NIGHTLIFE
In the following pages, Neil offers some insights and background into the lyrics of that twelve songs on the new Pet Shop Boys album, Nightlife, and Literally speaks to the three outside producers who worked with them on the record.

For Your Own Good. It's about someone being at home waiting for their loved one to come and see them. Whoever is singing the song is wondering whether the loved one is going to go out and get wrecked or come round. And they're saying: please, come home to me rather than go out. I always imagine that the person singing it is a woman, and that she is singing about her lover. It's a very simple song.

Closer To Heaven. Closer To Heaven" is just about a relationship which may or may not develop. It feels like it's developing - you're closer to heaven - but anything could happen; you've never been farther away. It's a love song about how you car almost be there, without getting there. The close you get to it, the more you realize it's not going to happen. Having called it "Closer To Heaven" I put in things about horoscopes, and fate; religious and superstitious terms. On the demo version - which you could hear a bit of on our radio documentary About The Pet Shop Boys -we had this speeded-up voice going "take me high, take me higher", but we decided that was a little bit corny.

I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Any More. I'd had this phrase in my little notebook "I don't know what you want, but I can't give it any more" years ago, a sort of paradox. It's about the end of a love affair; about two people who can't really communicate. What the title says is: I can't give you what you want. The lyric is about someone being unfaithful, and the whole business. It was from my own experience. It originally had a different bit in the song that went "if anyone can, the Action Man can", but we took it out.

Craig Armstrong Craig Armstrong is a composer and orchestrate, who, as well as making his own records, has worked with Massive Attack, U2 and Madonna and wrote the score for the Baz Luhrman film Romeo And Juliet. He produced, with the Pet Shop Boys, 'Closer To Heaven", 'You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk", 'Vampires", The Only One" "In Denial" and "Footsteps": "It started by, I think, Neil phoning up and saying that he liked my album and would I like to do some stuff on their album. I always really liked the Pet Shop Boys, so it felt quite natural, though I did feel a bit weighted down by the fact that they've worked with some amazing producers, because essentially I've really only produced my own albums. But they made it very very easy -they're very charming.
"Neil and Chris came to Glasgow, and a lot of the groundwork was done up here. Sometimes they would send material up and we would get it into some sort of shape. When we moved to London it was more getting the orchestras and mixing. They're very hard-workers and very very into how the whole thing sounds. And it's like working with two people who arc almost telepathic. You've got to find your own part of the jigsaw because Neil and Chris have been together for so long. A record has its own momentum. My original idea was much more electronic than the way it landed Up.! went out and bought lots of Can records and lots of early Kraftwerk and things like that, but as the songs developed I released the songs had lots more soul, in a way. "I think the strong thing about the Pet Shop Boys, like any good artists, is that they give you a lot of freedom - the best artists have that combination of giving you a lot of freedom and at the end of the day knowing exactly what they want. That's the best structure:

freedom plus discipline.'. ..Drunk' started off very country and western, and then we went much more trying to get some sort of rhythmic approach. We tried everything out, really. We went back to the country thing but with a more slightly mental Germanic feel or something - a funny mixture but it seems to work. "'In Denial' was good fun. Kylie Minogue was fantastic, apart from the fact we all wanted to many her. I've never actually seen a situation where somebody leaves a room and there's a lot of grown men silent. But she was really professional and had done all her homework before she came, and she's a bloody good singer, actually. It was a quite a bizarre mixture, Neil and Kylie; they definitely kicked up some sort of bizarre chemistry which seemed to work. I enjoyed that day.
"Actually my favorite song on the album is "New York City Boy" - at least I'm honest. I must be a closet disco fan, I think. But my other favorite song is "The Only One".
'My favorite of all their songs is "Rent" - I think that's a great song - and I also love a song which they don't like, which is "Suburbia". My wife likes "Shopping". But they're just one of those bands, aren't they? Everyone's got a favorite song. They're like part of British folklore now, really." Happiness Is An Option.
These words, for me, a surprisingly positive approach to life. They are about all sorts of grim experiences, and about not allowing them to bring you completely down and make you totally depressed. You've got to carry on. Happiness is an option. It's an expression of my belief that you can create the circumstances in which you live your life and that we all have control to a certain extent over our own destinies, which is why happiness is an option. Maybe we don't necessarily want happiness, but if we do, it's an option. The first verse is about a strange experience I had in 1974, when I felt I was trapped in my own body - the song goes through bad experiences, and the point is that bad things will happen because of your choices, but you can turn them around. The song is saying that you must never become a victim. The second verse is about a failed relationship -I love that line: "it was a strange feeling, like a law repealing itself'. Something you've assumed as fact is suddenly no longer there.

The line "I don't think I suit my face" comes from one of Brian Eno's daughters. In his diaries Brain Eno's children are very interesting, the things they say to him, and one morning one of them comes to him - I think it's the youngest one - and she says, "Daddy, I don't think I suit my face". And I thought, "God, I really know what you mean". I think it's possible to wake up in the morning feeling completely hung over, and you look in the mirror and this innocent face stares back at you - or the reverse can happen, and this debauched face stares back at you - and sometimes what your face looks like doesn't seem to reflect anything to do with you. I told Brian Eno that I was going to put that in a song and he said to me "It's yours". The line "this is neither old nor new" comes from the Anna Akhmatova poem of the same name; Anna Akhmatova was a famous Russian poet, the poet of the silver age, and she lived in the back of this palace in St Petersburg and she means a lot to Russians because she survived through all these different periods. I just thought that it was a good line: that you're just saying something that always is.

You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk. I think it's a sentiment a lot of people can relate to: you only tell me you love me when you're drunk. It's not necessarily a bad thing. I think sometimes it only occurs to some people to say that when their guard is down, when they're drunk. It was inspired by something in my own life years ago. Parts of my brain arc normally looking for song ideas at any given time and will pluck things out of an emotional turmoil and sort them away, and this is an example of that. In the song, the person who is singing the song is wondering whether the person the song is about is really in love with them, and whether the fact that they say they love him when they're drunk means that they love him, or that the fact that they say it only when they're drunk means that they don't really mean it. In the song, as in life, the answer is left hanging.

Vampires. It's a funny song, this. I always say it's about people exploiting each other, but this song slightly spooks me out because I don't really know what it's about but it all makes sense to me in a weird kind of way. "Sun in the kitchen! boy, you're still sleeping! when you get hungry! I'll do what you want me to do! you're a vampire! I'm a vampire too" - I find that really creepy. I've no idea why it mentions the kitchen; absolutely no idea. The song's saying that it all doesn't matter - it's only drugs, it's only sex, it's only whatever. A friend of ours goes on about this concept of psychic vampires. A psychic vampire is someone who will suck your ideas out of you and use them for themselves. I thought it was quite an interesting idea. Once, when it was proposed we worked with someone, I was warred that this person was a vampire, in that sense. And I jokingly said "Oh, it's okay, I'm a vampire too". And that was where the idea came from.

Radiophone. This is a classic nightlife concept, this song. It's about someone coming back wrecked from a nightclub and not being able to get to sleep.

David Morales David Morales is an American DI remixer and producer, who also had his own hit last year with 'Needing". He produced, with the Pet Shop Boys, "New York City Boy" (which he also Co wrote) and "I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Any More": 'I'm a Di so I'm familiar with their work from the days of 'West End Girls' and over the years I remixed a few of their records. I think So Hard' was the first - then there was '.. Streets With No Name' and then there was . ..
Seriously', which was like a reggae kind of thing. I was actually surprised when they requested me to work with them, because I hadn't worked on one of their records in a while, and Danny Tangle worked on their last album, so it just kind of caught me off guard, you know. But I was honored. They sent me a couple of songs - one of them was '...Don't Know What You Want...' which was brilliant, and the other one was 'Nightlife'. To me, I'm sort of a new producer on the block whereas to me the Pet Shop Boys have been a very Successfully pop band. For me working with them is the highlight of my career.

"We worked on their songs, and I proposed we could also try a different idea that would sound like a cross between The Village People and the Bee Gees and we came up with 'New York City Boy'. I just thought of the way old music is coming back and that it would be an interesting idea to try
it's definitely out of character for the Pet Shop Boys and I thought that was one of the best things about it. I wanted to make a Fun kind of record. 'Nightlife', the song, was a tough record and I understand if they think it's not right yet. We have this other cut that we did too that is very club-driven, incredible, a brilliant track, but it never got completed. Really deep stuff. It was called 'Love Letters'.

"My favorite of all their songs is 'West End Girls'. There's something about it. I can't really explain but, I mean, we're going back to the Eighties, when music was a lot more interesting, for sure. We weren't so much lost in this technology thing.
"We got along so well. Chris is a riot - we hung out a couple of days at the studio before Neil came and it was great, and then Neil came. It's nice how the both of them complement each other and balance each other out. Chris obviously is the musician side of it whereas Neil is the writer. How do I say it? Always in a pair you have the creative one and the one that's the business one, and to me it's that Chris is the first one and Neil is the second one.
"Neil is so clever with how he uses his voice because he's not a screaming diva but he knows his voice and he obviously has a sound that's distinctive - so many artists don't have a sound of their own. There's sort of a technique that he uses that I think is brilliant.

"I had them over to my house for dinner. I treated them to my mother's homemade cooking. I believe there was rice. ..Beef stew.. Salad.. Some other things.. Lovely red wine. It was wonderful. I'm a pretty good judge of character - I don't have people come to my house that I know won't be able to act right." And they've had a really good time, but they know something's happened, and they can't quite think what it is that they're thinking about, and then they suddenly realize that they thirty they're in love with someone. And they have a terrible hangover -
"my hands are shaking I my mind is aching / with a feeling deep inside I that you've been staring / sending signals every time our paths collide." Sometimes you can meet someone that you're really attracted to, and you think they're attracted to you but you don't really know, and you haven't ask them. It's about me lying in bed, the night after meeting someone, thinking "Why did I think I thought I was getting somewhere? I can't remember". I thought of the line "feels like a radiophone workshop's beaming straight into my head" one day when I was in a taxi with a hangover, and I just thought it was a very musical phrase. The BBC Radiophone Workshop was the part of the BBC that was famous for making the DR Who theme tune that I used to love when I was a kid. All those electronically created sounds that took a whole workshop to do that nowadays would take a little keyboard.

The Only One. A very romantic song, with a twist. It's about someone who's in love and they're wondering whether the person they're in love can be trusted. They don't really know the other person's agenda. There are two songs about this on the album, the other one being "Boy Strange". Quite often you know someone who's got a really unsuitable boyfriend. I've known men and women with this through the course of my life - who fall in love with someone who's a criminal or violent.
That's what this songs about really: going out with someone you're in love with and wondering whether you can really trust them. What they're up to. What they do for a living. That's why it says "I don't know much about the deals you make/ there's so much that you hide from me/the mystery: am I the only one?" Am I the only person you're seeing? You just simply don't know. You're hoping it's fine. It's about going out with someone who's really sort of an enigma. It's a work of imagination.

Boy Strange. The other song about unsuitable boyfriends. It's about someone looking at this boy and thinking how much they fancy them or whatever, and you just know he's trouble. You could say it's about the beginning of an abusive relationship. It's something I've seen many times in my life, though luckily not with myself. When I was 17, one of my best friends, this girl who I used to go out with at one point, went out with this guy and he almost ruined her life. He was a boy strange. He was a nightmlare. At the end of the song it says: "Why would you inflict him on you?". No one could ever understand why she wanted to be with him, because he just caused her so much trouble. But love is a strange thing. She was in love with him.

In Denial. "In Denial" is a duet with Kylie Minogue which was written for our musical. It's a most unusual song, this. It's a story about a father and his daughter. The father is gay and his daughter is meeting him for the first time in many many years and it's difficult for them both. She doesn't really approve of his way of life and she's telling him how to sort himself out, with the confidence of youth. He knows his way of life is upside down and - another nightlife kind of thing,
another reference to vampires - he says "my life is absurd! I'm living it upside down! like a vampire, working at night, sleeping all day! a dad with a girl who knows he's gay". Everything he does is kind of the wrong way round. But he's doing his best. The last line is them both saying "Can you love me anyway?" So actually it ends up as rather a positive statement.

New York City Boy. David Morales said "we should do this big disco anthem like the Village People", and I said "Oh, Alright then, we'll call it 'New York City Boy' then". And then I listened to the Village People's records just to hear how their music sounded. I hadn't listened to them for ages. The song is just about a teenager living in the suburbs of New York - Brooklyn or Queens or Westchester or somewhere like that.

He's at Rollo Rollo is a British dance music producer and also a member of the group Faithless, best known for hits like 'Insomnia" and 'God Is A DJ". He produced, with the Pet Shop Boys, "For Your Own Good", "Radiophonic" and "Boy Strange": "They're my heroes, really. I went out to Australia in the late Eighties, early Nineties, and I lived with three gay guys and we used to all go down to the strip in a part of Sydney called Oxford Street and Morales had done these mixes of the Pet Shop Boys - I think they're called Red Zone mixes - and we used to hear them everywhere we went, and they were just fantastic. Those mixes were the kind of things that tuned me onto house, and I loved them before. The first record I ever bought my sister was Actually, because she was a classical musician, so it was to get her out of that and into the world of real music - now she's a singer doing her first album.
"I'd done a couple of mixes, for 'Can You Forgive Her?' and 'Absolutely Fabulous'. 'Can You Forgive Her?' was the first big mix I ever got asked to do by a band who were well-known. It just had the brilliant line in, 'you dance to disco and you don't like rock' so we just repeated that.

"I also knew they liked my records because they'd DJed on the radio and they'd played a few of my records on those shows. They sent me a fax asking if I'd like to work on the album before, Bilingual, and I said yes, and then I never heard from them. Then they rang again with this album and asked if I'd be interested. They sent me over one demo which I didn't like, actually, which was 'For Your Own Good', but it sounded very different then. Then they sent mc over lots of other stuff 'Radiophonic' included, and then they just trundled down to the studio with all their bits and bobs and stuff and we worked on Radiophonic' and
'Boy Strange and then we sort of took 'For Your Own Good' apart. They'd wanted to do a rock track with 'Boy Strange' but we changed that quite a lot too in the studio, and made it weirder and more soulful. It was a bit of a struggle to get them round because they had done sort of Nirvana-ish. With Radiophonic', I think Neil had doubts whether the chorus was catchy enough, but I just think it was never written for a catchy chorus, and it sounds really funky and simple.
'They were just the nicest people. They're very relaxed but hardworking. I thought that Chris did all the work and Neil would be very dilettante, because I'd read ages ago that they nearly broke up because one of them was never turning up to the studio. But what I liked about their relationship is that nothing goes into their records unless both of them like it. They don't have fights about it either; they have a little discussion and if one of them still doesn't like it that's the end of it. When you're working, Neil is a bit more the driving force behind it while Chris is someone who'd come in at the beginning of the session with all these ideas and then generally sit around on the couch and relax and then at the end of the session listen through it and say I like that, I don't like that'. It's a really nicely balanced relationship. They get on so well. They've both very intelligent but Neil is really

home, and he's had exams at school, and it's Saturday morning and he's playing his punk rock records, his Green Day records. And he goes into New York. He wants to get out of doing homework and being at home, and to go out and hang around Times Square and the center of New York and look at all the girls on the street and look in the shop windows and see all the new computers you can buy and go to a record shop and get the best mix of the hottest new song. And then, when dusk starts to fall, you can feel the pace of the city change. It's a song about how fab New York is. Which I think it is. We had this vocal arranger called Danny Madden who came in and did the vocals on this, and when he heard the track he said "That's the bomb! That track is the bomb, guys!", and I liked that phrase so I put it in the song: "That's the bomb!". There was a great description on the Internet explaining the lines "home is a boot Campbell you got to escape want to go and wander in the tickertape".
Tickertape is what they used to throw out of the windows during celebrations in New York, and this guy explained about how it was about celebration and how I always have lyrics about people wanting to change their lives. And he was exactly right; that's what it means. Actually, I think I just endlessly rewrite the lyrics of 'West End Girls' really. It's just another version of 'West End Girls': it's a kid in a boring suburban house and he wants to go and have some excitement.

Footsteps. We were writing a song and this was the best bit of it so we just concentrated on this bit. And then I thought of the line "as long as I hear your footsteps in the dark, that's all I need", and I sang that just to give us a bit of a focus, and Chris said "I can imagine people at Wembley singing that". It's got a slightly anthem quality; it makes a good end to the album. If you think of the person at the beginning of the album singing 'For your own good, call me tonight", at the end of the album, she's still waiting. It says in the middle of this song, "I'm longing to see you, I want you, I need you", so the lover hasn't returned. The lover obviously did go clubbing. We've never really used a classical choir, because I've always thought it sounds a bit pretentious, hut I think with this, when I'm singing the line about the pier -"when loneliness induces fear/like waves against a ramshackle pier" - and the choir are singing behind, it sounds very moving. I think that line's very Michael Spite. This song reminds me of "Everybody Hurts".
The song's about a fear of the dark. It's partly about me - the car alarms going off in the city at night, and the feeling when you wake up at night and feel lonely, rain against the window. When I was a child I was afraid of the dark. But it's a very straightforwardly romantic song, about a fear of the dark which can be conquered by somebody you love being there.

Overtly cultured - he'd be going to galleries, and he was judging the Turner prize, and he was always popping out to secondhand bookshops in lslington - whereas Chris would come in after a late night and go to sleep for at least five hours, and was into football, so on a simple level Chris is this very down to earth man of the people and Neil is this font of knowledge about weird things and arty things. But they just get on brilliantly. They're always going out to dinner together, and they obviously care hugely about each other. "There were little things that I really learned from them. Like, on 'Boy Strange' we laid down an acoustic guitar and then Chris said we should mix that with a synthetic guitar and it'd have a more jangled open feel to it. And that's not something I've done before but it really worked.

"My favorite old songs of theirs, well, 'It's A Sin' is fantastic. And 'Left To My Devices' - what I love about that is it's like a little musical in four minutes or whatever, and that's when to me they're at their best, when their songs just move through different stages - they're very musical but they're very tiinky as well. And I love Being Boring and the whole of Disco. On the album, I love the three songs I did, and I really like 'In Denial' - I think Kylie sounds better than she's sounded in years. And I love 'New York City Boy' -it's a bit like the 'Go West' of this album. There's only one song that I don't like, 'Happiness...', because it's a little bit too Ace Of Base for me, but I think it's a really nicely balanced album. What was great about working with them was that I came out with something that I was proud of and I can feel really good about and play to my mates, and also they liked it as well. And that doesn't happen all the time".

Copyright Areagraphy Ltd 1999: All Articles have been
Taken From Literally 1998 Issue 21