Pet Shop Talk

For more than a decade, pop icons Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have epitomised gay disco as the craftsmen behind the Pet Shop Boys. Tennant and Lowe have been shaping the direction of Euro-pop dance music and mixing it with a gay sensibility.

With four number-one singles and more than a dozen Top 100 songs in the U.S., including Always on My Mind, It's A Sin, Opportunities, What Have I Done To Deserve This and the chart-topping West End Girls, the Boys have become one of the most influential pop bands of the '80s and 90's. But despite rumours of being gay and garnering a huge gay fan base all over the world, the duo has avoided coining out publicly, until now. Having passed the 40-year-old mark and fallen in love, Tennant felt the time was right to talk about being gay. (Of course, many people assumed their collaboration with Liza Minnelli in 1990, and last year's campy single, Absolutely Fabulous, based on the hit British TV show, was their coming out.)

"In the past, I had resisted (saying I was gay), partly because when we first started in the mid-90s we were very much a pop group and I didn't categorised as an outrageous gay pop star," admits Tennant in his first openly gay interview in the U.S. "We have always preferred to be enigmatic."

Part of the Pet Shop Boys images has always been to be enigmatic and not define things.

"I think in pop music that works very strongly, because people imagine things about you... you are a creature of their imagination. And I like that."

Tennant and Lowe return to the music scene September 10 with their first release of new material in nearly three years. Entitled Bilingual, the Latin-infused opus is the Pet Shop Boys' eighth release, and their first for Atlantic Records (their last release was 1995's stunning two-disc compilation of bonus tracks and B-side singles.) The album's first single, the infectious Before, recently topped Billboard's dance music charts.

The 42-year-old Tennant doesn't view Bilingual as the Boys' coming out album, (although the U.K. vinyl 12" of Before sports a photo of a giant penis on the album's outside sleeve). He says there have been hints of their gayness in almost every one of their recordings. The Boys' 1991 release Behaviour, for instance, featured the tune Nervously, a song about desire between two men who are meeting for the first time, which Tennant originally wrote in 1981 before he met Lowe. To Speak Is A Sin, and Liberation from 1993's Very dealt directly with being gay. In fact' most of Very was written from the view point of Tennant as a gay man in love. And of course their brilliant cover of the Village People's Go West took the '70s classic about the gay dream of living the gay life in San Francisco and gave it a '90s twist with an undercurrent of how that gay dream has been ravaged by AIDS.

But Tennant remains slightly weary of wearing the gay label on his shirt sleeve, fearing people would try to pigeon-hole the Boys into a category based on their sexuality.

"The gay label doesn't really bother me, as long as it's just not something that is restrictive. I just don't think one should live one's life as a gay man. I don't think that sexuality necessarily implies a life style package that comes with it," he says "As I write the words in the Pet Shop Boys songs, I deal with (being gay) in them. I always have done that. I probably deal with them slightly more openly now, which I quite enjoy doing. Although 'Metamorphosis,' a rap (on the new album), about growing up gay and realising what you are and how you are going to deal with it and all that stuff, I Suppose I wouldn't have done that a few years ago."

So, what does the press-shy Lowe think of the Boys' new found openness?

"Chris is completely against people categorising themselves as gay or straight for that matter. He just thinks people are sexual," Tennant says.

"The thing is, if you were just sexual, if you look at it as sexual preference, it doesn't carry so many assumptions with it, so many cultural assumptions with it. And I know a lot of people enjoy all of the culture that goes with it."

And no, Tennant and Lowe are not, and have never been, lovers.

"The only person who has asked that is my mother. No we never were lovers," he says. "But when you look back on the kind of photographs we used to do, people obviously would think that. It sort of looks like that - sort of the older guy and the street kid."

Born and raised in Newcastle, in the north part of England, Tennant was raised very Catholic, and went to a Catholic school, where he was seen as "soft." By the time he was 12, he knew he was different.

"I remember being 12 years old and reading an article in a magazine about Oscar Wilde. It said he was a homosexual. And I thought, 'Oh my god, I'm a homosexual.' I remember feeling so upset," he recalls. "And there was a boy I used to get the bus home with at school and I realised that I was in love with him and I burst into tears."

In the early 1970s, Tennant moved to London. Though many of his friends were gay, including his best friend, he remained uneasy with his sexuality.

"It was the '70s, and I found the gay scene fantastically off-putting If you look back to the clone era... I used to think I don't want to be that, I don't want to have a moustache and wear 501 jeans. In those days, to be gay was to wear a uniform - men with moustaches, wearing white 501 jeans, white T-shirts and Dr. Martin shoes," he says, noting that in the mid-1980s he started to become more comfortable with the whole scene. "Then it loosened up (in the '80s) with groups like Culture Club coming along and the clone thing starting to die. Gay clubs were really at the forefront of club culture, of dance music culture, and that really fascinated me. Gay clubs were hip without the bullshit. In straight clubs there was a lot of bullshit about different kinds of music. It was always about being ultra-cool, where as gay clubs were about having fun and they had great music."

In 1980, Tennant met musician Chris Lowe, and a year later the two formed the Pet Shop Boys, named after three of Lowe's friends, who worked in a pet shop.

"We used to say that it sounds like the name of a rap group. When we made our first record, we didn't have a name so we thought we'd be the Pet Shop Boys," says Tennant, who recalls that in his first ever interview as the Pet Shop Boys, a woman reporter told Tennant that she heard their name came from "this thing in New York where gay guys get hamsters and put them in plastic bags and shove them up their asses ... a lot of people think that is really how we got our name. But it's not true."

In 1984 Tennant and Lowe released their first single West End Girls, on an independent label. Two years later, the song was picked up by a major recording company and within weeks of its release it topped the charts in nine countries, including the U.S.

"Our music was very influenced by what people would regard as gay music," he says. "Of course, in Britain, by the late '80s pop music was gay music ... And, by the end of the '80s, partly because of us, and a few others, like Dead or Alive, it became terrible mainstream pop."

But while the group's popularity soared, they remained steadfast about not discussing their sexuality. People could read into their music whatever they wanted to, but neither Tennant nor Lowe were prepared to confirm or deny anything.

"In the 1980s, all my friends knew I was gay. There was no two ways about that. And our music was very influenced by what people would regard as gay music." he says. "(But) we were very much a pop group with the young audience. And although I was technically a homosexual I wasn't a practising homosexual. I didn't have a lover. I mean I had sex occasionally, but I didn't really have a very swinging sex life. I felt I was technically gay rather than practising ... And I preferred that the whole thing was enigmatic."

Still, the Boys have never shied away from dealing with the gay issue, albeit subtly, in their songs. They also became one of the first mainstream pop groups to deal with the subject of AIDS, in their music, doing so since 1986, when Tennant's best friend learned he had the disease.

"In 1986, AIDS was still comparatively rare in Britain. And it was an incredible fundamental shock, cause didn't even know anyone who knew anyone with AIDS." says Tennant, whose friend died in 1989. "And it has been in my life ever since, in terms of knowing people with it."

For the better part the last 10 years. Tennant has incorporated his feelings into his work, most notably in It Couldn't Happen Here, Hit Music, and the B-side single Your Funny Uncle, a song about two families that meet for the first time when they come to pay their respect over the death of one of the lovers.

"I write about subjects that affect me." He says. "Knowing several close friends who have died at a young age because of the same disease has a profound effect on your life. I mean at the same time we were having success in the late '80s with the Pet Shop Boys, my best friend was in a hospital bed with drips sticking out of his arm. I always had this permanent contrast between (my) life and (my) best friend's life, which kind of makes you feel terrible."

And Tennant scoffs off rumours that either one of them has the disease.

"I think if people know you are gay or think you are gay, people rather horrifyingly assume you've got AIDS," he says. "People just think gay equals AIDS in a lot of the straight media."

But while he doesn't get bogged down with rumours, he does take issue with the public's need to have celebrities come out as HIV-positive.

"We always come back in our contemporary culture that celebrities apparently are responsible for everything. I think it's pathetic. AIDS is a disease. We need to learn about the disease. It's not going to make life easier if you know Tom Cruise has got AIDS. The disease is still a disease. And I think people try to hang these things on celebrities. I think people expect nowadays celebrities to somehow solve their problems because they can't be bothered to solve them themselves," he says.

"I admire Magic (Johnson) for what he has done. But is he really an effective spokesperson about AIDS? It would be much more effective to tell young people about AIDS and have a real person with AIDS who lives around the corner come into their school or their home to talk to them about it. That would be 100 times more effective than Magic Johnson. Cause I think when a celebrity does it, it makes it seem like a celebrity disease. It trivialises it. It downplays it. AIDS is a disease that anyone can get, people should realise that it's a normal disease. It's a human disease."

With their new-found outness and fab new recording, Tennant and Lowe move into the last half of 1996 with a renewed sense of direction. Still, Tennant hopes the public doesn't reduce them into a one-dimensional gay bubble.

"Our songs speak to people because the lyrics are written by me. But I would hate for us to be categorised, to be disloyal in some way, as a gay group. We make music for whoever wants to like it. We make pop singles that we hope would attract a wide audience as well. To be honest I m kind of against the categorisation or splitting up of our society into communities of race or sexuality or any other classification. I would like society to be to be one big community really. I know it isn't possible but I think it's something we should all aim for."

And judging by the new set's rich lyrical substance and rhapsodic harmonies, it is unlikely that the mass public will simply view the Boys as two gay musicians. In fact, as the millennium approaches, it's apt that Tennant and Lowe will be seen as innovative pioneers of cutting edge music, and musical trend-setters.

This article was taken from the 13th September 1996 edition of Impact magazine.

Special thanks to Mary (Domino99) for sending me a copy.
There is a link to her Funnily Enough web site from the And Finally page.

By Jeffrey L. Newman