Boys Keep Swingin'

Of all the acts lined up to play the Some Days Never End event at the IMMA this Hallowe’en week, the Pet Shop Boys will arguably be the least phased by the conceptually artful (or artfully conceptual) surroundings. From their very first tour, staged by Derek Jarman, the group have always insisted on mounting elaborate theatrical productions, incorporating choreography, film and costumes. Indeed, in 2004 the Boys, plus orchestra, performed a live soundtrack to Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Battleship Potemkin in Trafalgar Square. The forthcoming show, Neil Tennant says, will be no less extravagant.

“It’s kind of aimed to be pop theatre really,” he says, “a multimedia show with film, lighting obviously, three other singers, two dancers… it’s one of my favourite shows we ever done, we’ve got it all paced right, I think. But at the same time it’s quite a thoughtful show.
“With the Pet Shop Boys ultimately you’re not sitting there playing guitar solos, so you feel you want to have a production to get the audience involved and create a mood. When we first became successful in 1986, the shows we were looking back on were the Grace Jones one-man show, which was very influential for us, and David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs tour, which never even came to Britain.”
Presumably because it haemorrhaged money all across the US.
“When we’ve done big tours, we always haemorrhaged money, but that had a weird effect – it made us start doing festivals. Because the show lost £12,000 a night we headlined Roskilde, the biggest festival in Europe, so we could break even. I’d never even been to a festival until we were headlining Roskilde. It was absolutely pissing down. It was a sea of mud, and Chris (Lowe) and I were dressed in white. But that was a great show. I think a festival, when you’ve got a lot of hits, and they’ve just had a lot of rock music, it lifts up the spirits, you’ve a lot of songs they’ve heard before.”
Ah yes, the Vera Lynn effect. A veteran chart act flies in at four in the afternoon to lift the troops’ spirits.
“That’s a very good point – how come Vera Lynn has never done Glastonbury?! Actually, she’s retired now. Chris and I once met Vera Lynn. We had this very odd thing we had to go to, a lunch, the Variety Club of Great Britain Lunch for Liza Minnelli. You actually sit on this platform having your lunch being watched by everyone. And on the platform was Vanessa Redgrave, Liza Minnelli, the Pet Shop Boys, Vera Lynn and Brian May from Queen. What was really embarassing was everyone watching you eating!”
Tennent, having served as a writer during Smash Hits’ early ’80s golden age, is more insightful than most on the subject of pop history. Pop, he maintains, like journalism, works best when it ignores stodgy posterity and seeks to document the fleeting present.
“People who are making self-conscious masterpieces, these are the records nobody listens to after a while,” he says. “I often think that the music that really survives, the music that enters the culture, the stuff people want to hear 20 years later, is normally that kind of instant pop stuff.”
Bizarrely enough, posterity and populism collided at the end of Greil Marcus’s last work of Dylanology Like A Rolling Stone when the writer used his riff on the Pet Shop Boys’ version of Village People’s ‘Go West’ as a kind of concluding fanfare.
“Ah yes, I read that!” Tennant says. “He was making a very complicated point about a national song or something wasn’t he? It was sort of a strange thing to read about ‘Go West’ in a book like that. Most rock critic types would probably think those two things couldn’t exist in the same universe. But it’s true, the whole idea of the West is so mythic. In doing the arrangement for ‘Go West’, Chris and I tried to bring out every aspect of the song, because one of the things that interested us was that it was the same chord changes as ‘Canon’ by Pachelbel, a very famous piece of classical music. And we also tried to bring out the incredibly showbiz side of the Village People song by having 60 Broadway singers singing the questions that I’m answering.
“And also, we were trying to bring out the pathos. The emotion of the song is of course very strong, because when it first came out everyone was going to the gay haven of San Francisco, and it was before AIDS. And Chris and I were recording it in the not-quite post-AIDS era, which had two or three years to run before the revolutionary drug treatments came in. We wanted to have an elegiac quality.”
The ‘80s were certainly a strange time in socio-sexual terms. The previous generation had the pill-enabled permissive age, but AIDS heralded a new Victorian era.
“I realised myself that I was gay right at the beginning of the ‘80s, 1983 or something,” Neil says, “and that time was terrifying, and it only got worse. I mean, the Pet Shop Boys’ career in the ‘80s and early ’90s, the height of our career, literally was bookended by people we knew getting AIDS and dying of AIDS. But in some ways it was a weirdly inspiring era as well. Derek Jarman found great impetus because he had all this work he wanted to do. It definitely influenced our music in a big way actually.”

The Pet Shop Boys play Some Days Never End on October 27.