They take it in turns to hover a hand over the screen. Jennifer Tennant is thinking really hard. Dawn Lowe looks like it's all too much for his tiny brain to cope with. After a few minutes Jennifer Tennant admits defeat.

"Well, what on earth are we?"

(Pause of Samuel Beckett type productions)

"We're the Pet Shop Boys, Neil..." The new Pet Shop Boys album is call Very. As with Please and Actually this joke will be lost on most people, but the likes of you and me will think it's very funny and very Pet Shop Boys - whatever that means.

The duo collect labels the way lesser groups collect gold discs. I can't think of anyone else who people have tried to hammer into as many different pigeonholes at once. Usually the line goes something like - "Ooh those Pet Shop Boys, they're ever so post-modern and clever and camp and ironic, aren't they?"

But are they?

"I see us in the tradition of Joe Orton and Noel Coward in that we are serious, comic, light-hearted, sentimental and brittle, all at the same time." - Neil Tennant

...and then in my dream Jennifer Tennant presses the buttons marked "serious" and "comic" and "light-hearted" and "sentimental" and "brittle". All at the same time! The show cuts away to a video of the Pet Shop Boys playing a storming Hi-NRG version of 'There are bad times just around the corner'. But in this clip Joe Orlon and Noel Coward are the Pet Shop Boys. When we return to the studio the computer asks Jennifer "Didn't Coward and Orlon have something else in common?"

"Drama?"

"You're getting warm," the computer replies helpfully...

Very is a bit of a disappointment. Queens like me who'd fallen in love with Behaviour and wept along with its electro ballads on an almost daily basis may find it all a bit too upbeat and uptempo. It's as jolly as Behaviour was sad. Strangely, the only track that makes you want to go wibble is 'To speak is a sin' - "strangely", because this seems to be little more than an update of 'Ballad of the sad young men'. The song's set in a bar where some strangers in the night are exchanging glances; "you look first then stare and once in a while it you dare..." Nonetheless it's curiously affecting, though the real sadness is that there's anyone who still thinks gay bars are like this.

I'm assuming the bar is gay, though the word isn't mentioned in the lyrics. But with the Pet Shop Boys there's always a lot of things left unsaid. We fill in the gaps and invariably jump to the right conclusions, just as straights jump to the wrong ones. Their songs mean different things to us, and that's why they've always meant more to us. For although the Pet Shop Boys are extremely popular they've been much misunderstood.

"I always maintain that we're completely misunderstood anyway. People often say 'it's wonderful, it's so camp', and I just smile politely because I'm bit disappointed really because it wasn't meant to be camp. Actually real camp is when something is totally sincere. There is no cynicism or trying to be clever." - Neil Tennant

...Dawn Lowe smiles and presses the words "misunderstood" and "disappointed" and "sincere".

The computer asks why they haven't pressed "camp"

"We're having enough trouble trying to define ourselves," Jennifer Tennant barks back. "If it was beyond Susan Sontag I'm sure it's beyond me."

"Going to Sarajevo and putting on a production of Waiting for Godot - that's camp!" Dawn Lowe interjects.

"All the more so as she's no idea how camp that is. It's much easier to name things that are camp than it is to define it. Actually even in 'Notes On Camp' Sontag resorted to making a list. King Kong, Firbank novels, feather boas."

Cut to a scratchy old black and white film of Christopher Isherwood reading from The World In The Evening: "You see high camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can't be camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it. You're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance."

Back in the studio Jennifer Tennant presses "fun" and "artifice" and "elegance"; "I always liked his Berlin novels," he says, "and I adored Cabaret. Hence Liza Minnelli..."

"You have a certain quality that really is unique, expressing with such irony although your voice is weak, it doesn't really matter 'cause the music is so loud" - 'Yesterday when I was mad'

'Yesterday when I was mad', one of the songs on the new album, has Neil singing of how they are often damned by faint praise. In the above chorus he mocks the most common misapprehension aboutthe duo - that they are ironic, Sorry - "ironic".

Part of the problem is that Neil Tennant is clever (Chris Lowe's a bright young thing too but affects an Andy Warhol-esque "Gee, I don't know" air and generally comes on like the simple Northern lad he so clearly isn't and brains are a pretty rare commodity in pop. This acts like a distancing mechanism that means that liking the Pet Shop Boys was never quite the same as liking Kylie or Take That or any of the other "rubbish" in the charts. They became "the pop group it's alright to likequot;.

A band started by a man like him - the former assistant editor of Smash Hits and all - could be seen as just a contrived exercise in manipulating the pop process. If they recorded a Village People number it was just a great camp statement. And if Chris said he really liked the lyrics to 'I should be so lucky' he was only being ironic. It's alright, it's not meant to be taken seriously. Except it was.

...They don't press "ironic"...

These days the idea of a pop group embracing post modernism is no longer a novelty. Even U2 have given up sincerity and authenticity for artifice and irony, But I guess that's what happens when you hang around with Brian Eno for too long. There's a certain amount of overlap between camp and post modernism and irony - seeing everything in quotation marks, the love of playfulness - so much so that some see post modernism as merely camp with A levels. But they're not the same thing.

The Pet Shop Boys were perfectly placed to be seen as a thoroughly post-modern pop group. Appearing as they did in the late Eighties - a time when I saw the worst minds of my generation destroyed by post modernism. But it was more than just a matter of timing. If post modernism was the great leveller in culture, they've attempted this in pop, continually refusing to show reverence to the rock canon: be it in turning the Elvis Presley "classic" 'Always on my mind' into a throbbing house anthem (with cow-bells on!), or giving U2's 'Where the streets have no name' an equivalence with the Boystown Gang's 'Can't take my eyes off you'. The thing was, many thought the joke in the latter was on Boystown Gang rather than U2.

...we cut away to a clip from U2's Zooropa TV film. Bono is dressed in his golden Elvis suit and crooning a few lines of 'Can't help falling in love' before launching into 'Where the streets have no name'. All this is disrupted by fast cutaways to Susan Sontag saying "the ultimate camp statement is 'it's good because it's awful'", a drunken student dancing to 'I should be so lucky' and rasping out "it's so crap it's brilliant!", Neil Tennant saying "I always maintain we're completely misunderstood anyway", and finally a scene from Coward's Private Lives: Elyot says to Amanda, "Nasty, insistent little tune', Amanda replies curtly, "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is".

Back in the studio Jennifer Tennant has a satisfied look on his face. He doesn't press "post-modern".

"For many people, camp is the same as tacky or kitsch but I don't think they are really, being camp isn't just being a snob. 'Kitsch implies a recognition of high aesthetic values' - Roland Barfhes."

Dawn Lowe looks unimpressed.

"'Eat my shorts!'" - Bart Simpson."

The Pet Shop Boys hadn't come to bury pop music, but to praise it. Like Noel Coward, Neil Tennant knows the potency of cheap music; "Pop music," he's argued, "is rubbish in a good way." Long before Bjorn Again had become a permanent fixture at Freshers' Balls, Nell was claiming that Abba were the best songwriters of the Seventies (he's said 'Knowing Me Knowing You' came from their "Ingmar Bergman period"), However much Neil Tennant loved artifice, most of what he said and sang wasn't a sneer but utterly sincere.

It's bizarre how readily people saw some ironic intent when you consider what a rare commodity irony had previously been in pop. Everything used to be taken at face value ("Hooray! Randy Newman hates short people too"). The Pet Shop Boys were even victims of this literal approach themselves. When they released their first single 'Opportunities (let's make lots of money)' they were written off in some quarters are Thatcherites. Two years later some still rushed to judge 'Shopping' as celebration rather then critique. And many still labour under the misapprehension that the "girls" in 'West End Girls' were really, well, girls.

But even before everyone discovered how clever and post-modern the Pet Shop Boys were being, when they weren't yet the darlings of the music press and the sort of dim people who only like "intelligent" music, straights were already claiming that they alone knew what the pair really meant, Their name was leapt upon as being a gay slang phrase for gerbilophiles. It wasn't (if the phrase existed at all it was an exceedingly obscure piece of American gay slang for SM rent), but the story was irresistible and gossip soon became gospel. In interviews Neil would have the "evidence" put to him, he'd look stunned and say they didn't know this when they chose the name, and - hey bingo! - here was the "proof" that the Pet Shop Boys had something to hide.

A whispering campaign began in the straight press claiming that the Pet Shop Boys weren't telling us the whole truth - and not just about their name. Things came to a head with an interview in the NME at the end of 1986. The boys were given the cover ("Queens' award for industry" - geddit?), and the paper did something the straight press had been doing for years before we discovered it. It tried to out them: "In anticipation of denials-a-go-go let's marshal the evidence... studied ambiguity... hamsters up your bum... homoerotic possibilities..." It even wondered "are they lovers?" - something that's never crossed the minds of any queens I know, but is automatically assumed by your average hetero hack.

But there were no "denials-a-go-go". Just Neil completely unflustered replying quite matter of factly: "We've never said anything about our sex lives to the newspapers or to magazines and we don't intend to - and that's not a clever ploy to appear mysterious - although if it has that effect I don't mind."

Despite his unashamed love of pop, Neil refuses to allow himself to be just another pop star. "if you decide you want to be a star, you have to be prepared to share your private life with the public... however if you decide you don't want to be seen as a star there are loads of things you don't do. You don't do lots of interviews, you don't do lots of cosmetic photo shoots for My Guy or whatever, you don't do glamorous videos, and you definitely don't talk about your private life."

"Being in a pop group isn't about being presented as two real people. It's about being the Pet Shop Boys... what we do in private doesn't matter. Only the songs," Neil's said, but I'm not sure he believes it. He talks too much about how the public property of the songs are personal statements: "Obviously people are going to look at our songs and read this or that into them. Some of them are quite direct, they're written from experience so it's quite embarrassing really, But the end result of people just speculating about things is far more accurate than them thinking one thing or another. I just don't know why people want to bracket you in one way or another. It's not what I want,"

To their credit though they still readily talk about the things that matter to them: be it gay clubs, gay disco, Aids or Clause 28 (they were the only pop group to play "Before the Act"). And if they won't put the facts of their sex/love/private lives on record, they don't seem to mind putting it on their records.

...Jennifer Tennant arches an eyebrow and says wryly, "I'm surprised you didn't put 'animal lovers' on there," before smiling to himself and pressing both "self-mocking" and "private". He deliberates for a while and then a little reluctantly pushes the one marked "pop star"...

"When we started ten years ago what we wanted to do was to make records that would be regarded as dance music, probably Hi-NRG dance music as it was then, and we were trying to marry that to traditional songwriting where the lyrics are interesting and make some kind of personal statement." - Neil Tennant

When they first set out the Pet Shop Boys' dream (soon realised) was to make a record with Bobby O and have it available on the import rack in Record Shack. Since then their music's been evidence of a long love affair with "gay disco", a term Neil uses, They make a kind of sophisticated Hi-NRG. Like Jimmy Somerville they've sometimes had to fall back on the cover version to secure hits. They share much the same points of reference but the Pet Shop Boys have been far more imaginative in their choices: plundering the likes of Sterling void, Stephen Sondheim, Yvonne Elliman, The Village People and The Boystown Gang.

...in quick succession Jennifer Tennant punches first "English", then "middle-class", and "Northern"...

"Many of the songs on Please are about running away. They're about someone brought up in a middle-class background in Newcastle who doesn't want to have a normal job, who doesn't want to get pinned down to bourgeois values, even though he could do that quite successfully and quite easily." - Neil Tennant

Like Morrissey, Neil writes well about the North where he grew up as a fey, bookish Fotherington-Thomas amidst a sea of Nigel Molesworth's. Only Neil, unlike Morrissey, has since grown up and escaped. He once conceded that calling them "the Smiths you can dance to" wasn't desperately inaccurate. They make dance music that's suitable for bedsit listening: you can stay at home and listen to songs about going out. Though their last album, Behaviour - a collection of sweeping slowies about not going out - augured that they might be turning into "the Smiths you can't dance to" (or something), Very sees them walking back to the dancefloor once more.

"English" is a word as often thrown at them as ironic, camp or post-modem, but is far more fitting. like the Kinks they have a love-hate affair with England itself. Their disastrous movie It Couldn't Happened Here, a sort of Carry On Derek Jarman, was a nostalgic yearning for the old England being destroyed by that nasty Mrs Thatcher. But, unlike some, the Pet Shop Boys are still very much in love with the modern world.

"English" is yet another of those words that has a number of over-lapping meanings. For many "Englishness" equals sexual repression ("It's a, it's a, it's a sin") and reserve - you can hear the latter in Tennant's delivery, for all his love of disco he never raises his voice like the divas do. It's sometimes a euphemism for gay (particularly in the States), but it's more usually a synonym for fey or unmanly - which they definitely are. Neil feels this is the main reason why they've failed to capitalise on their early success in America; "We just can't be a part of it. We're not a macho fantasy. We're not a heterosexual beach fantasy, Our music isn't macho, it's barely masculine,"

But when they're called "English", people mean more than a machismo deficiency. Above all the Pet Shop Boys are English in the sense that you know their records couldn't have been made by someone who'd come from anywhere else. Which is why Neil saying "I just don't know why people want to bracket you in one way or another" is bollocks pure and simple. Pop groups come with brackets.

The music people like, the stuff that moves them most, is that which has sprung from the same mud they have. "The gay community" may be a myth that only high ranking police officers talk of these days, but gay men do share an identity and a culture. Just like English people, Northern people and middle-class people do, we speak the same language, we like the same things. If Tennant will freely concede that the personal statements in his lyrics have been forged by his other identities - as English, Northern and middle-class - why does he down-play the other differences (and similarities) between people?

Neil knows that musical taste can be a crucial signifier; "In 'Can You Forgive Her', that line, 'you dance to disco and you don't like rock", gives the idea that the girl sees the guy as a closet queen, and she thinks that if he dances to disco he's not really a man and he hasn't faced up to this."

It's one of music's great cliches that it has some universal appeal, but the whole point of rock and roll was that not everyone wanted to listen to records aimed at Mr and Mrs Nice White Middle-Class Person. Even that old chestnut "Gor blimey everyone falls in love don't they?" is patently piffle - gay men's experience of love is different from heterosexuals. Which is why so many of us find Tennant's songs so affecting. The three most over-used words in pop's vocabulary "I love you" are used a lot by him but in an unusual way. He always distresses his desire; "I thought I loved you but I'm not sure now", "I could leave you, say goodbye, I could love you if I tried"," I may not always love you, you may not care", "if I didn't love you I would look around for someone else", "I love you, you pay my rent", "all I wanted to say was that I love you but you tell me now that you don't believe it's true". The new album queers the pitch rather by containing a love song with no such catches but the title admits 'I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing', Tennant writes bitter-sweet love songs - passionate yet worldly, romantic yet realistic, and hampered by insecurity, jealousy and doubt. Love isn't the answer to all your problems, it's just more problems. Not that that stops you from wanting it any the less.

And whilst gay men used to be able to content themselves with the fact that though lovers may come and go, our friends would always be with us, these days that is no longer a certainty. 'Being boring', 'It couldn't happen here', 'Hit music' and the new song 'Dreaming of the Queen' are about how we've coped with Aids. and how sometimes we can't cope. When singing of Aids he sounds bitter, bewildered, desolate but never simply angry. The Pet Shop boys are grace under pressure.

"There are two very distinct ways that people consume pop music. Your laddish music you react to like 'isn't it great they're just like us'. And then there's what I call aspriational music, which is 'oh I wish I was like that.' I think to a certain extent our music is aspriational." - Neil Tennant

...Jennifer Tennant presses "aspriational"...

This sounds suspiciously like common sense, but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Most fandom embraces both positions - the joy of the Pet Shop Boys for most queens is that Neil seems "just like us". Only a lot of us often wish he was a little more like us.

Christmas 1985. I am seventeen going on eighteen. This girl I know, Tessa, has taken me to Heaven. It's my first time in a gay club, but she's a bit of an old hand. Her big sister's a lesbian you see, and looking back I think the whole thing was probably her sister's idea ("I know what that boy needs"). I spent about six days worrying about what to wear and four hours trying to get my Morrissey quiff just right. I was a bit clueless and a bit disappointed by it all, The men didn't look like what I thought gay men looked like so I kidded myself it must have been a straight night - even though Tessa was just about the only woman in the place. And I didn't think much of the music. I didn't like dance music then and only recognised one song all night. That new band were in the charts. The Pet Shop Boys.

October 1991. And I'm in Heaven again. It's six years on and I've been out on the scene for four of them. I'm happy these days. Much happier than I ever thought I could be when I was seventeen. The Pet Shop Boys are my favourite band (I can't remember the last time I played a Smiths record) and they're playing here tonight. The place is going predictably mad. One queen's holding up a piece of file paper with "I love Neil" written on it in biro. The rest of us are just screaming our tits off. It's not Christmas this time, but it feels like Santa Claus has finally come to town. Or come home.

After frittering away my adolescence listening to self-pitying guitar groups, the Pet Shop Boys made more sense as I grew older. And I only really fell in love with them after I'd come out on the scene six years ago, Their music seems a far more accurate reflection of the world I move in now - the things that I care about and the things I no longer care about. I don't believe there's anyone who writes so well about the way gay men live their lives now.

By "now" I mean the late Eighties and early Nineties. The Pet Shop Boys were the archetypal Eighties band. But arehetypal late Eighties. The first half of that decade gave us genderbenders and Boy George and Frankie and Bronski Beat. And then? Nothing. The Pet Shop Boys appeared at the end of 1985, just as the party was over. Aids had hit in a big way and the backlash had begun. The Pet Shop Boys were products of a period as much as of a culture - when the boys who begged to be bracketed gave way to a New Discretion.

...so Jennifer Tennant presses "Eighties" and quick as a flash Dawn Lowe presses "Nineties". One of them presses "discreet" but it happens too quickly for me to figure out if it was Tennant or Lowe.

The words that they think best describe themselves are "serious", "comic", "light-hearted", "brittle", "misunderstood", "disappointed", "sincere", "fun", "artifice", "elegance", "self-mocking", "private", "pop-star" , "English", "middle-class", "Northern", "aspriational", "Eighties", "Nineties" and "discreet". They rejected "clever", "camp", "post-modern" and "ironic".

Then the computer says what she always says at the end of Star Test; "If we think you've been honest we will play your new video, but if we think you've been dishonest we'll play a video by someone else."

As the credits roll we hear the opening strains of 'Go West'. But I can't quite make out if it's the Village People's or the Pet Shop Boys' version...

This article was published in the October
1993 edition of Gay Times magazine