Interviews They Want You As a new recruit
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The Pet Shop Boys return to remind us what pop is for with the mighty 'Go West1 and a heart-spinner of an LP in ‘Very’. But who does what in the Gilbert & George of pop? And is Chris really the fifth coolest man in rock? "Irony?” They say, “Irony is Crap!”

SO THERE WE WERE: ME AND

Bono   and   Salman, Wembley Stadium, back-stage, drinks and cheery chat, the whole thing. Ace! I'm going again tonight.

Never mind all that Salman-Rushdie-come-on-down stuff, I'm taking my mobile phone and I'm going to ring him up: 'Hello Bono! It's your old mate Chris here! I'm closer than you think! In fact, here I am!' It is going to be excellent, ha ha ha!"

Neil Tennant glares down at his fellow Pet Shop Boy with a nuclear winter's-worth of disdain. It's one thing going to see U2 - who occupy a particu­larly high league position in the Pet Shop demonology for being not just Rock but Conscience Rock Trying To Be Conceptual. But it's another to pitch into the Zooropa opening night back-slap-o-rama with MacbloodyPhisto and Salman Rushdie the literary Disco Vicar. There is, as Big Dave would have it, a line, and Chris has stepped over it.

"Well that's the end of that, isn't it?" Neil shrugs. "The Pet Shop Boys' glittering career is over as of now. We've split up. Musical differences. He's join­ing U2 and I've had it.. Call me cynical, Chris, but I think that your new chums U2 use and abuse all their important causes. Those Bosrila TV link-ups, what is that all about? It's grotesque."

Chris is unabashed. He remains squatting on his haunches, eating something steamy and unpleas­ant from McDonald's and chugging away on an Extra-Large Coke. Someone mentions that he could have bought an Iranian Number One for the Patties by strangling Sahaan Rushdie. He grins at Neil. Neil winces theatrically, either at Chris' born-

Enthusiasm for stadium popery or at his choice of luncheon. But Chris is in his stride.

"He's great, is Bono, you know. Lovely feller. Said he liked us. And he gave me a hug..."

Neil looks like he's ready to spew.

Ho HO, VERY PET SHOP Boys. But You WOULD SAY THAT,
wouldn’t you? The notion of things being 'very Pet Shop Boys' is now so strong that Neil and Chris are calling their new and thoroughly marvellous LP 'Very'. It's not as good as calling their first LP 'Please' so that people had to go to the shops and ask for "The new Pet Shop Boys LP, 'Please"', but it'll still do nicely. It's still very Pet Shop Boys.

This is a pop group that long ago ceased to have just an identity and instead grew a personality. Other groups get in more papers, play bigger con­certs and sell more records. Some even make better ones, although not very often. But more than anyone else, the Pet Shop Boys are knot. Everybody understands what they're about.

Anyone who went to their superlative mince concerts a couple of years ago will have been marginally freaked by the sheer breadth of their audience: kids who love them for their videos and lurid pop tableaux, clubbers who con­nect with the remixes, South Bank Show viewers who appreciate their minimalism and theatrical flair, speed intellectual and music journalists who get into a lather over all that supposed irony (more of that later).. And they've got the Pink Pound pretty much sewn up too.

But paradoxically, the less they smile, the more they stand stock still, the more they don't do any- -thing at all, the more we like them. In a pop world where all kinds of twerps and half-wits fawn on our affections, the Pet Shop Boys are loved because they’re so unlovable.

Which is part of what makes Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe a true double act. They're almost a col­lective personally - Neil the rational right hand side of the Pet Shop Brain with a taste for opera and the fine arts, Chris the impulsive, rave-friendly left-hand side. The disco Jives and Wooster. In the flesh, though, they're a lot more like one anoth­er. Nine years as 24-hour professional Pet Shop Boys has given them a spiky and frequently hilari­ous rapport that you almost feel is wasted in being kept to themselves. They bicker expertly. You almost wish they had their own chat show- Chris And Neil's Big Night In or, more probably, Conversation only no one else would get a word in and all the guests would seem dull and stupid.


Reference-spotters will love the 'Go

West' battle suits. It's a Leeds United Star Trek look with

Roman Centurion overtones...

They are very close. Over the Years the ambigu­ity that characterised songs like 'Rent' has grown less, well, ambiguous, but even though there are at least three tracks on 'Very' (not including the unabashed gay anthem 'Go West') that are pretty than on heterosexual connotations, it still seems churlish to ask them about their sextialities. In fact, it seems rather pointless.

Today, for a change, they've agreed to be split up and asked the same questions, as Select search­es for inconsistencies and random bitchery.

But we're not anything anything nasty about each other, you know," Chris declares. "It always looks crap...

Neil is taller and more rangy than he appears in all the pictures that you've seen. He's smithy slim­mer than he was and the frothy perm of yore is clearly never coming back. But he looks well on it, with a distinguished Spock-like tight crop and the

Manner of a particularly carefree schoolteacher. Speaks rapidity, and sometimes his voice inadvtently slips into a kind of benign Victor Meld nasal tone, pronouncing the title of one song as' Wouldn't normally do kind of Thing.' And treats Chris with a kind of exasperated affection and the supposedly petulant, hard-faced, unco­operative, obstreperous, sullen Fifth Coolest Person In Pop? Chris is solidity built and, oddity, has; a frequent and throaty laugh that with a little more work and some Senior Service therapy could turn. Into that of Sid James. He also has a disarming ten­dency towards the bashful. Neil is 39 and reamer than a ghost of his Newcastle accent. And Chris, who's 34, has Blackpool in his voice too..~, Neither of them swear very much for pop stars.

Today, in a photographer's studio in Camden Town, they're premiering the 'Go West' Very' bat-. insults in petrol blue and canary yellow. Designed by opera art director David Fielding, who was:

Responsible for the bewildering array of funny hats, wigs and cummerbunds in Performance, they are the more poly-dimensional successors to the one-gag 'Can You Forgive Her?' dunce cone head outfits. Reference-spotters will love them. It's a kind of Leeds United Star Trek look with Roman Centurion overtones, a hint of Star Wars Rebel ~ Alliance chic and a smidgen of Dad's Army in the salad-bowl helmets. All of which adds up to a kind of Deionisation of The village People's uniforms.

Chris also sports a visor, which he is both fond of ("It makes me look like Mr Lafarge off Star Trek

- The Next Generation") and detests ("It pushes into your temples and it gives you a headache"). There's a spear, which appears in the 'Go West' video but doesn't get used in pictures because it looks "stupid". Neil strikes a pose for the camera, yellow fist on blue chest in a Roman-style salute,  and instantly worries that it looks fascist. This immediately sets Chris going...

"Do you remember that show we did m Germany?" he crows across the studio. "Ha ha ha' Classic! Nell's singing, right, and I forget which song, but he raises his arm for emphasis, like on It 5 A Sin'. Only he gets the angle wrong and he's standing there with a full siege he ill foraminifer so! I’m going "Put your hand down! Put it down' the Germans are all sitting there open-mouthed and the record company people are going white it was fantastic, ha ha! There goes the career!"

Not very Pet Shop Boys.

"ONE SINGS, The OTHER WATCHES TEILY - IT'S THE PET Shop Boys!" Thus quipped a cruel but funny cartoon in Arrival Pop Magazine a couple of years ago The pictures showed an obsessive Neil furiously poring over computers while a baseball hated Chris drank pop and bounced the channels with his remote control. It's ~harsh travesty of the truth of course, but not far from what some people believe

When Chris Lowe met Nell Tenants in a music shop on London's King's Road in 1981, he was still studying architecture at Liverpool University

"We hit it off on a musical veil more than any thing," he recalls as he lies, stiff as a board on a lumpy settee in the corner of the studio (the space warrior outfits are rather rigid and not built for relaxation) while Neil has his picture taken.

"We were both into David Bowie, really which was what got us talking. But I was into disco music. Imagination, 'Body Talk' - that was the first 12-inch I ever bought, in fact. Whereas Neil was more rock orientated. It seems funny now  but I think his generation poo-poohed the whole dance thing as kind of.. . not real music."

For no apparent reason Chris suddenly becomes oddly introspective.

"It's incredible, really, how a chance meeting like that can change your whole path of life. Chris Lowe - the Chris Lowe that we know- didn't really get invented until he moved to London, you know. Neil and I see a lot less of each other now, but at first we went out clubbing and to restaurants more. But as you go on you find you have more time to yourself. And our circle of friends has grown."

Do you argue?

"Yes, just for the sake of arguing. Our argu­ments are usually pathetic. Lake: I never agreed to do an interview... We once had a really silly row on tour, which went on for ages, about whether golf was a rich man's game, or not. There were loads of people from the record company sat at the table, agog, as we had this blazing row about golf, of all things. But I think it has something to do with being on tour. It all gets a bit tense and horrible."

Do you argue about work?

"If someone doesn't like something it doesn't get done," he says quickly. "If I go out to watch tele­vision and I come back to find Neil's plonked some horrible part all over my, my painting . . .or if I do something cheesy.. Then it just goes like that. We only ever compromise on choosing songs for records - if one of us realty likes a particular song and thinks it should be there, and then it goes on.

"But I like arguing with Neil even ff1 don't know what I'm talking about. Coos he's Catholic, or lapsed Catholic, and I'm supposedly Protestant, I like to wind him up about religious beliefs. Neil is great to argue with simply because he knows so much. Historical knowledge in particular. For instance if you say to him, I don't understand this Bosnia thing, Neil can home straight in and tell you..."

Which makes him unique on Planet Earth.

"...And I admire his determination, his under-standing of what's right and wrong. Neil used to be very much a workaholic, and he tends to get rest­less and irritable if he's not doing tatting. He paces around his house feeling guilty. Whereas I'm quite happy doing nothing."

What do you mean, nothing?

"Err. .1 dun no," he says sheepishly. "I flick through the satellite channels, ha ha! (Ah! One sings, the other watches telly!) A lot of UK Gold actually. I love Star Trek - The Next Generating too. Ls Deep Space Nine any good? I do sport too. I play tennis and squash. I've got a multi-gym. You'd be surprised. Things always seem to crop up. I like to, ah, go out a lot. I like to party. I think there's a whole generation of people now whose life is nightlife, who get by just to go to the club."

If you weren't a Pesto, would that be you?

"No. No way. You can't do a proper job and be like that. You'd be half dead."

What can Neil do for the Pettoes that you can't?

"He can type," Chris grins. "And he can use a Passion Organiser. This was continua interrupt ed by Bob Kraushaar the engineer teaching Neil how to use his Passion Organiser. Come to think of it that was a bit of an irritating habit.. but I think he's mastered it now. He's on to an Apple Mac now. In ten years' time he'll be a computer expert..."

Chris, h6w' did you feel about being voted the Fifth Coolest Person In Pop in last month's Select, beaten to fourth place by Bay 'Techno' Sluggard?

"I was very pleased with that. I wider stand your irony, ha ha! No, actually, that 'Techno techno.

techno techno; it is a great pop moment, isn't it? The funny thing is, The Face voted me third best-dressed male too. Something funny is going on here. You're not around for two years and then sud­denly all this starts happening? So I'm going to disappear forever and watch my credibility rocket."

Was Neil miffed at not getting in?

"If he was he didn't show it. I told him, It says here, Neil, you try too hard. He said, Mm, I do too."

Much of the Lowe cool and thus the PSB sang­froid appear based on the stoical Kraffwerk principle of less-is-more. But though Chris confess­es himself a massive Kraftwerk fan, he puts his stage persona down to sheer terror rather than emulation of Iliad and Florien. In the early days he and Neil were dumped with no warning in a Belgian TV studio and told to mime to 'West End Girls'. It was their first performance ever. Terrified, he stared fixedly at the keyboard, playing the baseline.

Neil: "I use Chris shamelessly. I say Chris is absolutely furious about this! There's no way he's going to do it! And really it's ~

"And that's what I've done ever since. I never thought, Oh God what would Kraltwerk do now? It was automatic. I didn't even think about moving."

You're known to dance a bit when you go out...

"Oh yeah, I love dancing.. .But dancing behind a keyboard, I've always thought it looks tragic. Your mosey keyboard player, whenever the camera points at him he looks up and he pulls a funny face! And it looks pathetic. I'm very shy. I'm a great one for dancing in my bedroom when I've got out of the shower. But cameras? No, no..."

All right: are you the clubbing conscience of the Pettoes? Chris becomes suddenly sheepish.

"Err.. Not really. Neil doesn't go out as much as he did, but for me clubbing would be - if it could -just a total way of life. I mean I Just love everything about it. When you're on the dance floor and a really good tune comes on, you literally get an ecstatic feeling that you can't get anywhere else at all. Like when we went to the first Sunrise raves..." He realises he's getting slightly carried away. "In fact I'm getting a tingle now just thinking about it! Sorry. I'm getting a bit of a potty rush on...But any-way, I think that the music I dance to and the music we make are times entirely separates. I don't feel we have to compete with dance music."

He funnies his satellite dish onto his head

expends a hand so he can be pulled uprightness cheeky question for you, Chris: are you the Bob Mortimer of the Pet Shop Boys?

"I’m Bob Mortimer? Is he funny?"

He's their than Vic Reeves.

"Funnier than Vic Reeves? Is he? Ahh. .1 like those chocolate adverts about the fipple under­side.. I've no idea. I don't care, to be honest."

Let's hope he doesn't turn to page 68, readers!

"OH     NO. NOT 'Gobi is A RICH MAN'S GAME' AGAIN I SEE Neil Tennant flops down on the laundry b

Couch, arms and legs sticking out in the stiff sum like Action Man, and rolls his Eagle Eyes.

"Please don't open that one again. Chris argues-~ about that kind of thing, I just sit there with agora less expression on. There are certain subjects which Chris just goes bonkers about..."

Neil clearly means 'bonkers' not in a cheery ~ con text, but in the rather resigned Oh-Dear My ~ Light Socket-Again sense of the word. In the distance Chris is shouting about the class-based iniquities of golf from under his visor as the camera clicks away

"Chris tries to wind me up, but then l waddled up too. I tell him he's going to hell when he dies and he gets very worried about ft, ha ha! Or the world is going to end coos the Virgin Mary said so in Farina

Neil speaks with a kind of dazed warmth about Chris, whose five years his junior but spatially quite clearly still the teenager. And as if forever marked by his time as assistant editor and itinerant journo on Smash Hits, he retains the occasional tendency to speak in inverted commas He is refreshingly educated and very, very funny.

Does Chris love being the gentleman of leisure?

"That's absolutely true. Chris in theory would be quite happy never to do anything ever again, but in fact he does phone up unexpectedly and say, Listen, I've written this really good thing, we should work on it. When we went up to see Johnny Marr and Berriard Sumner for the first time to write with them, Chris had a little "something I prepared earlier with him. He does far more than one might think. But he has a fantastic ability - which I wish I had - to turn off on things, shrug his shoulders and forget it. I will have three weeks of sleepless nights over it, but he can ignore things for weeks."

He glances across the room at the Fifth Coolest Man In Pop, who is ignoring the roasting studio lights with consummate insouciance.

"I'm meant to be the sensible one, you see," he mutters wistfully. "Therefore I'm expected to do a lot of the things the Pet Shop Boys have to do, which is the only thing that niggles our relationship at all. I get miles of faxes at home all day - check these proofs, do this, do that, probably because I used to be a journalist - and I don't think Chris even knows half of that goes on. People are scared of him, actually. They think he's unapproachable and unpredictable, and that he'll get angry."

Isn't it just the pictures of frosty-faced Chris that make them think that? There must be parents who now tell their kids to wash behind their ears or the man from the Pet Shop Boys wiliest them...

"Yes. But also he really is like that sometimes He doesn't like to be bothered at home. So people say, Oh I'll just ask Neil. I say No, I do not manage Chris. But as it's "a dimity", we both have to be asked and then he gets annoyed when he isn't'

Do they see him as a naughty younger brother~

""at is the sort of.. act: I'm the sensible, readable one, he's the naughty in reasonable one But it works both ways. I occasionally get into a bad mood when I'm doing promotions or suchlike and he'll miraculously become the sensible Pet Shop Boy. We swap roles. Also, by the way, I use this shamelessly. I say to people, (adopts mortised tone) Chris is absolutely furious about this, absolutely riots. There's no way he's going to do it. And really it's me. He's my secret weapon.

"Chris has a different way of thinking of things: he doesn't worry about whether things are more convenient for people - he wants it done right. I'm more the compromiser. Which is good, because I compromise too much. I'm the Paul McCartney of the group and he's tije John Lennon."

People would see it as the other way round.

with most groups people get the wrong I endow(;I’ll the stick about who does what. Paul McCartney thought of 'Sgt Pepper', not John Lennon John Lennon wrote loads of soppy ballads too. It's not that dear cues I do "a    like things to bemoreorised, and Chris abit are impel see, But because I comprise farley readily,

was.

5 concept, then the Pet shop boys would have been

Too. I'd have had to learn how to dance. So it was Chris' attitude that suggested that we just stand there without embarrassing ourselves too much."

And so we see, reader, that Chris is indeed the Bob Mortimer of the Pet Shop Boys - he doesn't stand at the front and he doesn't get all the best lines and there are probably people who think, yes, openings and the other watches telly. But without his inimitable attitude, his inflatable jackets and the fact that he knows a chunky baseline, the Pet Shop Boys would not be what they are today: to nab a phase from the old "Smash" "Hits", the best pop group on the planet. Lie is entitled, as much as Neil, to rub his lapels and say "that was my idea."

SEE NOW WHO IS THE BOSS! ON HERE?" ASKS NEIL

rhetoricay. Chris is tugging off his space gloves and jerking a thumb at he door he wantes battle door. He wants of The lure of Wembley Stadiums clearly on his mind.

"Look, we could be sitting in the Grouch Club having a glass of champagne now, that's my point of view," he argues. But hang about: you haven't done the irony but yet. If I honest irony is what gets the Pettoes their post-modernist seal of approval. All Pet Shop Boys interviews have to mention irony. It's in the Masticate easy. Journalists have to be seen to be in on the conceptual joke that they

-We -think the PSB are. Neil and Chris' faces fall.

"Wee ell...,, Neil smiles the same of a not very happy person, 'We get embarrassed about this. This is why there's that line in 'Yesterday, When I Was Mad' on our new LP, 'That couldn't underside your ~ of humour tickled. 'People say that so often about this that frequently aren't even meant to be fumy anyway. We realised early on that we are urlintentionaily funny, and a lot of what's written about as irony often wasn't intended as that. I don't admire irony. The hardest thing to ~

Write is something that's incredibly sincere but still original. It's easy to turn on the sarcasm tap."

Chris is less sanguine.

"Irony is crap. Nobody likes frond anyway, do they? They like sincerity. I know do."

"So do I," adds Nell. "That's the Ironic thing, ha ha! Also irony doesn't work on a mass level. Look at 'Opportunities'. In America it's a moneymaking anthem. We starter get requests from there that say, this is going to be the theme song for our plastics conference! That was meant to be Ironic..."

Don't people dislike clever, rather than ironic?

"What I don't like is an attempt to be clever," counters Nell. "When people go, Oh that's really clever. I hate that. I don't like they’re to be a fantastic intellectual reaction to my lyrics because it gets in the way of it being a song."

But you're painted into a corner, aren't you?

When you come up with something subtle like 'Left

To My Own Devices', pundits will go, Oh very

Clever. But if it's a down-the-line dance job like 'Go

West', it'll be, Oh how ironic! How Pet Shop Boys!

So that's why it's best not to get worked up about it. Funnily enough I thought we would get sick to fucking death of 'Yesterday, When I Was Mad', but we like it more as time goes on."

Neil: "When we did our tour, it was kind of funny to stand there in a pink silk suit singing 'Where The Streets Have No Name'. Now it lust seems par for the course, doesn't it?"

IT - They’re OF TO A CAB TO The GROUCHO CLUB,

Then Wembley and Zoetrope. It transpires that they're both going. If Sainan can't rake it, maybe Neil will attempt to enact his own personal fatal on the '2. As the taxi slides through a muggy West End

- And the driver keeps looking into his mirror to see if it's, you know, them two in the back -they ramble about pop. The Pet Shop Boys seem to talk about pop all the time, with a mixture of paternal interest in its well-being, and constant amazement at the state it's in.

When you retire some time in the next century, will you recur' steatite yourselves as the Pet Shop Pop Consultancy?

"We offer advice to people all the time way," Neil says. "Look at U2. I rest my case. When we did our tour two years ago, it was kind off my to stand there in a pink silk suit and a pink stetting singing 'Where The Streets Have No Name'. Everybody thought we were mad. Now it just seems par for the course, doesn't it?"

Yes, it does. As the restaurants of the West End town slide past, Chris gazes out of the window with a distant look in his eyes.

"Hah," he mutters. "Me and Bono. Lake that."
 
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