Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys has always
regarded Noel  Coward as the first British pop star.
Here he explains why he has  persuaded a group
of fellow musicians to record an album honouring  the
enduring appeal of a consummate entertainer

ACCORDING to his diaries, on July 4, 1965 Noel Coward was enjoying an "interlude" in Rome, having attended the wedding of some minor royals with actresses Merle Oberon and Kay Thompson. In the evening, he went to see the Beatles play a concert. I was truly horrified and shocked by the audience. It was like a mass masturbation orgy . . . Mob hysteria when commercially promoted, or in whatever way promoted, always sickens me. To make matters worse, he was invited for a drink with the Beatles afterwards, but they refused to see him because he had been reported slagging them off in the Daily Mail several months earlier. Undeterred, Coward managed to summon Paul McCartney.

'I explained gently but firmly that one did not pay much attention to the statements of newspaper reporters. The poor boy was quite amiable and I sent messages of congratulation to his colleagues, although the message I would have liked to send them was that they were bad-mannered little s***s'. Oh dear.

A classic pop tiff. Luckily, McCartney doesn't bear a grudge, for he sings an enchanting version of Coward's classic A Room With a View on a new album, Twentieth Century Blues, alongside other Coward covers by the cream of four generations of British pop stars. Just to put my cards on the table, I was executive producer. In compiling the album, all proceeds from which go to the Red Hot Aids Charitable Trust, my motives were not only philanthropic. I think No?l Coward was Britain's first pop star; I wanted to hear his songs sung by the generations that followed him. The young Beatles, as we have seen, were contemporaries of the old Coward (John Lennon encountered him at one of Alma Cogan's parties). Marianne Faithfull (who sings Mad About the Boy on the album) was visited backstage by him in the Sixties and performs his Twentieth Century Blues in her live shows. Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy cites Coward as an influence and has a charm which Coward might have fallen for. I have a feeling he'd also have been mad about Robbie Williams, who covers There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner.

The history of British pop is not just a story of sex, thugs and rock'n'roll, it is also a tradition of style, wit, irony, sexual ambivalence and flaunted sophistication communicated through the mass media. This is a tradition begun by No?l Coward. The first time I really became aware of him was in 1968 when he appeared in his final film, The Italian Job. His performance as the gangster boss fascinated me with its charisma and camp authority. Two or three years later, I heard the album, No?l Coward in New York, at a friend's house. We used to play it back-to-back with David Bowie's Hunky Dory or the first Roxy Music album. The early Seventies were the heyday of progressive rock, which I hated. Rather than endure the turgid riffing of Black Sabbath, Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Deep Purple, I wanted pop that was glamorous, beautiful, witty, provocative. You could look back and hear this in the Beatles; you could find it in Bowie or Roxy Music or Lou Reed's Transformer.

It was there in the soundtrack of the film Cabaret. You could hear it in the recordings of No?l Coward: the fascinatingly clipped delivery, the incredibly witty rhymes, the sexual innuendo; the air of someone terribly sensible describing the most outrageous behaviour; the beautiful but undercooked sentimentality. To me, in the early Seventies, Coward seemed contemporary and he's seemed that way ever since. You can see why if you contrast Coward's songs with those of his British competitors. For much of his career, his main rival as a composer and as a star was Ivor Novello, whose shows such as Perchance to Dream or The Dancing Years packed theatres in the Thirties and Forties. Today, they are rarely revived and few of his songs have survived in the popular consciousness: they've dated. Novello's music was the last gasp of the Viennese operetta tradition of Franz Leh?r. Although Coward wrote shows, such as Bitter Sweet, which were well within the operetta tradition, he was intrigued, from his first visit to New York in 1921, by the jazz he heard in nightclubs, Harlem hotspots, society parties and Broadway revues. In the Twenties, he wrote dance music for the demi-monde: jumpy, brittle songs which seemed to live on their nerves, expressing a simultaneous fascination with and a jaded reaction against the frenzied partying of the era.

In lives of leisure The craze for pleasure Steadily grows. Cocktails and laughter But what comes after? Nobody knows. (Poor Little Rich Girl) Performed on the Twentieth Century Blues album by Suede, Poor Little Rich Girl sounds utterly contemporary. It's about drinking, drugs, parties and what's the point of it all? It finds romance in the sheer desperation of hedonism. They're the sort of themes Brett Anderson of Suede, the author of Animal Nitrate and Beautiful Ones, might write about now. It was Coward's first hit song in 1925. For the next 25 years he would continue to write hit after hit: Someday I'll Find You, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, London Pride, Sail Away, songs that defined the British experience of those years. And, in terms of British pop music, it's possible to say that, before the Beatles, there was only No?l Coward. In the decades before the Sixties, popular music was dominated by American songwriters - George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern - and by American performers - Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald; Coward was the only British singer and songwriter who was a household name around the world. Like Ivor Novello, Coward was a homosexual, writing for the apparently heterosexual mass market only 20 years after the trial of Oscar Wilde.

He was always comfortable with his sexuality and, like the "anti-gay" gays of today, refused to be either a victim of his sexuality or to be totally defined by it. To regard homosexuality either as a disease or a vice is, we know, archaic and ignorant. It has always existed and always will exist. It has always been a minority in every country of the world and always will be. To attempt by law and punishment to eliminate it is as foolish as to try to eliminate hair colouring and skin pigmentation by the same methods. Coward wrote this in November 1955 about the possibility of the "barbarous" British laws against homosexual behaviour being changed. However, in the same diary entry, he comments that "any sexual activities when over-advertised are tasteless". Nonetheless, sexual desire was a frequent theme in his songs, as he acknowledged in his wicked rewrite of Cole Porter's Let's Do It. Mr Irving Berlin Often emphasises sin In a charming way; Mr Coward we know Wrote a song or two to show Sex was here to stay. Love was more difficult. It is impossible to believe that the pain of unrequited love or of the love affair gone sour which fills Coward's songs is not a reflection of his own emotional life. In If Love Were All, written in the Twenties, he gives a poignant statement of his "creed", of the problem of falling in love with the wrong person, of how the loved one will more than often let you down, of how you can rely only on yourself and your work. I believe the more you love a man, The more you give your trust, The more you're bound to lose. Although when shadows fall I think if only - Somebody splendid really needed me, Someone affectionate and dear, Cares would be ended if I knew that he Wanted to have me near. But I believe that since my life began The most I've had is just A talent to amuse. Heigh-ho, if love were all! Coward's great love (and business manager) of the Twenties and Thirties, Jack Wilson, caused him much pain with his infidelities and nearly landed Coward in prison for tax avoidance with his mismanagement.

Coward had given his trust and had lost out. He wrote the song Never Again after their relationship had ended. No, never again, Never the strange unthinking joy, Never the pain: Let me be wise, Let me learn to doubt romance, Try to live without romance, Let me be sane When trying to entice people to record songs for the album, I noticed that Coward seems to appeal more to male than female artists. The manager of one famous woman singer sent back a message saying: "Sorry, she's just not into him." Which is fair enough, though in his lifetime, Coward would probably have assumed that his public was predominantly female. Today, his romantic, matin?e idol appeal may have faded, but it seems he can be an icon for straight or gay men, an ideal of sophistication worn easily, a man for whom sex was not a problem, someone who could dress with style without being a clothes horse. Coward worked hard on this effortless sybaritic image, creating it out of the raw material of a suburban boy whose mother ran a boarding house. And, like any modern pop star, he knew you had to change with the times to survive.

As Coward's biographer, Philip Hoare, writes in the sleevenotes to Twentieth Century Blues: From decadent rebel in the 1920s, to serious sophisticate in the Thirties to stern patriot in the Forties, to hip cabaret artist in the Fifties, Coward assumed a succession of stylistic masks which carried his loyal fan base with him.' His image was fixed in the public imagination by its transmission through the electronic media. His records and films made him world-famous by the Thirties. In the Fifties, his television appearances in America established him as one of the first beneficiaries of the new mass medium. In the Nineties, all of his recordings have been reissued on CD. What would he have made of this album? My guess is he'd have criticised the deliveries of some lyrics, thought a few of the backing tracks were rather noisy, noted that several melodies have been re-harmonised, forgiven Paul McCartney for everything and been quietly pleased with the whole affair. Because, 99 years after his birth, No?l is still a part of now.

 Twentieth Century Blues: The Songs of No?l Coward is released by EMI on April 13. The concert featuring Elton John, Sting, Bryan Ferry and others will be broadcast on Radio 2 at 5.30pm today and shown on BBC2 on April 11. A three-part 'Arena' documentary on the life of No?l Coward will be shown on BBC2 over Easter weekend. An exhibition, Twentieth Century Icon: Images of No?l Coward runs at the Photographers Gallery, London WC2, from April 14. The National Portrait Gallery exhibits a selection of its collection of photographs of No l Coward from April 6.