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The
Pet Shop Boys aren't standing still
Dominic Utton NEIL TENNANT, singer with the Pet Shop Boys, that peculiarly
English synth-pop duo that over the past 15 years has grown from quirky
one-offers to national institution, sips tea in an elegant private club
just off London's Kings Road and addresses the tricky issue of age in
pop music. Specifically, the age of people listening to his pop music.
Neil
and fellow Boy Chris Lowe (of the surly manner and one-fingered keyboard
technique) are midway through a world tour and have noticed a change in
demographics according to the countries they're playing in. "It's quite
interesting going from America to Europe to Britain," he says. "In America
the audiences are in their 20s, then in Germany they're in their late
20s early 30s, and in Britain they're in their 30s, 40s and older. We
get the grannies at the front these days." Tennant himself is no spring
chicken. At 45 (Lowe is 40), he has been aware of pop music for almost
as long as it has been around, playing in his first group at 16. Called
Dust, they spectacularly failed to make an impact.
"We were convinced
we'd become famous," he says. "It was very kind of stoned Seventies but,
at the time, we thought it was absolutely brilliant." Ten years later he
was working for Smash Hits, the teeny pop bible. Three years after that
he was on Top Of The Pops singing West End Girls, the Pet Shop Boys' first
release - and first No1. It is widely assumed that after a while interviewing
pop stars, Neil thought he could do better. He laughs. "Not at all - it
was all part of the same process.
I'd been writing
songs since I was nine, and I met Chris in 1981. We were already the Pet
Shop Boys when I got the job on Smash Hits. I went to work there because
they wanted me to edit a book - and also because they knew I knew loads
about music. It was a bit of a shock in a way - they hired me as a book
editor and I got there and found I was the news editor, which was a bit
of a surprise. "It was a great time to work at Smash Hits - in terms of
music anyway, it was a fantastic time.
There was so
much excitement in pop, with Culture Club, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, hip-hop
coming from America. After a year I went to America to supervise the launch
of Smash Hits over there and by that time I was actually making records.
People often assume I just thought, 'Hey I could do this!' but I was doing
it beforehand." In the 15 years between West End Girls topping the charts
and Neil and Chris's latest Top 10 entry, the beautifully-titled You Only
Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk, they have enjoyed more than 30 hits
and four No1s.
Along the way
they have also managed to create a wholly unique - though often changing
- image, as well as practically defining a whole new genre of pop music.
The "two men and a synth" look might seem utterly run-of-the-mill now, and
the "miserable words against a disco beat" sound might come across as similarly
predictable, but it should not be forgotten that these two forty-something
men (along with Mancunian synth-poppers New Order) did it first. Despite
once saying that having a No1 single is about as exciting as "having a cup
of tea", Neil's enthusiasm for pop music is undimmed by age or experience.
If anything, he feels more strongly about it now than ever.
"Oh God, did
I say that?" he winces. "I think I must have meant it very literally - I
was talking about West End Girls and it had been in the charts for so long
it just seemed kind of inevitable it would end up at No1. In fact, West
End Girls was probably the least exciting No1 we had. I remember when we
had the Christmas chart-topper - with Always On My Mind - and that was hugely
exciting because it was a race between us and Rick Astley. "Everyone thought
it would be Rick, because he was the hot thing that year. And I remember
I was at my brother's house and we were having a family party, and we heard
it live on the radio - ooh, it was very exciting. "In those days it all
seemed a bit more innocent. Now you get predictions every day of the week.
A bit of the magic's gone, I think." THIS LOSS of innocence in pop music
is a subject that Neil is keen to expand upon.
It turns out
that the former editor of Smash Hits and self-styled authority on pop (after
15 years of creating pure pop records he has a fair pedigree) is not happy
about the state of the nation... or indeed the nation's youth. But whereas
most fortysomething men (I'm thinking of my father at that age) traditionally
bemoan modern music as destructive, subversive and rebellious, Neil feels
exactly the opposite. "The music business at the moment is going through
an extraordinarily conservative phase," he says. "In fact, I don't think
it's ever been this conservative - it's a little like pop music was before
the Beatles. Having said that, I was watching one of those Sounds Of The
Sixties programmes the other night and I realised that pop music before
the Beatles was actually more exciting than it is now. It at least had a
kind of musical ambition about it.
"Nowadays, music
is regarded as a career, and we suffer from the fact that everyone thinks
they're hip - and what that actually means is that nobody's hip. And that's
very, very bad for pop culture. It means that there ultimately isn't a cutting
edge. "If you think of someone like Adam and the Ants in the early Eighties,
that was some really weird punk music being made specifically for 10-year-old
girls... and you compare that with I Have A Dream by Westlife! We really
are now living in a sort of weird Fifties America culture. "Pop music from
the Fifties up to the early Nineties operated as an expression of youth.
I don't think it does anymore. And if it does, then I think it only points
out how conservative youth is." Perhaps, as some kind of reaction to this
conservatism, Neil and Chris have adopted an especially odd look for their
latest single. The wild orange hair,
big fake eyebrows
and baggy combat pants come across as very early Eighties. Is this a case
of a couple of men trying to recapture their own heyday? Neil is nonplussed.
"Our current image is just a way of saying you don't have to be yourself,"
he insists. "Everything nowadays has the style of naturalism; everyone dresses
the same. You can no longer tell what someone is from their clothes. I saw
Q Magazine last month. They had a picture of all their winners from their
awards... and they all looked like students. There's no expression of anything
other than utter ordinariness. "Years ago I used to say that pop music was
divided into 'He's one of us' or 'Wow - I would like to be like that'. And
there's not a lot of the latter about any more. Pop has become a 'one of
us' culture.
"I think what
Chris and I are trying to do is something uncomfortable. We could of course
present ourselves in the same way as everyone else, but I think if you look
back at what we've done through the years, one of the things that makes
it interesting is our very strong identity. We always created our own world
that defines us against everyone else." Who'd have thought it? The Pet Shop
Boys - last bastions of youthful rebellion.
SYNTH WE'RE
ON THE SUBJECT, A FEW MORE OF THE BIG-TIME ELECTRO PROPONENTS IF THE Pet
Shop Boys best epitomised the "synth and a voice" style of pop, they have
not been the only proponents of the genre. Here are a few others. Some you
will have heard of, some you won't, some you should have - and some are
best left in obscurity. Kraftwerk (far right): The original, the best. In
the late Seventies and Eighties, the German men with Moog synthesisers defined
the sound of an industrial brave new world. Hits included the 17-minute
Autobahn and the 14-minute Tour De France. Obsessed with robots, they would
stand motionless behind their keyboards at gigs.
Not exactly
rock 'n' roll, but oddly beautiful in a weird, Teutonic way. Depeche Mode/
Yazoo/Erasure: In the Eighties, Vince Clark was Chris Lowe's only rival
as the coolest man to stand behind a keyboard and do nothing. His electro-travels
took him from Depeche Mode (before they went crap and gothic) through the
Alison Moyet project Yazoo to end with Andy Bell and Erasure. Five No1 albums
followed.
Sparks: Punkish
American duo. The singer had bad curly hair and jumped about while the keyboard
player looked a lot like Adolf Hitler. Hard to believe they were twins.
Their utterly fantastic overblown odyssey, This Town Ain't Big Enough For
Both Of Us, peaked at No2 in 1974. Gary Numan (left): Either a sad wannabe
glam-rocker with a penchant for big dirty keyboard basslines, or visionary
genius with a penchant for... etc.
Hits such as
Cars and Are Friends Electric? made him rich and films including Mad Max
gave him an excuse to wear a lot of leather. Unfortunately, he's also from
Essex which makes his vision of postapocalyptic electro-pop seem a little
ridiculous.
Soft Cell (below):
Two men, a keyboard, and a cover version of Northern Soul classic Tainted
Love (kerr-chang chang!), 1981's top selling single; and a cracking ditty
called Say Hello Wave Goodbye, which peaked at number 3 a year later. Sufficient
to propel fledgling oddball singer Marc Almond into the big time - and big-time
oddity. |
