The Pop Fundamentalists

Irony. That word again. An abused and over-used word, of course, but there’s no two ways about it: the Pet Shop Boys are pop’s arch (and the word is arch) ironists.

Mind you, it's a stance the duo continue to deny, a stance that has earned them both plaudits from New Pop aesthetes and brick-bats from the soul-for-soul’s-sake brigade (Shane MacGowan still spits nails if you bring up their cover of Willie Nelson’s ‘Always On My Mind’, which beat ‘Fairytale Of New York’ to the number one slot in the winter of 1987).
And when U2 were banging on about the importance of being ironic circa Zoo TV, the Shoppers had already put it into practice, medleying the panoramic melodrama of ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ with a snatch of ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You’ that owed more to Boys Town Gang’s ultra-camp ‘80s disco version rather than the Four Tops or Andy Williams.
Yet the duo – the ultra-cultured ex-Smash Hits writer Neil Tennant, who enunciates his band’s tunes in a disingenuously disaffected tone, and his shaded, silent partner Chris Lowe, are nothing less than a two-man hit machine. Since meeting in an electronics shop on the King’s Road in the early ‘80s, they’ve scored 38 Top 40 singles in the UK (four of them number ones), and were one of the few 1980s Brit invaders to top the US pop charts.
Over the past two decades the group have specialised in polished electro-pop confections that marry canny hooks, dancefloor savvy beats and erudite lyrics (the 1.5 million selling debut ‘West End Girls’, ‘It’s A Sin’, ‘Shopping’) to pop art pretensions (videos by Derek Jarman, elaborate choreography and stage designs, and more recently, a live 2004 extravaganza that provided a new soundtrack to Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin) – not to mention numerous collaborations with icons such as Liza Minnelli, Dusty Springfield, Tina Turner, Elton John and Madonna.
And the pair show no sign of losing their sheen in middle age. Last year they headlined the Live 8 Moscow date, and their ninth album Fundamental, produced by Trevor Horn, charted at number five in the UK this May, boosted by a top ten single ‘I’m With Stupid’, which was accompanied by a Bush’n’Blair baiting video overseen by Little Britain’s Matt Lucas and David Walliams.
You’ll find their advocates in the most unexpected places. Consider the following from Greil Marcus’ Like A Rolling Stone, which takes the baton from Bob Dylan and hands it to the Boys’ 1993 version of Village People’s ‘Go West’: “The sound was like the sun, the disco beat stirring, the drum machine a twentieth-century Yankee Doodle. The song gathered the whole of the American story to itself, claimed it as its own, and said that it would never end.”
Dave Fanning: Album number nine: what does the title Fundamental mean to you boys?
Neil Tennant: Well, we had the title before we started making the album, and as you may know, we always have one-word titles. It seemed like a word that is around at the moment ’cos of fundamentalism, and it seemed quite nice to take this rather threatening word and put it in as trivial a context as the title of a pop album. And on the cover it’s in neon as well, so it makes it look a bit showbusiness. And also, having made the album, we thought it was still the right title, because it's a very fundamentally Pet Shop Boys-sounding album. It’s almost like the essence of the Pet Shop Boys. Plus it’s got the words ‘fun’ and ‘mental’ in it!
When you say the fundamental sound of the Pet Shop Boys, what are we talking about here?
Well, we’re talking about...we worked with Trevor Horn on this album.
As you did 20 years ago as well.
As we did. We only did two tracks with him then, we did a whole album this time. It’s a big-sounding record. And I think when people think of the Pet Shop Boys, they don’t think of ‘West End Girls’, which was the record that got us going, they think of ‘It’s A Sin’ or ‘Always On My Mind’, those kind of big records. And when we started writing the songs for this, we actually wrote a little manifesto, that we would write songs that were about the world today, about authoritarianism, about fundamentalism and those sorts of things. And we were going to write minimal electro-pop. And actually when we started writing them, they were all these big epic things, so we decided to work with Trevor, and it sort of sounded like us. A lot of people complained our last album didn’t sound like us. And this one I think, it’s got that epic thing that is something that we’ve done in the past.
But what about the style and substance and wit people associate with the Pet Shop Boys? Are they important to you before you sit down to write and record?
They’re always in the ideas, even before the song is written. There are more sort of witty songs on this than the last few albums. The new song’s called ‘I’m With Stupid’, the title comes from the I’m With Stupid t-shirt you used to see around, and it takes the story of Bush and Blair, Blair being the clever one, making the alliance with Bush, the stupid one. But then the song turns around in the middle, where the person singing, which is from Tony Blair’s point of view, is thinking, “Is stupid really stupid, or a different kind of smart?” which I think is often true in American politics, that being genial and stupid often masks the real purpose.
And when you say a different kind of smart, are you implying a scary kind of smart?
I’m not quite sure what I’m implying...that sounds like a slogan for a clothing shop, doesn’t it? A Different Kind Of Smart.
When you said witty earlier on, do you think that people who aren’t big fans of the Pet Shop Boys still see you as “Oh yeah, that ironic duo.” That word ‘ironic’, when is it going to start annoying you?
It’s always annoyed us! On this album there's one ironic song which is the last one, ‘Integral’, which is inspired by this issue of the ID cards being brought out in Britain, and they’re all linked to some central database, and that is sung from the point of view of an authoritarian government, like a Big Brother 1984 kind of thing. But there’s a big strain of romanticism that runs through the Pet Shop Boys albums, right from the word go, from the first album. A song like ‘Being Boring’, for instance, but they’re very rarely singles, those songs. We don’t have the nerve to release a ballad as a single, or EMI never wanted us to. And on this album there are some very beautiful songs like ‘I Made My Excuses And I Left’ about a marriage breakup, there’s a song called ‘Indefinite Leave To Remain’, again about a sort of relationship. And there’s a kind of lushness, a musical romanticism, which has always been there as well, and maybe has increased over the years. But I think there’s something in my voice that has a distancing quality, it doesn’t throw itself into emotion, it seems to stand back a bit. Well, that’s what my voice sounds like.
But those in the know, know.
Yeah, to me it makes it sound more romantic, because there’s this kind of small, high voice against this big background, and there’s a massive musical contrast there, which is quite moving, or can be quite moving to me. I don’t know that I’m really bothered with what people think though. I think people can take what they want from what you do. We don’t signpost what we do with the style of how it’s presented. Normally romanticism is presented on Top Of The Pops with six female string players, and flames. We don’t do that, because to us it’s too corny. And I think people listening, our fans, understand exactly what I’m talking about.
If you don’t approach music intellectually, you approach music instinctively. Is that a better thing? Chris?
Chris Lowe: Well, I don’t approach it intellectually. I don’t approach many things intellectually! No, instinct’s far better, because it’s genuine, from-the-heart stuff.
There would have been people who would’ve thought, around 2002, that you went a little more ‘rock’ than you ever had before. And in doing so, a lot of people would’ve said, “Wait a minute, that’s all wrong.” Do you ever get to the point where you’ve created this monster that you don’t own any more, that other people own it, and they expect things from you?
NT: We get problems when we use guitars. In fact there’s a lot of guitars on this new album, as part of the sound. In America particularly, we are part of electronica, and electronica is about not liking guitars. In the ’80s we used to say all the time, “We hate guitars,” even though they were on our records, but they weren’t the focus of them. So on our last album, Release, when Johnny Marr played on almost every track, a lot of our fans were kind of shocked because one of the tenets of the Pet Shop Boys is “we hate guitars”, and suddenly there they were. But I think it’s a process of evolving, that you do something you’re not meant to do.
The whole thing is ultimately pop music. It’s not striving to present itself with the importance that an REM record is presented with, or that the Smashing Pumpkins or the White Stripes are presented with, it wears its cleverness, or its wit, or its musicality, very lightly. One of the problems in recent years is that so much pop music has been rubbish, so there has been a rock influence on our music. Touring, we’ve learnt that having guitars on those kind of four-on-the-floor songs, like ‘It’s A Sin’, putting power chords on them makes them even more exciting.
What about shows with people rocking out and saying, “Get your hands together, and get your scarves out!” Your shows aren’t that kind of thing. Your shows are big theatrical things, and the audience, you can take it or leave it.
NT: Well, they’ve changed a bit over the years. When we were touring on the last album, we had two guitarists. Particularly when you’re playing festivals, we put the guitar power chords in the choruses. I think that rock energy, when it’s good...you see I always slag off music I like. I went to see Led Zeppelin in 1970. I think really ‘up’ rock music is exhilarating, just like ‘up’ dance music – it’s great. So we have had quite a lot of energy in our shows. When we do the U2 cover ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’, I've noticed it’s increasingly gotten less ironic as time’s gone on, even the ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ bit, it just boosts the energy level.
Were you trying to have a dig at U2’s pomposity of The Joshua Tree era?
NT: Yes, that was obviously the idea behind it. And also, it was a fun idea to take a U2 song, a very transgressive, revered U2 song, and say, “It’s showbusiness everyone, let’s face facts, it’s showbusiness.” And then U2 started doing showbusiness anyway. But musically it really worked, it’s a very clever arrangement and we still do it live because it really works, and you’ve got to hand it to U2, the background they come from is the background we come from.
One of the things you did some time back was the other side of Lollapalooza. You guys wanted to have Whata...
NT: Whatapalava. Never happened though. We had this idea that you could do a travelling festival of gay musicians and call it Whatapalava. And it would be a really good festival, and it would link in with gay people around America and what have you. And our idea was it would show that there isn’t such a thing as gay music, because you would have the Pet Shop Boys, and you would have Rufus Wainwright, and the Magnetic Fields, and we were going to have, for a very brief period, Sinéad O’Connor, as our co-headliner. And she stopped being a lesbian, so she couldn’t do it any more! And we liked this idea, because I’ve always wanted to fight against the stereotype that gay kind of means something. And you always read in, broadly speaking, the heterosexual media, about gay culture, gay icons, and all the rest of it. Well, gay people don’t talk about their lives like that.
Does a phrase like ‘gay community’ freak you out?
NT: Yeah, I don’t like this talk when you get religious communities: “Muslim community leaders say ...” Who’s elected them? Who’s elected gay community leaders? Am I a gay community leader? I haven’t been elected, and I would like to think that we all live in one community, because otherwise I think it all gets a bit divide-and-rule.
Heterosexual people are not usually defined by their sexuality, but gay people are. Does that annoy you?
NT: It really annoys me. ’Cos I can’t see any reason to define gay people by their sexuality. Over many years I’ve thought about this, I’ve realised by having friends who are heterosexual, people who don’t have children have the same kind of lives as each other, whether they’re heterosexual or homosexual, because they don’t have those responsibilities, those ties to home. So they’re going to have the same kind of life. I think that, as you get older, it’s a defining thing, whether someone has children or not. Because I think when people have children, not always but often, their life completely changes. And I think when people say the word ‘gay’, maybe less than they used to, but there’s a whole load of cultural assumptions come with that which I find pretty irritating, and sometimes patronising.
So do you think that if you release people from defining themselves sexually, if it wasn’t so ghetto-ised, we might have a whole community out there, a whole way of finding out about everything we do?
NT: Well we didn’t used to, and the idea of gay comes out of political oppression, where gays were attacked by the police, and queer bashers, which we still do get. But in Britain, we have equality before the law, in terms of the age of consent, which astonishingly was brought down to 16, and we had the (Civil) Partnership Act, and I think with that you see the idea of a gay community becoming less important. Also, people didn’t used to define themselves as homosexual or heterosexual. I think there are massive areas of sexuality that don’t have to have the label ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ put on them, and certainly, if you read about these things, life used to be much more fuzzy until it was all defined in the ’60s and ’70s.
Okay, but what about a track like ‘You Choose’, when you say, “Falling in love is preventable.” Can you really be that cold?
NT: I’m not saying it’s preventable! Well, yes, maybe I am. On that song.
Has it never been stronger than you, the attraction to somebody else?
NT: Yes it has. But what I’m singing about is the moment when you think, “I’m going to commit to that.” There is a moment where you make a decision in your brain.
Always? Are you sure?
NT: No, I’m the person who wrote, “Love comes quickly, no matter what you do, you can’t stop falling.” Which is saying the opposite.
That’s not fair!
NT: So when we had that song on the last album, I was saying, “I’ve sung the opposite before.”
‘The Night I Fell In Love’ is a song a lot of people will talk to you about because of the fact it’s about a gay guy who has a relationship overnight with, probably, I’ll say Eminem, you don’t have to -
NT: No, we say Eminem! We don’t mind.
The homophobia in rap music, Eminem gets out of it by saying, “That’s Slim Shady” or some other character, “It’s not me” or whatever. Do you believe him?
NT: Yeah, I kind of do. That’s why we did the song, because Eminem’s method, his kind of approach, is to present himself...actually Eminem is very ironic, his characters represent the nasty side of America sometimes. Therefore the homophobia is part of it. In that song I’m playing a character, like Eminem, it’s not what I really think. But the rap star is gay in that.
Would an historian looking back at Pet Shop Boys see a kind of AIDS narrative? Should I see that listening to your albums of over 20 years?
NT: Yes, but I think a historian listening to our albums would hear an enormous amount of what was happening at the time reflected in our songs. So in our album Actually in 1987, we had the song ‘Shopping’ on it, which is about privatisation, and ‘King’s Cross’ which is about Thatcherism, and ‘Couldn’t Happen Here’ which was about a friend telling me about AIDS in America, and they were saying it wasn’t going to happen here to the same extent, and that guy got AIDS and died. And then there were the elegies to friends who died, like ‘Being Boring’. Since the mid ’90s, there was a song on Bilingual called ‘Survivors’, about going to someone’s funeral. But since then, we’re very lucky that treatments and stuff changed, so I’m not that obsessed. What I’m saying is that the concerns of the world will probably always crop up in our songs.
You guys weren’t friends who grew up together, but you’ve been good friends now for a quarter of a century. Have there been any sort of vibes? ’Cos bands always fall out. Any hissy fits?
CL: Well we’ve had a row obviously. Everyone does that.
NT: Yeah, but we’ve gotten over that. But right from the beginning, it was not a project about celebrity; it was not a project about personal fame. It was deliberately done like that. We like the idea of the Pet Shop Boys as an entity being famous, but not Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant. And by that point I had had a job, I had worked for ten years, and I had my life. I wanted to carry on, I didn’t want to go around in chauffeur-driven cars, I just wanted to get a taxi, or get the tube or whatever. I think a lot of people can do that. Plus, I don’t think we’re those kind of star personalities, and I think definitely some people are born with an “I am famous” kind of personality.
Someone you know very well is Madonna ...
NT: Actually we don’t know her very well.
You do know her very well! There’ve been collaborations in some shape or form down through the years. The point is, somebody like Madonna would come to London on the first time out, before she met Guy Ritchie, and she’d go jogging and make sure there were 40 guys jogging with her. Now, as far as I’m concerned, that’s not really because she wants protection, but because she wants to get on the front page of every tabloid.
NT: Of course it is, yeah.
Then there’s the other guy at the bus stop who used to be famous and is no longer famous any more, and people go, “That’s yer man...”
NT: What’s his face, yeah.
Which is the more pathetic? I mean, obviously the second one is to a point, but I’m just saying, are they both in the same pathetic bag? You can’t slag Madonna obviously, why did I ask that?!
NT: When we were making our last album she was in the same studio, and Madonna came in every day on a bicycle. I think she had the car behind her, I don’t think the car was that visible as such; it was just a car behind her. Because Michael Jackson would never do that, would he? He would want to be recognised. A lot of people run their lives in a way that they choose to be recognised, and they don’t feel fulfilled unless they are. And I think most people, if they want, can live normal lives. David Bowie walks around the streets of Manhattan without hassle.
I’d hate to go from one hotel room to another hotel room, to a car, go home and get changed and go to some thing. People are always surprised ’cos Chris and me normally walk home after interviews, ’cos you’ve been cooped up all day, and also you just want to feel the energy from the streets, and that’s a really important thing. You think people don’t recognise you, but every so often I’m in taxis, and the driver goes, “That’s £9.50 please Neil.” And that level of fame is nice.