live shows, Sir Ian McKellen has starred in their videos, architect Zaha Hadid designed them a modular stage set and, most recently, Turner prize-winner Wolfgang Tilmans made a short film of mice scampering around London underground train-tracks to accompany their forthcoming single, Home and Dry. They write stage musicals and attend private views.
Tennant recently took to the Pet Shop Boys website to thank a fan for sending him some presents: a CD-rom of Soviet Dada and a wooden stool designed by 1930s architect Alvar Aalto. Somehow, they just don't seem like Brewery Way kind of guys.
This morning, however, Tennant and Lowe are applying their finely honed aesthetic sense to a full breakfast in Brewery Way's nameless café. "They do scramble eggs in a most unusual way here," says Tennant. "We can't quite work it out."
"Last time we were in, they came in a leaning-tower arrangement. A cylinder going off at an angle," says Lowe.
"There's a lot of vertical food around at the moment," says Tennant, as if hoping to transform his pile of vulcanised egg into a cutting-edge culinary trend. "I thought it was supposed to be an '80s thing, but we got taken to Claridge's \ by a music business executive last week. Very vertical, Gordon Ramsay. Beautiful food, but vertical."
The café has been, as Tennant puts it, "the hub of the Pet Shop Boys' world" since they began rehearsals in a nearby studio for a tour of UK universities. That too seems a most un-Pet Shop Boys concept, a sweaty contrast to their usual live extravaganzas featuring chorus-lines of dancers, multiple costume changes and complicated sets.
"We had two motivations in doing the big theatrical shows," says Tennant. "One was to try something different, which is always a good motive. The second one was to hide behind all the dancers and costumes. We didn't think we were interesting enough without them."
"I was thinking about Paul McCartney when he first formed Wings, just turning up at universities and asking to play," explains Lowe. "That was the sort of inspiration for it. We wanted to travel up and down the country and eat in transport cafés like this. I originally wanted to do the tour in a Transit van . . ."
". . . But I point-blank refused," says Tennant.
"Neil thought that was going just too far," says Lowe. "I don't know. A nice new mattress in the back, for shagging. It would be great. The Pets have arrived in town!"
Despite their bravado, Tennant and Lowe seem no more at home in their rehearsal studio than they do in the café. Like all rehearsal studios, it is grubby and cold. The standard-issue odour of old carpets and stale cigarette smoke is in marked contrast to the discreet waft of expensive aftershave that emanates from Tennant and Lowe. The Pet Shop Boys are the nicest-smelling pop stars you could wish to meet. Isn't this all rather rock'n'roll for a band who once wrote a song called How I Learned to Hate Rock and Roll?
"Our tours are very rock and roll anyway, I wouldn't worry about that," says Tennant. "We had a manager in America who used to manage a lot of big rock bands and he said, 'You are without a doubt the most rock'n'roll people I've ever managed.' We were the most decadent. We had make-up artists, dancers, wardrobe, the guys who just do the wigs, so there was this huge, mad entourage, which gives it this kind of party ambience. It's a bit of a circus. Oh, you'd be really surprised. Heavy metal bands are always in bed by 11 o'clock."
There's something slightly schoolmasterly about Tennant. He strides rather than walks to the band's nearby rehearsal room. Straight-backed, head up. He wears little wire-framed glasses and his thinning grey hair is cropped short. He speaks in clipped north-eastern England tones - he was born in North Shields - and, perhaps uniquely among pop stars, uses the phrase "what-have-you".
As Tennant rightly points out, the public's perception of the Pet Shop Boys is largely based on the cover of their 1991 greatest hits collection, Discography, on which he smirks and raises a sardonic eyebrow and Lowe stares impassively from behind a pair of enormous sunglasses and a jaunty hat. Their aloof personas were partly informed by the fact that both had come late to pop stardom - Tennant was born in 1954, Lowe in 1959.
During the late 1980s, however, when the Pet Shop Boys seemed invincible, a brainy hit-making machine that scored four number ones while providing a running commentary on the decade's mood, both made good copy by playing out their respective images to the press. Tennant was ever-prepared with an ironic quip - "I quite like proving that we can't cut it live," he commented after the duo mimed on television - while Lowe did haughty froideur. "I don't like country and western, I don't like rock, I don't l ike rockabilly . . . I don't like much really, do I? But what I do like, I love passionately," he snapped in a quote later used on Paninaro, the duo's 1986 paean to Armani clothes.
"Everyone with a degree of exposure gets lumbered with the cartoon version of themselves which you have to live up to and that is the cartoon version of ourselves," says Tennant today. "Maybe it has something to do with our song titles. People perceive You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk as ironic, when in fact it's a painful, heartbreaking song to me, because it's so true."
In person, Tennant is neither arch nor smug, and Lowe is seldom stony-faced. He has a bluff Blackpool accent and a habit of undercutting Tennant's more thoughtful speeches with a one-liner. Lowe laughs a lot, particularly when discussing the travails of Closer to Heaven, the musical they wrote in collaboration with Jonathan Harvey, author of Gimme Gimme Gimme and Beautiful Thing. It opened to mixed reviews at the end of May and lasted only four months at the tiny Arts Theatre.
The Pet
Shop Boys'
extracurricular activities have attracted critical opprobrium and commercial failure before. Their ill-conceived and rather pretentious 1987 film, It Couldn't Happen Here, was savaged and it flopped, while the New York Post suggested Radio City Music Hall should be fumigated after a Pet Shop Boys' concert. But the failure of Closer to Heaven seems to have particularly rankled.
"The first night was quite triumphant and I think the critics got pissed off," says Tennant. "We had people like Elton John and Ian McKellen turn up, people we know. The television people were saying, 'Wow, this is an incredible night, you've changed the West End musical,' and I thought, 'We've actually f**king done it!' The next day was this incredible comedown, really savage reviews. Made the music press seem really cosy. There was a lot of hostility to it in the theatre, but it got a little cult audience . But we're in it long-haul. We're writing another."
"We've learnt a lot from doing this one," says Lowe. "It's not just a case of writing a few songs and slotting them in somewhere. Well, itis with Mamma Mia. That's another disheartening thing with musicals - really crap ones seem to do incredibly well."
Whatever the failings of Closer to Heaven, you can't fault the Pet Shop Boys' aspirations. At the very least, they're trying to do something different, which singles them out at a time when British pop appears to be lacking ambition.
"The music business is very conservative at the moment," says Tennant. "Imagine showing us 15 years ago to Simon Cowell [head of A&R at RCA Records]! That's the problem with Pop Idol." He says they were auditioning "cabaret singers".
"Not that I've got anything against cabaret singers, it's a perfectly noble occupation, but it's not pop music. It's Batley Variety Club. We're back to 1961. And thank God for that, eh? It's Cliff \, it's Adam Faith - if you're being really dangerous, it's Billy Fury."
"The Beatles was a huge mistake, going down that path, letting artists write their own songs. Everything's back to normal," says Lowe.
"Yes," says Tennant, "all the Beatles ever did was make people take drugs."
Some 16 years after West End Girls hit number one, the Pet Shop Boys look rather like a reminder of a bygone era. In an age of confess-all interviews, they seldom discuss their private lives. Not much is known about the Pet Shop Boys beyond the fact that they're gay and their previous occupations: Tennant was a journalist for Smash Hits and had a job anglicising spellings for Marvel Comics, Lowe studied as an architect and played trombone in a jazz band called One Under the Eight.
"People are more interested in a writer's life than a writer's writing," says Tennant. "Like the film Iris, which tells you that Iris Murdoch had Alzheimer's and did a lot of shagging when she was younger. Shagging, Alzheimer's - Iris Murdoch, a life in full. The 28 books don't get a look-in. I imagine Iris Murdoch would be horrified if she saw this film, although Dame Judi is obviously marvellous. Anyway, people have this idea that the life is what's important and you express it in your art. Well, you know, a lot of our life does go into our art, but songwriting, like any creative act, is contrivance as well. I don't think people appreciate the skill or the talent that goes into that."
In addition to their unfashionable urge for closely guarded privacy, their music smacks of a time when pop was unafraid to take at least some risks, to not immediately seek out and target the lowest common denominator.
The Pet Shop Boys, lest we forget, were the band who offered, as the lyrics to the single Left to My Own Devices had it, "Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat". They pricked U2's earnest pomposity by covering Where the Streets Have No Name as a pounding camp medley with Andy Williams' Can't Take My Eyes Off You. They provided music's most deft dismantling of the Thatcherite dream, Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money), a tale of no-hopers imbued with the spirit of the late 1980s, convinced that untold riches are within their grasp. The chances of Westlife, Blue or any current pop band recording something along those lines seem slim to say the least.
"We work in an area that doesn't really have a category now, it doesn't really exist any more," Tennant admits. Alone among songwriters whose work is aimed at the charts, Tennant and Lowe still deal in wit, intelligence and ambiguity, as evinced by their new album, Release. I Get Along turns the sacking of Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson into a regretful love lyric, sung by Tony Blair: "The morning after the night before, I had been alerted to all your lies, I phoned you up, the calls were all diverted."
The Night I Fell in Love is even more striking. "Some people feel uncomfortable with Eminem, because of the homophobia, or perceived homophobia," explains Tennant. "Eminem's response is he's not personally homophobic, he is representing the homophobia of America, he's playing the part of a homophobic. I can buy into that, I think there's a certain amount of truth in it. I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to use Eminem's method - write a song about a boy, like the boy out of Queer as Folk, who goes to see a rap artist at the Manchester Arena or somewhere, ends up getting off with him and can't believe he ends up spending the night with him. I just thought, well, if Eminem can give it, he can take it." He chuckles.
Perhaps because they represent a last bastion of intelligence and edge amid the mindless fray of pop, the Pet Shop Boys are still warmly received. They were the unlikely stars of 2000's Glastonbury music festival.
More than 16 years after West End Girls topped the charts, their singles still reach the top 10 - not, it must be admitted, with the frequency they once enjoyed, but more often than those of most of their contemporaries. They have survived pop's dumbing down relatively unscathed. Their recent university tour sold out quickly. The new album, which features former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, is a melancholy delight. The 1980s revival circuit shows no signs of claiming them just yet.. "If you've still got an idea - which we have," says Tennant, "you can always carry on."
"I tell you what I really hate at the moment," says Lowe. "When Steps split up, they went, 'Oh, we wanted to end while we were on top. 'I think, what's that got to do with it? Do you like doing it or do you not like doing it? This whole 'We wanted to end at our peak' thing - it's \. Either you enjoy making music or you don't; it's not something you can opt out of. They just regard it as some bloody stupid career." But what's the point of a band like Steps existing if they're not having hits? They're hardly in it for the artistic endeavour, are they? "But they'll always be able to play Butlins!" says Lowe, apparently without sarcasm. "Sacha Distel's playing there, you know. He says he doesn't care whether it's the \ Albert Hall or Butlins. Good on him, I say."
Release is on the Parlophone label