Neil Tennant says it’s all about
following their instincts.
By John Kennedy

There’s something about Toronto men that drive British singers wild.
The long time love of Elton John’s life, after all, is Ryerson grad David Furnish. Neil Tennant, one half of the Pet Shop Boys, says he also found romance in the city. Tennant, on the phone from London, recalls how he went to Kom4rads (formerly at Young and Isabelle) after a Pet Shop Boys concert in 1991. "I met this guy there who I lived with for the next three years," he says.
Tennant will have a chance to find himself another Toronto man [ME!] November 9th when the Pet Shop Boys are in town for a concert at the Warehouse. It’s one stop on a tour that will take Tennant and musical partner Chris Lowe through the US, Germany, Czech Republic, Britain and Eire before the end of the year.

The first single off the new Nightlife CD is the long-winded but highly infectious I Don’t Know What You Want But I Can’t Give It Anymore. The video for the song shows Tennant and Lowe undergoing a character transformation and living in a world where everyone looks the same. Videos have also been shot for the next two singles, New York City Boy and You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk.
Tennant says he’s looking forward to returning to Toronto next month. He’s even added his two cents to this past summer’s hottest local topic: the arrests at the Bijou. Tennant says gay men should keep their sexual behaviour private. "I think we’re best just not to talk about it. Sex is best just not discussed, I think," he says. "You know why, because it’s less sexy. When it’s all open it’s not as sexy. I don’t think, anyway. Call me old fashioned."
After a day of rehearsing for the tour, Tennant picked up the phone to talk about Nightlife, his fans, his longevity and those other boys – the Backstreet Boys. A lot of songs on the new album have a real club vibe, which I assume is a result of working with David Morales.

JK:
How did you get hooked up with him?

NT:

We like to work with people from what I would call the New York dance scene. We started off 16 years of working with Bobby Orlando in New York and since then we’ve worked with Shep Pettibone, Frankie Knuckles, Danny Tenaglia. David Morales did a mix several years ago for the song so hard, which we really loved. We’d always had him on our little list of people we wanted to work with. We just approached him to work on this album. We already had the song I Don’t Know What You Want But I Can’t Give It Anymore, and we had another song NIGHTLIFE – which hasn’t actually made it onto the album because we haven’t finished it yet. Then we wrote New York City Boy with him because he wanted us to do a big disco Village People style anthem because he said nobody’s writing them anymore. We went all the way with that one. I think that’s quite an interesting track. It’s the third track we’ve ever done that sounds retro. It sounds like the Pet Shop Boys making a record in 1979. It’s got a really authentic disco string sound. In terms of the whole album our basic idea was to mix electronic music with strings.

JK:

How do you account for the longevity you’ve enjoyed in the music business?

NT:

We’ve been through different phases. In ‘87-88 in Europe we were a big teen pop thing, which is something we never really thought we’d ever be. We’ve had a very consistent following and also we have a following all around the world that has carried on growing. Our last album, Bilingual, did particularly well in Latin America and Spain. We have kept on adding fans it’s quite interesting. I think we just follow our own instincts. We’ve never tried to be hip but we keep trying to do new things, to develop our sound. If you listen to this album compared to our first album, it is really quite a musical progression we’ve been through. In a subtle way. It’s not like we’ve completely changed style on every album, but on every album we have an idea for the album. I think we spend a lot of time writing songs. On this album there’s 12 tracks. We did about 20 tracks. We chose the ones that we thought were the best and fitted in with the idea of Nightlife.

JK:

People are talking about the video for the first single, not only because it’s a great video but because of the personas you take on in it.

NT:

Yeah. We like to play with imagery so on the first single [IDKWYWBICGIA] (shortened for my own sanity!), we decided to present us in a completely different way and just to create a series of photographic images of us that we could then use in the videos. You’ve got the punky hair and big eyebrows from Japanese kabuki theatre and those big trousers from Samurai – we’ve just taken strong imagery and put them together in a different way. It’s to make you stand out and to make people look at you and maybe think about you differently because people just get used to what you look like. In the 90s most pop groups are just totally naturalistic which is fine but we’ve always liked to play with our own imagery of ourselves and we try to create a very strong image.

JK:

Having been around as long as you have, how do you feel about the manufactured pop groups that are dominating the charts these days?

NT:

Actually the Backstreet Boys are quite good. They’ve really upped the ante on boy bands because you actually have to be able to sing and dance now. It wasn’t like that in the 80s. In Britain there are a lot of groups that I don’t think are very musically creative. I think with a lot of that stuff it’s not a musical project and therefore it won’t last anyway. I do think it’s exciting when you do get groups that are appealing to a young audience who have a sense of musical creativity about what they’re doing. You know, like in the early 80s you had all those groups like Human League and Culture Club and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, to name three. I mean, they were strong musical projects that tried to do something very new. Depeche Mode when they first started was a very strong musical project and even so they had a huge teenage following and I think that’s much more exciting and inspirational then just wanting to do slow R&B ballads which so many groups do no matter where they’re from. Sometimes I find it a bit dull, really.

NT:

You’ve done a few performances here and there but it’s been a long time since you’ve toured. Why have you decided to hit the road now?

NT:

We just thought for an experiment we would tour while the album is out. We’d never done that before. We thought let’s see what happens when we do it the traditional music business way. We normally tour about nine months after the album. We just thought it was about time we toured again because we have a very loyal fan base in North America and I sometimes think we don’t really give them, I mean, we give them records and videos – but I think when you like a group you want to see them sometimes. So actually we’re really looking forward to it.

JK:

What can we expect from the show?

NT:

The music has songs from every album we’ve released. Some of the old ones have been reprogrammed to sound

different. There are some tracks from the new album, as well, of course. There’s one B-side. The set has been designed by an architect named Zaha Hadid – she’s one of the most famous new architects in the world right now. It’s a very futuristic look. It’s quite different from any show we’ve done before. It features some video stuff and some of the lighting comes from within the stage. It’s not theatrical like the previous shows have been but it’s definitely futuristic.

JK:

A significant portion of your fan base, as you know, is gay. Does this influence you at all?

NT:

I don’t write music for a gay following. I think maybe you get a gay following because of what you write about, or the kind of music you write. There aren’t that many groups that write songs from a gay perspective while at the same time attempting to be mass market. It’s quite a difficult thing to pull off – to be mainstream and write from your own perspective, from a gay perspective. Happiness is an Option is completely about me. [YOTMYLMWYD] is kind of based on my own experience. We can all relate to that one, I think. It’s about inhibitions. So, I think some of those things appeal to gay men but I’m always a bit weary about there being such a thing as a gay sensibility. I think it pigeonholes people in a way that’s not particularly helpful. I don’t know that I really agree with it. I often think the gay sensibility is the fact that gay men, as a rule, don’t have children so they’ve got more time on their hands so they’ve got time to think about going out and fashion and music whereas, like my brother Simon who’s got three children doesn’t have that time. I’m sure he’d quite like to, but he doesn’t have it. Therefore he has a straight life but actually what he has is the life of someone who is bringing up three children. If you were gay bringing up three children your life would be exactly the same as a heterosexual bringing up three children, ultimately.
I think it’s quite interesting because what we refer to as gay now is actually a political response to the 1970s and that’s when gay was created and it was a political response to oppression, ultimately, and it’s gradually getting us equality everywhere and to me that’s the issue – equality. Not what someone’s sexuality is, it’s to have the equality to express that sexuality. We are gradually getting that. To me political equality is the issue and once you’ve got that

JK:

I sort of lose interest a bit, really. I think it’s a mistake to always pigeonhole people in terms of their sexuality because so many assumptions get made, don’t they?

NT:

You’re gay so you like Barbara Streisand and House music and Dolce & Gabana. Well, I don’t really. I never liked to belong to a gang, really.

JK:

Your sexuality has never been an issue – why not?

NT:

We never pretended to be straight in the first place. We never did fake girlfriends in videos like some other gay pop stars I could mention. We never did that. Quite the opposite, we used our position as real pop stars to make videos like Being Boring or Domino Dancing, where people thought it was kind of gay. Also in the songs – there’s songs about AIDS, on Behaviour there’s a song called Nervously which is about a gay couple meeting each other and making gay love for the first time. There was always a lot of discussion about whether Pet Shop Boys were gay or not and I always like that. It sort of gave us a mystique and I think it’s good when people kind of speculate and wonder about you when you’re a pop star. Like everybody’s speculating whether Ricky Martin’s gay – it kind of makes him a bit more dangerous. Otherwise he’d seem a bit bland, wouldn’t he, if you didn’t think he was gay. Since I came out, you sort of lose the mystique because everyone knows. Having said that, we’ve gained a lot of new fans so I guess it doesn’t bother people. I don’t think it should hurt. I think people either like your records or they don’t. I personally have quite a large following among middle aged women. Kids stop me in the street for my autograph and say, "My mom loves you." I really like that, as well. So we have a wide audience and I think that’s great.