WEST END BOYS
Pet Shop Boys are gearing up for the West End opening of their musical Closer To Heaven at London's Arts Theatre on May 31.

The show has been written by Neil and Chris with Jonathan Harvey (author of play Beautiful
Thing and sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme) and starring Paul Keating and Frances Barber. Tennant has described Closer as a "riotous story of sex, drugs and clubland". The show features 15 new Pet Shop Boys songs and a cast LP
produced by Neil, Chris and longtime collaborators Stephen Hague will be release early summer. 7 spoke to Neil about the show, its ketamine sequences, and drinking red wine with Andrew Lloyd Webber.
What's it about?

"It's about a boy from Ireland who comes to London and works in a club. It's also a love triangle as he has an affair with a girl and also a boy. I don't want to give the whole story away buy it's a coming of age tale about a
young lad who comes to the big city. It's a bit sad, but it's a musical comedy".
What's the club like?
"A bit like Kinky Gerlinky or Taboo - I don't think there's anything quite
like that in London at the moment but other than that the intention is to create something that feels contemporary".

And the drugs?
"The pivotal drug in the whole thing is ketamine - there is an attempt tot dramatise a 'k-hole' at one point. It's the right drug for the plot. I've never taken it myself - its presence reflects its current use on the gay
clubbing scene. There's a lot of references to drugs in the piece - you can't something based in a contemporary club and not deal with drugs.

It's interesting to look at the way people whose lives are built around clubbing
and spend so much of their time off their trolleys on alcohol or whatever - and we wanted that to be reflected in the play".

Has it taken a long time to develop the show? "Its taken about six years to get to this stage. We started developing the
story with Jonathan (Harvey) - he wrote the script and we wrote the songs. We did a workshop performance last year with actors and it's changed a lot since then - more songs have come in, others have been thrown out".
It must be very different to preparing an LP or the normal band stuff that you must do?

"There's an incredibly collaborative process - we're working with Jonathon and then the director and designer and cast and musical director. You have to give up a lot of control - so it's not really the Pet Shop Boys musical,
it's also the cast's musical and the director's musical and Jonathan's musical. Its been a new experience for us. Which is exciting when you've been in the music business for a long time - suddenly life is full of new
experiences".

Do Pet Shop Boys fans go to the theatre? "I think musical theatre is really underrated. People think of it as
something just for the tourists. We've written a contemporary play with contemporary music - I hope people will be interested. We've always been interested in the theatrical aspect of music we once did a show for several
weeks at London's Savoy theatre, we worked with Derek Jarman - there's always been a theatrical and visual element to our live music - and it's very exciting area to explore".
Who backed the show?

"The Really Useful Company".
That's Andrew Lloyd Webber's company - did you get to meet him? "We had dinner with him. He absolutely loves music - and he's one of those people who knows the Top 20 singles inside out. He went on a lot about Craig
David, who he really likes. And he drinks very expensive red wine. I can highly recommend his red wine".
And what do you think of Hear'Say?

"I watched the last few programmes in the series. It was kind of gripping. It's not really about the music is fairly efficiently done. It's really about how in the last 10 years show business has come back against pop. And
originally pop music was created as a reaction against show business - The Beatles came along and wrote their own songs - before that the peak of an artist's career was to be on the Royal Variety performance or have a season
at the Talk of the Town. Rock'n'roll changed all that but with Hear'Say and the boy bands it's gone back to pop before the Beatles. It's become a production where you find a cast to play a group - its' very anodyne and
attracts these people who want to do it to be famous - for previous generations that wasn't the point. They wanted to express themselves - which now seems to be off the agenda".