Neil Tennant may be best known as a Pet Shop Boy, but his latest venture is a tribute to Noël Coward's songs, performed by an all-star line-up. What would The master think? Patrick Humphries reports Noël Coward died in 1973, so one can only guess what he would make of Neil Tennant's tribute album, Twentieth Century Blues - The Songs of Noël Coward.

The man himself famously acknowledged: "Strange how potent cheap music is", but his views on pop music were rather less benign: "What are the Beatles?", he wrote. "Of course, they are almost entirely totally devoid of talent. There is a great deal of noise." That "noise" has been translated by Tennant into an intriguing album which brings together the Pet Shop Boys, Texas, Sting, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Neil Hannon and Robbie Williams - to name but a few - all tackling Coward songs in a manner which would surely have left even The Master speechless.

Take the tongue-twisting I've Been to a Marvellous Party (The Divine Comedy), the gravity-defying Mad Dogs and Englishmen (Space), the poignant Mad About The Boy (Marianne Faithfull) and the ambitious London Pride (Damon Albarn, now reinstated after a contretemps a week or so ago, collaborating with Michael Nyman); then consider the sheer inherent quality of Coward's work and it is obvious why Twentieth Century Blues, profits from which will go to the Red Hot Aids Charitable Trust, works better than most recent tribute albums. It is evidence, also, that despite having been a pop star for 13 years, the convivial Tennant, 44, who still has a marked Geordie accent, has interests stretching far beyond chart placings. As we sit in a sterile North London photographic studio, his enthusiasm for the Twentieth Century Blues project is evident: "In 1996 the estate of Noël Coward gave permission for an album of cover versions," he explains. "I said I would do it on condition I would have complete control over commissioning the whole thing. Sometimes you just end up with re-interpretations that have little to do with the original work; but with Coward, although he is often seen as simply a piece of nostalgia, the songs are really good, and I knew that it would be good done in a contemporary way.

"I thought we should narrow it, and treat Coward as the first British singer/songwriter/star who was globally famous," he continues. "He is a really important figure in the musical life of this country, which I think people don't realise. Musically he's very modern; Twentieth Century Blues is a very interesting melody. I think it was Normski who said that Coward was the first English rapper." Twentieth Century Blues is certainly an intriguing collection. Sir Paul McCartney makes a decent fist of A Room With A View, Bryan Ferry's louche I'll See You Again has the old lounge-lizard in fine fettle, while the Pet Shop Boys' Sail Away, stylish and quintessentially English, is very much in the spirit of the original. "I wanted the album to be a history of a strand of British pop music, with Noël Coward as the first modern pop star, someone who had a very clear image and wrote his own songs," Tennant explains.

"So it needed people with a very strong sense of style, of wit, of theatricality to do it." Tennant recognises that Coward - who dismissed a 1965 Beatles concert as being "like a mass masturbation orgy" - might have been withering about the concept. "He was sniffy about pop music; sniffy, but let's face it, jealous," Tennant maintains. "He was obviously fascinated by the Beatles as a showbusiness phenomenon, which they were when he made that diary entry. By that time Noël Coward had ceased to be a songwriter. His last thing was The Girl Who Came to Supper in 1962, which coincided with the rise of the Beatles. Another interesting thing about Coward is that he lived in Jamaica at the same time as Bob Marley! I was recently offered one of Coward's paintings; it wasn't very good but it had a great title - Reggae Man." Tennant's interest in Coward began when, at 16 or 17, he saw the film of The Italian Job.

As his friends played the Who, Tennant listened to Noël Coward in New York, which belonged to a friend's mother. When he arrived in London from Tyneside in 1972 to go to North London Polytechnic, the first play he saw was Private Lives with Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens. Tennant got a job working for the pop magazine Smash Hits, and it was a decade after moving to London that he left journalism and set his sights on pop stardom. In August 1981, he met Chris Lowe in a music shop in Chelsea and formed the Pet Shop Boys. Their first hit was West End Girls , which reached No 1 in November 1985. "We became successful when I was already 31," Tennant recalls. "It seemed embarrassing to be leaving a job to be in a pop group - my hair was thinning - but it was what I really wanted to do. I don't know about growing old gracefully in rock'n'roll - of course there are many people much older than me in pop now." Even as a youngster, Tennant was obsessed with pop. He remembers his mother, a former dancer, allowing him to stay up late to see the Beatles on television. "I'd been writing songs since I was nine.

I still have a back catalogue of Seventies songs which occasionally I dip into." The song he and Lowe wrote for Dusty Springfield to sing in Scandal, Nothing has Been Proved, had its beginnings in a song penned in 1979 about the Profumo affair. He remembers fondly the Pet Shop Boys' early days. "It was very exciting being at Smash Hits, earning a living out of what you liked doing, and at the weekends I was writing songs with Chris. Then finally we had a record out. I can remember quite clearly walking into the CBS offices in Soho Square to see the product manager, who gave me a box of 12-inch singles of West End Girls, and going back on a No 19 bus to Chelsea. It was really, really exciting." If pop stardom had not come, how good a journalist would Neil Tennant have made? "That's quite interesting," he says."I used to say that if I'd stayed I'd be editor of Q now, but because of the way the company has expanded, I'd probably be running three radio stations. "I used to hate the writing," Tennant continues. "I never sought to be a journalist; I went to Smash Hits because I'd worked in editing books and they wanted me to do their Yearbook, but when I got there they wanted a writer . . .
I used to hate interviewing people, I used to be shit scared. I remember being flown to America to interview Genesis, and after 15 minutes, I couldn't think of anything else to say, and this very sweet photographer took over asking the questions. "I also hated sitting alone at a typewriter. I've always liked collaborations. That's what I like about Pet Shop Boys - me and Chris, making records. When you're a journalist, at the end of the day you've got that tape but transcribing the tape drives you raving mad. You can't give it to anyone else, you have to do it yourself - painstaking transcription, then writing it . . ." The Pet Shop Boys have always been associated with trying something new within the limited framework of the live rock'n'roll experience - "Our shows at the English National Opera in 1991 used to lose us £20,000 per night" - and the latest development is a stage musical, as yet un-named.   "I don't like the term "musical", but I can't think of another word for it," says Tennant.

"The script is written by Jonathan Harvey, who's got a new play at the National this autumn, so I don't think our musical will be until next year now. We've got a first draft, and we're at the stage where we realise it needs a lot of work. Chris and I have written tons of music for it. We're trying to do a show which has contemporary music about contemporary life; a show that looks different. It follows on logically from what we've done in the Nineties" - he lists collaborations with Derek Jarman, English National Opera, the Savoy Theatre. "Ultimately, Chris and I are not performers, although we've both learned a bit by now," he says. "I used to be really intense, now I'm quite relaxed about it; but the musical takes what we've done with our performances several steps further. Tennant confesses to a love of musical theatre but bemoans the dearth of "good musicals". "I saw Rent  on Broadway and thought it was awful. It's meant to be about contemporary street life, but I just thought it was exploitative, it presents having HIV as being an alternative lifestyle choice, and the music sounds as though it was written in the early Seventies for some rock opera. "I think our music does lend itself to theatrical qualities. To me it would be a really fantastic thrill to pull it off. I think you've always got the same problem with musicals: why are they singing? I always remember a friend of mine going to see The Sound of Music - it ran in one cinema in Newcastle for seven years, longer than anywhere else in the world. Anyway, the woman sitting behind him said 'You know, I'd have liked that if it hadn't been for all them songs'." Outside the Pet Shop Boys and away from Twentieth Century Blues, how does man-about-town Tennant spend his hard-earned cash? He is straightforward and unembarrassed about answering. "I buy paintings, but I don't think I'm a serious collector.

I started off buying pre-Raphaelite art because I had the money. You know, as soon as you're a pop star and you have money . . . I was walking down Bond Street one day, saw a painting I liked in a gallery window, said 'How much is that?' They said £7,500; I said, all right." With Noël Coward still very much in mind, I wondered if there was a particular period Neil Tennant would wish to have lived in? Perhaps as a dashing Twenties playboy, cigarette holder at the ready, purring around the West End in a Lagonda? "Oh, no. My favourite period would be St Petersburg in the twenty years before the Revolution," he insists. "I studied history, my degree is in history. I think this was the most modern period there has ever been. Just think what was happening in terms of the arts, and politics, technology. This was an incredibly modern time, people had absolute faith in progress, and there were revolutionary works of art - Stravinsky, Picasso." This prompts him to tell a tale from the Pet Shop Boys' recent concerts in St Petersburg. "A Russian friend was saying, 'How much money do you make?' They're obsessed by money in Russia, and I said, 'Believe it or not, we make nothing, we break even'. He asked, 'Why do you do this?' I said, 'Because we really like St Petersburg; I really love coming to Russia'. He said, 'So it's like a gift?' I said, 'You could put it like that, yes'. Then he just looked disapproving." The public image of the Pet Shop Boys has Lowe the boffin beavering away with the technology, while Tennant supplies the style. Wrong again. "It's nothing like that," he maintains. "Chris can programme music, but he works on fantastic-ally short bursts of energy. We have a programmer who operates all that stuff. Chris also helps the style approach, he is a qualified architect, after all." Tennant has lived in London for more than twenty years, and now feels he has settled there. He came out in 1994, but remains resolutely tight-lipped about who is sharing his life, or his three homes.

"I've got a classic terraced house, two bedrooms, in Chelsea. I love Chelsea. I had a studio flat there from the late Seventies right up to 1987. I love it because it's not trendy - although the King's Road is a high street now, which is sad. I think Marks & Spencer shouldn't have been allowed, convenient as it is for me. But you go down to World's End and there are still some nice shops, a bookshop. When I moved there in 1978, punks and Teddy Boys were having fights outside my front door. I was terrified, but it was also rather exciting." He has just bought a home in County Durham, and has another small house in Sussex which he intends to sell. "That's why I don't own anywhere abroad; I've been to Jamaica a lot, but I can't help thinking, 'Who's going to pay the electricity bill? Who's going to clean it?'," he says. But back to the Pet Shop Boys. Although they are widely known for promoting postmodern irony, enthusiasm now seems to be more important, in Tennant's view. "Irony is the curse of the modern age," he proclaims. "It's so lazy - you can do something bad and say 'Oh, it's ironic'. Irony's great, but it's a virus in the machine now, which I hate. I've always preferred enthusiasm " He believes all art should progress through new technology.

"The sampler was the thing of the Eighties; the synthesiser was the Seventies," he says. "In the Sixties it was ultimately the studio, in the Fifties it was the electric guitar. And in the Nineties we haven't had anything new. It's no accident that white pop music has been comprehensively retro, because the bands haven't had any new technology to play with." How ironic then - in the true sense of the word - that a man whose musical reputation was built on new technology should be the architect of such a retro project as an album covering the songs of Noël Coward. But then again, if in the process you can bring together pop stars from three decades, and raise some money for a good cause, why not? •The first double A-side single from Twentieth Century Blues, I've Been to a Marvellous Party, by The Divine Comedy, and Someday I'll Find You, by Shola Ama with Craig Armstrong, is released on March 30 on EMI. The album is released on April 13.