"A fried egg sandwich. With tomato sauce", says Neil Tennant. "That's the first thing he'll ask for when he eventually turns up." He clucks about the Pet Shop Boys' office in granny glasses and comfy cardie apologising, in his funny way, for the tardy arrival of his partner Chris Lowe.
"He was out at a club all night", Tennant explains, the veneer of disapproval cracking to reveal begrudging admiration. "Didn't get home until **midday**." He calls for a cup of tea (with lemon) and settles down with a small hillock of album sleeves.

As he carefully inscribes his unfussy signature upon the many copies of the Pet Shop Boys' new singles collection, he chats in a fey, slightly mannered accent just to the Alan Bennett (Northern playwright - A.T.) side of Brian Clough (Northern Football manager - A.T.). "On my first day at school I was called Poshy", he recalls, "because I didn't have a Geordie accent.

Very witty that, wasn't it, Poshy. That was the first thing that struck me when I met Chris, you know, his strong Northern accent which, of course, he still has." Tennant is a diverting conversationalist, an intellectual gossip with a tendency to theorise.

In 10 minutes he covers considerable ground: Francis Bacon, Michael Jackson, transvestite nightclubs, quality newspaper music journalists, the artistic concept of "redefining the space around domestic objects", Tin Machine, office rental, the merits of fizzy and flat water, and Adam Clayton's penis. He sifts through a box of demo tapes sent by hopefuls to the Pet Shop Boys' new label Spaghetti. "These song titles aren't very inspiring, are they?" he complains, randomly selecting a tape for perusal. "Hypnotise.

How Will I Know? Reputation. Very derivative. The first demo we made had three tracks on it: Jealousy, which was really rather good even then; Bubadubadubadubadum and a song called Oh Dear! I mean, they're quite interesting titles, aren't they? You'd stick them on just to hear what the songs were like." It wasn't this demo tape, however, that eventually secured the Pet Shop Boys' deal with EMI in 1985. "Actually", Tennant laughs,

"I still have a not-the-sort-of-thing-we're- looking-for-at-the-moment type rejection letter from EMI which is rather fabulous." The Pet Shop Boys' offices are an impressive affair, comparable, in many ways, to a Pet Shop Boys song: sparsely yet handsomely furnished, modern with classical touches, symmetrical but not obsessively so, tastefully artistic, even mildly pretentious, but nothing to prompt a visit from the Serious Pseud Squad. The main room is currently dominated by copies of Discography, a collection of the Pet Shop Boys' finest moments to date.

Apart from being an essential purchase for anyone remotely interested in modern pop music, Discography serves as a reminder of just how strong a songwriting team Tennant and Lowe are. Long having dismissed suggestions that the Pet Shop Boys are simply Neil Tennant with a grumpy, Andrew Ridgeley-like appendage, the partnership have, over the last six years, repeatedly struck a chord with party animals and couch potatoes alike. Chris Lowe's sophisticated understanding of dance music and Tennant's traditional songwriting values have resulted in some of the most cleverly constructed and cunningly compulsive music ever to simultaneously straddle dance floor and hearth rug.

The door opens and a sheepish Chris Lowe wanders in, black under-eye luggage very much in evidence. "There's some fans on the stairs", he announces with amazement. What are they doing there?" He sits down and automatically begins to sign the record sleeves in his round, rolling hand. He laughs regularly and loudly and, despite his hangover, is a much cheerier chap than his professional persona would have you believe. "So where did you get to last night?" enquires Tennant breezily, after a suitable period has elapsed. "Rage at Heaven", sniffs Lowe.

"It was pretty good, left about half three. It was what happened afterwards that did the damage." Tennant looks on knowingly, lips pursed. "Is there anywhere around here I can get a fried egg sandwich", Lowe asks the office assistant urgently, "with tomato sauce?" "I would say, Told you so", laughs Tennant, "but it sounds too much like a Pet Shop Boys song." Mr. Deevoy: Are the lyrics ever collaborative, or is that exclusively Neil's department?

Chris: Sometimes I'll take the mickey and then Neil will sulk and refuse to sing them.
Neil: True. It Couldn't Happen Here being a case in point.
Chris: But Neil generally writes them all after we've written the music. Apparently, Elton John writes the music after Bernie Taupin's done the words and he has to make them fit in the phrasing. That must be impossible.
Neil: Can I just say, Sac-er-rif-ice. It's no sac-er-rif-ice. Does the word Sacrifice have four syllables? No, I don't think it does. Mr. Deevoy: Let's break down one of your songs and examine the various components. How, for example, was It's A Sin written?
Neil: It's A Sin was a total musical collaboration. We used to go to this demo studio in Camden Town and Chris was playing this chord change - it's a very well known chord change.

In fact, when Jonathan King accused us of ripping the tune off from Cat Steven's Wild World, there was a musicologist's report floating around and he said that the first time that those chords had been used in Western music was in the 17th century by J.S.Bach. It's one of those very logical chord changes where one thing leads to another. So Chris was playing these chords for the verse, which is actually the hook of the song, and the words - it's a sin - came to me immediately. I don't know why. The middle eight bit - the bit that goes, Father forgive me, I tried not to do it - Chris had been playing earlier in the evening and I said, Put that in.

Then I came up with the, Everything I've ever done, everything I ever do part which leads to the chorus. The lyrics for the first two verses came to me very quickly. Chris had said to me that he thought my lyrics were getting too complicated and that I should make them more seedy and sexy. So It's A Sin is my attempt at being seedy. Of course, my interpretation of seediness is quite chaste, so we ended up with this Catholic guilt thing. But I couldn't think of an ending for It's A Sin. I wanted a very clever little twist in the last verse. That song could really do with a brilliant pay-off verse. But I couldn't for the life of me come up with anything.

Chris: So what did you do? For the last verse you wrote, **So** I look back upon my life...
Neil: It's really, really weak, isn't it? Well, the first verse said all I wanted to say and then the second verse was illustration about being at school and by the time the third verse came around I'd run out of steam. But it's a circular song and in that sense it does work. Mr. Deevoy: Would a later song like Being Boring have been written the same way?

Neil: I read the phrase, Being Boring, somewhere - probably in one of our reviews - and immediately the tune for that line, We were never being boring, came to me and I went around for ages just humming it to myself. Chris really liked it as a title and immediately came up with some chords. In fact, it's The Chord Change, isn't it? If you ever want to write a classic pop song use these chords: A flat, B flat, G minor 7th, C minor. That's The Chord Change. You can't go wrong with that. A guaranteed worldwide hit.
Chris: They're the chords to Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, Stock Aitken and Waterman used to love The Chord Change. All their good songs have those chords in.

Neil: We used The Chord Change on Being Boring, Kings Cross and the chorus of Domino Dancing. But the thing that gives Being Boring that lift, that feeling of optimism is the key change between verse and chorus. The verse ends on a G major - never fee-ling bored - and the obvious thing would have been for the chorus to follow in C but we lifted it up a semitone and went into The Chord Change. But the rest of the lyrics took forever to write. I had that, We were never being boring part and that was it. Then I got a vague tune for the opening line of the verse which is in C major - When you're young, you find inspiration in - F major - anyone who's ever gone. That's a very Beatlesy progression. Then I remembered this invitation I got for a party in Newcastle which quoted "She was never bored because she was never boring". So the first verse is about finding that party invitation. Then I had to try and complete the picture. It's quite a long melody line in the verses as well, so that made it more difficult. And with the chorus, I knew what I wanted to say but it was hard to say it within such a tight, specific tune. But I sat there, I was in Munich, with a typewriter and tried to write the rest of it. That's why you get, Now I sit with different faces/ In rented rooms/ In foreign places. Because that's exactly what I was doing. Mr. Deevoy: Have you come to rely less on irony and trickery as a lyricist than you did on your earlier records?

Neil: I think that the irony in our songs has always been overrated. It's the thing we're really, really famous for. It's like my expression on the cover of Discography. That expression represents what we're famous for. Slightly smug irony. But when we started we weren't ironic. West End Girls wasn't remotely ironic. Opportunities was the one that did it. Let's make lots of money. Chris came up with that. Ironically enough. In fact, what people don't realise with the Pet Shop Boys is that it's Chris who is the ironic one. I'm more sentimental really. Mr. Deevoy: Do you strive to keep the lyrics free of pretension?

Neil: What normally happens is we start off with a pretentious idea that we try to then wring all the pretension out of. The middle of Left To My Own Devices - Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat - was gratuitously pretentious. In fact, it was Trevor Horn who originally said that when we were working with him. He said, "Ooh, I've always wanted to put Debussy to a disco beat". Mr. Deevoy: Like Morrissey, the Pet Shop Boys "give good headline" in that you write very strong song titles, many of which have a Carry On-type sexual innuendo involved. Love Comes Quickly, So Hard, even Was It Worth It?
Neil: It often happens with us that we don't realise we're being funny or that we're double entendre-ing. With Love Comes Quickly, it didn't occur to me for ages that it was a double entendre.
Chris: It was the first thing I thought of. I couldn't tell anyone what the second single was called because of it.

Neil: Oh. Mr. Deevoy: How about So Hard?
Neil: Well, that was deliberate. We even sent out It's Hard boxer shorts. The fact that the lyric It's hard, so hard was a double entendre obviously occurred to me pretty quickly but it worked in the context of the song, too. Funnily enough, we actually got a sample out of the Emulator from a porn movie of a woman going "It's **so** hard!" With Was It Worth It? it was just a great title. And we really wanted to have it as the last track on the Greatest Hits collection. It seemed an appropriate note to end on. Mr. Deevoy: You've said that the lyrics to So Hard are true.

Neil: They're absolutely true. Mr. Deevoy: So what is the contact magazine you mention in the second verse?
Neil: Ah. I made that part up. It's **mostly** true. That's the only part that isn't. Well, it's kind of true. I'd explain but I'd incriminate the people it's written about. I really like the third verse in that song where it goes, I'm always hoping you'll be faithful/ But you're not, I suppose/ We've both given up smoking, `cause it's fatal/ So whose matches are those? I love that rhyme between "faithful" and "fatal" because strictly speaking those two words shouldn't rhyme. And that part is completely true, the matches incident. Somebody told me about this incident between two people I know. There were these matches by the bed and neither of them smoked. Oh **dear**! Mr. Deevoy: The image one has of the Pet Shop Boys is of you both poring over lyrics and fine tuning your synthesizers. Has a song ever been written spontaneously in its entirety?

Neil: Well, Left To My Own Devices was almost like that. Sometimes the whole thing comes to you with the words attached and it's absolutely fantastic because it involves no work at all. With Left To My Own Devices we were at Abbey Road and Chris was fiddling around playing in a rather desultory way on the keyboard and I'd completely lost interest and was reading the Melody Maker. It was all a bit, When are we going out for dinner? Anyway, suddenly the whole thing came to me. I could leave you ... and left to my own devices I probably would. This galvanised us to finish writing the whole song there and then. Mr. Deevoy: Rent is probably your most celebrated lyric. The couplet I love you/ You pay my rent was taken as a neat summing up of relationships during the Thatcher years.

Neil: Yes, it wasn't specifically about Thatcherism but it was of that time in lots of ways. When we started, we would deliberately try to think up provocative, pointed titles. So Rent was a good word because of the association with the expression "rent boy". I've always thought of Rent as a love song, although it's had all sorts of interpretations given to it. It's about love at its most basic. People always thought it was about that rent boy arrangement but in my head I've always thought that it was about a politician's mistress. It takes place in New York, and it's a long-standing affair and they are in love but he's made no other commitment to her than taking her to restaurants and buying her furs and paying for an apartment for her off Madison Avenue or somewhere. But the currency that she has spent is that she's given her whole life to him. But she loves him. So I love you/ You pay my rent is saying, I've had a life anyway. You've paid for my basic needs. A lot of love songs tend to be about compromises. I was 32 years old when we started to become successful. There's a song on the first album called Why Don't We Live Together? It's not idealistic it's older, more realistic. I love you/ You pay my rent is about compromise. It's really saying, it could be worse, this relationship isn't that bad, really. It's not perfect but then nothing is. Mr. Deevoy: Is this the sort of conversation you have with Chris once you've written a lyric?

Neil: Oh God no! Never. I'm too embarrassed to discuss them.

Chris: This is the only time I find out what the words really mean. Mr. Deevoy: So you've just found out what Rent is all about.
Chris: Yeah. Fascinating story, that, Neil. Songwriting satisfactorily negotiated, further hot beverages are dispensed and another tangential Tennant-led conversation commences. He has a theory that the Pet Shop Boys are a large cult band ("like Kate Bush or Queen or Morrissey") and that they'll never have absolute toddler-to-granny appeal. He describes their last album, Behaviour, as "dangerously mature, we were bored with being ironic, we didn't have any more ironic ideas and we didn't seem to be living in an ironic time anymore". He claims not to know how the Pet Shop Boys are perceived by the public anymore but comes close when he says that the average person's idea of the Pet Shop Boys is probably that "one wears dark glasses and doesn't say anything and the other one thinks he's really clever". He talks authoritatively about Marky Mark's and Dannii Minogue's chart positions this week and expresses interest in learning Neil Sedaka's album sales figures for the next fortnight. They both rant about the new Top Of The Pops, variously describing it as "misguided" and "clueless" and "crap".

As time passes, it comes to light that Chris Lowe was once a virtuoso trombonist. "I just picked it up", he shrugs. "My Grandpa played the trombone in a band called The Nitwits and I just followed in that tradition." "But did you play the trombone **because** of the Nitwits?" asks Neil, supportively stifling a chuckle. They discuss the currently voguish producers and remixers, politely pointing out that the Pet Shop Boys worked with Brothers In Rhythm, The KLF, Frankie Knuckles and Shep Pettibone long before the Madonnas of this world had cottoned on to their talents. Tennant confesses that he has a drum machine at home that plays a "fabulous" heavy metal pattern and says he can often be heard fingering a hairy-chested riff on a distorted electric guitar. They mull over Chris's "grumpy" image: "I don't know if anyone is aware of this", says Neil, "but Chris defined what a keyboard player looked like in the second half of the '80s.

Now, a keyboard player scowls and wears a baseball cap. "Nothing is ever discussed", he goes on. "People assume that we meticulously plan everything. That's the joke. We were never `pop strategists'. We may have had the occasional scam but we never had any grand plans." "We just didn't want to come across like smiling pop stars", says Chris. "Just switching on the happy smile." But by the same token, does Chris Lowe feel obliged to switch on the glum expression when on Pet Shop Boy duty? "I'm normally in a bit of a bad mood anyway", he admits. "It doesn't bring out the best of me. But I have laughed on stage. When we were playing at Heaven recently, the computers broke down and I found that tremendously funny. I was laughing my socks off." The image debate is concluded by Chris, bemoaning the fact that whereas Madonna sends out a sexual signal in photographs and even Guns N' Roses communicate debauched aggression, the Pet Shop Boys' photographs don't exude anything.

"No", agrees Tennant, resignedly. "We don't really **ooze**, do we?" As their taxis arrive, Tennant says that his biggest worry is that people think the Pet Shop Boys are conceited. "I do really worry about that", he frets. "I think we communicate a kind of arrogance. You sometimes see my face on a record sleeve or a poster and it's just saying, Aren't we clever, everyone?" He picks up a copy of Discography and studies his wryly-amused-eyebrow-ironically-cocked expression. "You want to write, Oh **fuck off** across it, don't you?" Ch

ris pulls on a woolen hat and a designer anorak. Neil wraps up in a long black cashmere overcoat. Before leaving, Tennant confirms an appointment with Leonard, his hairdresser, and Lowe, fortified by the fried egg sandwich, ponders the wisdom of clubbing again tonight. Not for nothing are they often called The Odd Couple. "Ooh, it's been a funny week", sighs Neil Tennant as they make to leave. "That sounds like a Pet Shop Boys song, too, doesn't it?"