They epitomise Eighties good-time pop, but they also express Nineties angst. Now the Pet Shop Boys have notched up their own first decade, and the big question about them remains.  Are they funny or sincere?  Both.  At least that's their story :

MB:
Neil won't have it.  "No," he says firmly, "It's too obvious, I'm sorry.  And I like the other one that you don't like; what's his name?  Paul Merton.  Now he's _quite_ funny."

The Pet Shop Boys reflect for a moment, each gazing thoughtfully at a different corner of the room, which is painted coconut-white.  Chris Lowe, reddened by the sun and wearing baggy shorts and trainers, looks like a refugee from a package holiday in Ibiza; Neil, with his spider-thin glasses perched halfway down his nose, dressed casually in denims and a grey silk shirt, looks as though he ought to be something important in the Berlin Philharmonic. With the air of a man who has just solved an important problem, he sits up and pronounces judgment: "I'll tell you who was the best person they've ever had on Have I Got News For You- John Major's brother!"  Chris is equally enthused by the memory: "John Major's brother was _fantastic_."

NT:   Now _there's_ a very ambiguous figure. _He's_ a bit like the Pet Shop Boys: is he trying to be funny, or is he just like that?

MB:
It was a circuitous route, but we finally got there - a working definition of the British pop phenomenon that calls itself the Pet Shop Boys: they're a bit like John Major's brother.Recording studios and record company offices, such as the one in which the Pet Shop Boys are sitting, are curiously depressing places.  In one sense, they resemble what Balzac described as "the bank's kitchen" - a messy and shabby scullery in which the dishes of glamour and opulence are dreamed up, sent back or scraped clean of their left-overs.  In another sense, it's the very attempts at laid-back informality and rock'n'roll kitsch (a hamburger
restaurant conceived by Radio 1) which makes them so forlorn, and, ultimately, rather pathetic.  It's the pin-ball machines and the tin-foil ashtrays sprouting stamens of stubbed-out roll-ups; it's the bright young
assistants with abbreviated names that end in "z" or "y"; it's the constant, unholy inanity of MTV flickering wherever you turn.

It's a strange place to meet the Pet Shop Boys, somehow; for exactly a decade they have taken the values of pop, embraced them totally and then reserved them.  Their unique brand of techno-glamour and disco-melodrama has defined new recipes and fed new hungers.  In fact, if pop was food and recording studios were industrial kitchens, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant would be the Marks & Spencer of the medium.  After all, wasn't it around 1985 that Marks & Spencer brought the avocado to the High Street?  And that's another working definition of the Pet Shop Boys: they're a bit like an M&S sandwich.

NT: When, as is bound to happen, the Pet Shop Boys' story is released as a made-for-TV bio-pic, the opening credits will give way to the words "London, 1981" and a scene of two young men meeting by chance in an electronics shop on the Kings Road.  One is Neil Tennant, a Smash Hits journalist from North Shields; the other, younger by five years, is Chris Lowe - an architecture student from Blackpool.  Interestingly, they both have fathers who are sales representatives.  They decide to make music together; the screen goes watery and we're in New York.  Legendary producer Bobby O, (the man behind Divine) is working with them on their first single.

CL:   I think that one of the reasons why that first version of West End Girls had so much power was because it was recorded so quickly. Sometimes you can work on something for so long, and make it so much better, that it becomes crap again.

NT:   Bobby O thought that we were doing this gorgeous, lush little number, and what we wanted to do, actually, was something more like Shoot Your Shot by Divine.  It was rather like that film about Ed Wood -
you know, one take and it's perfect.  That's what Bobby O was like.Those records were full of mistakes, but in those days I never noticed anything like tuning.

CL:   I still don't.

NT:   (pensively)  Yes.  You're lucky like that, really.

MB:
The Pet Shop Boys were attempting to make a go of it as pop stars at a time when British pop was fashion conscious, dancing to the feel-good prettiness of Culture Club, and looking to born-again Soho as some kind of new jazzy club scene.  As a pop journalist, Neil Tennant must have been only too aware
of the context into which the Pet Shop Boys were delivering their pop project.  It's tempting to imagine that Chris and Neil actually sat down and designed the Pet Shop Boys - rather like Gilbert & George, the artists, created Gilbert & George - as an efficient piece of pop art. This would tie in with all of the later accusations (and applause) which they receive as "ironic" or "detached" pop stars, mirroring the post-modern
complexity of the Thatcher era with cleverly-executed songs about the alienation of contemporary urban existence.  But this is to miss the more obvious point that Chris and Neil, who are great fans of pop music, were too in love with the potential of pop as a means of conveying emotions to simply
sit down and start being arty about it.  True, Neil's voice can sound impassive at times and render the lyrics opaque, but it isn't really detached".  It's the Englishness of Neil's voice, in fact, which makes it semi-detached.

NT:   I, actually, personally, felt that we were really really talented. People always ask me, in the legendary 'Neil you've been on both sides of the fence' question, how working at Smash Hits helped me to assess us.  And I actually thought that what Chris and I were doing was pretty good and a bit different from what everyone else was doing.  And then loads of stuff came along that I thought was like what we were doing. Remember, we'd recorded West End Girls before Frankie Goes To Hollywood were known; by the time it came out, Frankie were the biggest group in the country, Dead Or Alive had a hit, New Order had released Blue Monday... If only Bobby O had got that record out in September 1983, we'd have been something really really new, whereas I thought by the time that it did come out, a bit later, we could have looked like we'd jumped on the bandwagon.

NT:
Although, we've been interested in, and to a certain extent followed, contemporary dance music, we've never applied notions of trendiness, or of taste, really, to what we do.  Which is what makes it so
different.  Because so much music, particularly when it comes out of London, is aware of all these trendy groups that everyone's going on about.  When I was at Smash Hits, Blue Rondo were going to be something, and when we signed to EMI, Chak were the thing.  Even now, we'd never be able to be hip in the way that these groups were hip. Which I think is an advantage, as it happens.

Returning to the notion of a bio-pic, the leaves would have to flutter off a swirling calendar to show how the Eighties - that most febrile and self- contradictory of recent decades - saw the rise and rise of the Pet Shop Boys. You could argue that they defined and described the Eighties more than any
single novelist, painter or film director.  Unintentionally, the Pet Shop Boys articulated the decade in rather the same way that Scott Fitzgerald discovered that he had invented the Jazz Age in the Twenties.  But rather than quick shots of bobbed girls dancing the Charleston and Wall Street magnates toasting their ticker-tape fortunes, the images of the Pet Shop Boys decade would be opulent adverts for building societies, nouvelle cuisine and the cult of personal organisation.

The Eighties, however, are regarded as villainous by the nervous Nineties, (Duran Duran were virtually blamed for the recession) and yet the Pet Shop Boys are ambivalent about their relation to the decade of excess.

CL:   (firmly, with confidence)  I thought that the Eighties were really really good - particularly towards the end.  You must remember that Rave started in the Eighties.  And didn't Grunge start in the
Eighties?"  (He pauses, mentally charting his theme)  In fact, didn't everything start in the Eighties?  House music?  Actually, 1988 and 1989 were two of the best years, ever, in the history of the world...

NT:   And Stock, Aitken & Waterman.

CL:   (nodding) ...and Stock, Aitken & Waterman. (He relaxes, confident that he has proved his point.  Sipping his Snapple he lets out a satisfied sigh and starts to reminisce.) There was loads of money, nice cars, expensive things, bottles of champagne... I'm sorry, but I can't complain at all.  I loved it. They were great, the Eighties.

(He gives a sudden start) Obviously, we detested Maggie and everything.  We did our bit...

Neil  : (philosophically)  All pop stars voted Labour, in fact.  Except for the ones who didn't.

CL:   Clubs aren't as good any more, you know.

NT:   But this is what worries me about decades and centuries and... millennia.  (the term is spat out with some contempt)  It's all so arbitrary.  I mean your Nineties, really, started in 1988.  Rave
started when the economy happened to take a dive and Mrs Thatcher started to falter.  Your actual classic Eighties was Mrs Thatcher's second administration - it's 1983 to 1987, isn't it?  It's just like
your classic Sixties is really between 1963 and 1968, just about. Your boom decades are always terribly short.  And we came in, really, towards the end of that boom thing.  Didn't we used to say that we
were the last of the Eighties-type pop stars?  And, also, the beginning of the next big thing.  Because we didn't have the vivid personalities of your Culture Club-type pop stars and we weren't as
designery as them.  I mean, Chris actually pioneered a kind of street-type look; Chris, in fact, invented what a keyboards player was meant to look like from then on, in this period: ie a baseball
cap and scowling.

It was probably in the Eighties, with its cultural insistence on the rule of irony and the power of mediation, that the Pet Shop Boys - who were, by then, enjoying international fame - became a kind of pop institution: a cross between Morecambe & Wise and Kraftwerk.  The irresistible rush of their hit
singles had made them a pretty constant feature in the world of mainstream pop, while their approach to the music and its presentation was the stuff of doctoral theses.  They had managed an effective pop cross-over.

On the one hand, you could usually hear a Pet Shop Boys song being played in almost any shopping centre from Reading to Rio, wafting, familiar and comforting, from Sock Shop or The Gap.  On the other, these same songs were about all of the things that a consumer society is most afraid of:
alienation, broken relationships, Aids, guilt, sexual failure, moral and financial enslavement.

It was as though, delivered on such irresistible melodies - with heroic production values which just avoided the pitfalls of pure camp - these impassive statements about daily life were dressed in a brilliant disguise.
After all, these weren't nasty young rock stars, like the Manic Street Preachers or EMF, these were the Pet Shop Boys, and at least half of the country, by 1991, would have been happy to see a Pet Shop Boys Christmas Special on TV.

But we also had a sneaking suspicion that these pop songs meant something; so, surely, it had to be ironic?

NT:   I think that we're so sincere that some people can't believe we would say something as naive as the things we say; if we are as intelligent as we're reputed to be, it follows, in these people's minds, that
we're being ironic.  And a lot of it just happened by chance.  Our second LP, actually, happened to come out during a particular period of the Eighties and was assumed to be a critique of that period.  The
song Shopping on that LP, is ironic, in fact - it's about the nationalised industries.

But we've really only tried to do two things: to get that romantic, beautiful approach which can send shivers down your spine; and then there's our cheeky, punky kind of thing - as exemplified early on in
Let's Make Lots Of Money.  I think that's also important, to say the unsayable in a beautiful and rhythmic way.  And I think that all of those things invite a shifting perspective, which results in some
people thinking we're taking the piss, other people just going along with it, and some people trying to analyse it.  All of which, asresponses, are equally ... valid.

CL:   Actually, another thing about irony is that at the time, when we were coming up, all of these groups were on MTV doing European promotion. And they all used to do these wacky thumbs-up shots when them leaning into the camera and pulling faces.  And we would never do that; we
never wanted to present ourselves like that...

NT:   Which meant that when we were on Top Of The Pops everyone was appalled because we didn't 'do' anything.  In fact, Rob Dickens, from Warner's, told me a couple of years ago that 'the rot set in with us'.  I knew what he meant, actually; there was absolutely no attempt at performance values - but we did more then than we do now, as it happens.

Chris Lowe is possibly more famous for not doing anything than almost anyone else in the history of popular entertainment.  This reticence (or is it obstinacy?) continues in his handling of promotion and the media.  On a Late Show film he said nothing at all; on The South Bank Show profile, he was
filmed for about five minutes, standing cheerily in front of his keyboard with his arms folded, looking for all the world like he was an 18-year-old waiting to have his photograph taken standing next to his first car.  But Chris Lowe is neither sullen nor aloof, nor is he Dr Watson to Neil Tennant's Sherlock Holmes.  He's a remarkably down-to-earth man, held in place by his north-western common sense which sees work as work, fun as fun, and is precisely aware of his worth within that equation.

CL:   I've always wanted to do no promotion at all - to do nothing, really. The more we've gone on, the more I've covered up my face; I'm shocked, now, when I see a picture of myself without my glasses on or
the hat.  I mean, I wouldn't dream of going to a photo session now without a hat or glasses.  Also, if I'm drunk, I'll talk loads, but I don't really feel that anything I've got to say is anyone else's
business.  I hate it when people start mouthing off about everything. And, despite my immense qualifications, I don't know anything, really.  I'm thick as shit, me - on a worldwide scale.

Even my old school hasn't acknowledged me; at least Neil's old school slagged him off.  My school only acknowledges that Peter Purves went there.  Oh, and David Ball from Soft Cell was in the year above me,
but I don't suppose that they've acknowledged him, either.

Neil Tennant, on the other hand, has a reputation as a wait and a raconteur; if times got hard he could probably make a reasonable living as an after-dinner speaker.  But speaking to whom, exactly, it is difficult to guess.  With their opposed public personae - funny man and stooge, gent and
lad - it is tempting to believe that the Pet Shop Boys are not the equal partnership which, in fact, they are.  But it was Neil who finally gave a solo interview, to Attitude magazine, in which he discussed his homosexuality and the sexuality of the Pet Shop Boys.

One way of connecting with this line of analysis is to think of the Pet Shop Boys as a continuation of the tradition, in England, of gay political satire. This tradition, deriving from the impact that Oscar Wilde had on Victorian London, can be followed through characters in Evelyn Waugh's early fiction, W H Auden, Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan and Joe Orton.  The historical necessity, due to persecution, for homosexuals to develop a coded language and a coded sense of humour, equipped them more than any other social group
with the ability to disguise serious commentary as light entertainment.  To this end, only the Pet Shop Boys could encode the glamour and humour of their pure pop aesthetic with such politically pointed messages - It Couldn't Happen Here is about Aids, Shameless, a pure disco stomper, is about their
pop peers - and somehow get away with it without seeming smug.

NT:   I don't think that a straight group could do what we do, because if they tried it would be too waspish.  There's a sense of humour that wouldn't come naturally to them.  Having said that, I don't know if
it's true that homosexual people have a different sense of humour to straight people.  I suppose that they must have instigated one; but I wonder whether that will carry on now that homosexuality is less
and less of an issue - which I hope is what is happening. To me, homosexuality has always had a mysterious glamour, particularly in pop music.  The reason I never discussed it earlier
was that it seemed more interesting not to.  It seemed that, in pop terms, it was more interesting to leave a veil over the individual. But I don't know how many people in ordinary society - if there is
such a thing - could really care less.  I think that they'd find it faintly embarrassing; I mean, talking about sexuality is embarrassing, so talking about homosexual sexuality is doubly
embarrassing...

CL:   (impishly)  Except when you're drunk in a club and on the pull.  Then it's fun.

NT:   (undeterred)  ...I did the piece in Attitude because I think it's a good magazine - but I had a vague feeling that I'd kind of given in about it.  But, then, part of me also thought that it was sort of
pathetic that when we occasionally gave interviews this issue was always skirted around by the interviewer out of respect for us.

As I also said in the Attitude article, the reason I did it was because I'd just been in a relationship with someone and it was the first homosexual relationship I'd ever been in.  It seemed to me that
throughout the Eighties, when there was so much speculation as to whether we were gay or not, I wasn't in a relationship, I barely had a sex life...

CL:   And the last one was a woman.  So there you go.

NT:   ...Also, we're great ones for not belonging to things, and in the Eighties being gay was presented as kind of joining a club, the president of which was Jimmy Somerville.  And that's a notion of
sexuality which I find very outdated.  It's an old way of looking at things, and the reason that it's come about is persecution.

If we had equal civil rights the whole issue would practically die away.  It came out of the civil rights struggle of the late Sixties and early Seventies, and that, for some people, is still what 'being
gay' is all about.  And I've often found that to be a very misogynist world, which I don't like.  I don't want to live in a single-sex environment - which a lot of gay people do.  Also, I
didn't want to become 'gay pop star, Neil Tennant', which I became, classically, two days after the Attitude thing in a piece in the Daily Mirror.

CL:   Were you 'self-confessed'?

NT:   No, but weren't we going to make an album called Self-Confessed?

CL:   We could announce an album called Self-Confessed and then not do it.

NT:   And then evade questions about why it was called Self-Confessed.

In terms of being a truly independent voice in British pop, the Pet Shop Boys sit (uneasily, perhaps) alongside Morrissey and Mark Smith's The Fall as mature outsiders who understand their precise worth and identity as informants of British culture.  Interestingly, the Pet Shop Boys, The Fall
and Morrissey are all quite senior within their profession; they are the tradition which has enabled the likes of Blur and Pulp to play the part of "literary" popsters, mining Englishness for its humour and its semi-tragic sentimentality.

But The Fall, Morrissey and the Pet Shop Boys, one feels, are somehow the real thing, having created three very different forms of pop, which, taken collectively, confound any spurious notions of high or low-culture by virtue of their originality and individual brilliance.

Interestingly, all three groups come from the north of England, and their northerness seems central to their longevity, their humour and their vision.

NT:   It's different coming from the north-east than from the north-west. Newcastle doesn't compete with London; Manchester competes with London...

CL:   Blackpool competes with Fleetwood.

NT:   ...I've never found that London trendiness very interesting.  I always think that the north, in terms of pop culture, has contributed pretty much everything.  There are occasional examples, like the RollingStones, of London pop, but the history of pop music is pretty much a northern story.  There must bea reason for that.  I think it's to do with not being sophisticated; not being trendy releases you - you don't know that you shouldn't like something.  Or, conversely, you don't think it's wrong simply to follow the crowd.

On a blue summer evening, earlier this year, Neil Tennant was welcomed by the librarian of the Oxford Union into the University's Debating Chamber. Dressed in a shimmering suit of aquamarine satin, Neil acknowledged the thunderous applause from this mock parliament of privileged undergraduates
with a cross between a curtsey and a Papal blessing.  "The place is going to be packed," hissed a self-assured youth with golf club eyes, "there's probably rather more people here than we had for the defence lawyer in the O J Simpson trial."

Crammed on to hard benches, their eyes brimming with affection and awe, the students of Oxford University put together a series of questions which got a better interview out of the subject than most journalists could manage.  The boys all had those accents which indicate their future roles as leaders of
men; the questions boomed across the chamber like a curiously camp version of Prime Minister's Question Time.

Stdnt:  Ahm, Mr Tennant.  Perhaps you could tell us just what you do when
you're not being a Pet Shop Boy?

NT:   Well, it's amazing how the time can pass, actually.

Finally, with a sense of the inevitable, one young blade plucked up the courage to enquire about the pornographic legend which is attached to the term "pet shop boy".  For many years now, an urban myth has circulated that the name is related to a practise among Hollywood decadents of anally
inserting tortured small animals to induce a sado-masochistic masturbatory high.  In fact, the Pet Shop Boys took their name from some friends who owned a pet shop in Ealing; also, they thought it sounded like the name of an English rap group.

But unphased, Neil leaned back in his throne-like chair, surrounded by blackened portraits of Oxonian statesmen, and regarded his eager audience. He sighed.  "You know, it's funny to think that people are looking at you and thinking, 'There goes a man who puts hamsters up his bottom'."
He bought the house down.