BOYS WILL BE BOYS
The Pet Shop Boys are more interested in making pop music than pursuing the celebrity lifestyle associated with
it. But as Dorian Lynskey discovers that doesn't mean they don't enjoy having hit after hit

I wouldn't write off Westlife;" Neil Tennant soberly warns. The Pet Shop Boys are in a King's Cross rehearsal studio, finessing their set for a forthcoming one-off charity gig and conversation has turned to the subject of the boy band that will not die. "My God they're ruthless," Tennant continues. "There's a Japanese restaurant around the corner from our studio and they play these awful cassettes and every single song could be a Westlife number one." The stool-loving Irishmen are not invincible, though. Recently Channel 4 screened a rundown of Britain's top 50 pop stars, based on actual singles sales rather than the bizarre
whims of the voting public.

The Pet Shop Boys, says Tennant proudly, were at 38, with Westlife at a lowly 44. The top slot, predictably, went to the deathless Cliff Richard.
"I want the Christmas number one so I'm going to combine the Lord's Prayer with Auld Lang Syne!," cackles Chris Lowe from behind his keyboard.
"Now that," says Tennant dryly, "is what in the 1980s they called a pop strategist." Eighteen years after their first hit, the Pet Shop Boys are still in the fray. Not for them the forlorn autumn years of ageing musicians (Tennant is 49, Lowe 44) who harrumph that the Top 40 is irrelevant now because it hasn't
seen fit to embrace their latest offering. No, they are still doing what pop stars do, which is having hits (their last single, Miracles, reached number 10, "and it was a very busy time of year") and gawking at other pop stars in the corridors of Top Of The Pops. They're fascinated by new bands, whether it's Franz Ferdinand, The Darkness or even Blue.

"It's always exciting, Top Of The Pops," says Lowe,
settling into the studio sofa. "You never know who's going to be there. We've always liked feeling part of the world of pop.
"There's nothing Chris likes more than doing a Saturday morning kids show but they don't want us anymore," says Tennant, rather sadly.
I tought she looked amazing actually she looked a bit like a walking artwork."
The Pet Shop Boys insist they've never been celebrities themselves. Ten nant was 31 when they reached number one with West End Girls and had spent 10 years as a journalist, including a spell on Smash Hits. Lowe, meanwhile, was a trainee architect. "We weren' created by what we do," says Tennant. "It's a weird thing. When I was a kid I wanted to be a famous pop star - I didn't want to be just famous famous - but I never thought I could, sc by the time it happened I thought I'd missed thi boat. I had a life beforehand and it just carried on. When I was 17 I was in the lower sixth. Robbie Williams was doing PASS in gay clubs with Take That. It's a different perspective on life."
The tabloids have never really known what to do with the Pet Shop Boys. There was a brief fuss when Tennant came out in 1994, but it hardly qualified as a shock revelation. They no~ occupy an enviable position in which their fans, who stretch from Rio to Tokyo, are more interested in the minutiae of their song writing than in their love lives, and everyone else just leaves them alone. Anyway, Tennant's personal life is often there in his lyrics - sometimes, as it the case of I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give Anymore, word for word. "Those are things that you actually say to someone in a role and the song writing part of your brain says, 'Good song title by the way', so you write it down and then carry on with the row. It's possible to have a part of your brain watching the other part."

Lowe, meanwhile, gives nothing away. Where in a previous interview, I asked them about coming out, he left Tennant to answer while he disappeared off to buy some chocolate. "Everybody's very public now," he says disapprovingly. "Look at people on Trisha. They want it all out. They want to go out there and to the whole world about all their problems."
Other than that, they are funny, gossipy, waspish, and opinionated on everything from fame (Tennant: "To be famous and not rich is for people to despise you. Look at Hear 'Say") to musicals (Lowe: "Les Mis annoyed me so mud I wanted to boo all the way through. We left after 20 minutes"). And they make such a fascinating double-act, even visually: Blackpool born Lowe boyish with his new foot balleresque blonde hairdo; Tennant balding and professorial with a voice like Noel Coward by way of North Shields. "I remember Paula Yates telling me she'd always been scared of me. She said, 'You've always looked so forbidding'. And I don think it's a good quality to have. I think sometimes we can appear disdainful, and honestly we're not."

The contrasts that make the Pet Shop Boys' music so compelling - "Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat", to quote Left To My Own Devices - stem from the combination of Lowe, the dubber who still pines for his 1991 rave heyday, and Tennant, the art-collecting, Shostakovich-loving aesthete, although their enthusiasms do overlap. Lowe introduces Tennant to TV programmes like Frasier and The Office; Tennant repays the favour by recommending books. "If we're in a bookshop Neil will say, 'Oh you want this, this, this and this' and I go to the checkout with a big pile of books. When I walk into a bookshop everything it turns into a blur."

They differ in tone too. Lowe is orally outraged about the war in Iraq:
'It was a huge turning point for me. Feeling deceived and lied to. I find it
totally scandalous." Tennant is more measured: "Well I just find the whole thing very confusing. But I'm pleased that Saddam Hussein's gone. I'd be very pleased if the communist regime in North Korea went as well. I think it's scandalous we're talking to Colonel Gadaffi. He's just a despot. But I don't
think we should invade all these countries." He sighs heavily in a let's-change-the-subject manner. "It's very complicated."

Tennant would make an excellent pundit, and he's been asked to appear on Question Time and present TV shows, but he doesn't want to do anything television that would detract from the Pet Shop Boys. "I don't want to be a television personality. Lowe: "Whereas with a lot of recent pop stars you get the impression they'd rather be TV presenters." Tennant: "You know everybody slags off Stuart Maconie for being on all those programmes? Well we could be on all those programmes as well, and it just devalues you."
Lowe: "Yeah. 'Remember clackers? Remember when we were all wearing pinkframed glasses?' And you think, No, none of us were! They were sad then and they're sad now!"

The Pet Shop Boys are still somewhat purist about the business of pop. They believe their job is to make music, not to pursue any of the trappings associated with it. "We went to this dinner in Paris the other week and I was really embarrassed that Mick Jagger was there," says Tennant. "I honestly feel that Mick Jagger should not have accepted a knighthood because for anyone who believed that the Rolling Stones stood for something it feels like a betrayal. I guess that's a naive point of view. Maybe it was just show business. It's no different from Cliff.
"Someone once asked us what awards are worth having and I said an Oscar and a Legion of Honour. Then there's the Nobel Peace Prize of course." They both laugh like drains.
The Pet Shop Boys are currently writing what will become their ninth album. Although what Tennant calls their "imperial phase" of number ones ended in 1989, their song writing has never stopped being literate, touching and eager to experiment.
"I think people know what a Pet Shop Boys
record is," says Tennant, always his band's most astute critic. "I don't think Chris and I necessarily do. People see Pet Shop Boys as being four-on-the-floor, big men singing, my little choirboy voice in the middle of it all. And actually there are a few like that but there are a lot of other things we've done."

In America, it seems they are destined to be forever misunderstood by the public. "The thing we always get over there is: 'I get you guys'. And we always say, 'What is there to fucking get?"' (It's very disconcerting to hear Neil Tennant swear, a bit like hearing Alan Bennett call someone a 'motherfucker'.)
"There's something very comfortable about feeling like an outsider," says Tennant.
"We've always liked that feeling. We're here but we don't quite fit in."

So here are the Pet Shop Boys in 2004. Still wonderful anomalies
In the pop world.
Flamboyant and PopArt: The Hits are both out now on Parlophone.