With their melodramatic songs and spectacular productions, the Pet Shop Boys
have been preparing for their own West End show for years. Sadly, their computers haven't. Andrew Harrison reports.

"We absolutely weren't going to have any dancers this time around," Neil Tennant is saying. "But the fact is, Chris and I get paranoid if there's nothing to look at for two hours except us. We worry that it's boring. So, as of this week, we've got a dancer in it. Just the one."

It's a Thursday afternoon in May, and the Pet Shop Boys are waiting to start work in the heart of London's theatreland. About time too. For 12 years now, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have made the most theatrical pop music in the
world. Some of their songs - It's A Sin, Rent, the high-kicking Can You Forgive Her? - seem to have come from imaginary musicals. Others, like So Hard or Being Boring, are themselves pocket-sized dramas. The Pet Shop Boys

write about transient London lives and they enjoy a tragi-comic love-hate relationship with the world of showbiz. Their previous live shows have been

extravagent wig festivals helmed by the late Derek Jarman and then the ENO's David Alden and David Fielding. It seems almost inconceivable that the Pet Shop Boys haven't "done" the West End yet. But they haven't; not properly.
Until now.

This week, a show called Pet Shop Boys Somewhere will open for a season at the Savoy Theatre on The Strand - replacing Simon Callow's turn as Wilde in

The Importance of Being Oscar, a coincidence which is, in the parlance, "very Pet Shop Boys". Though the famously rock-disdainful duo now seem to be "on the road" more regularly that Status Quo, this will actually be the
first time they have played live in Britain since 1993. Neil says that Somewhere is the Pet Shop Boys labour saving way of going on tour without all the travelling - "You get to sleep in your own bed at night" - but he
is sneakily proud of the fact that they will be the first pop group to play a West End residency (the tour is even named after a new single which happens

to be a West Side Story cover). "It's quite posh," he divulges. This time, wigs are out and video is in. Somewhere is a collaboration with the conceptual video artist Sam Taylor-Wood. It will use an elaborate
system of video screens to frame the Pet Shop Boys, who will play inside a large
box. The duo have to interact with 45 minute films in a baffling routine that will occupy the middle ground between choreography, mime, and karaoke.

Rehearsals are to begin in earnest today, but it's already teatime, not much is getting done, and Chris has wandered off to worry about computers. "The potential for nightmare is high, " says Taylor-Wood, smiling nervousl as the videos are rewound again. "I wanted to create the idea that there is

an enourmous party going on backstage, so the videos are all single shots that happen in real time. If it goes wrong, in theory we have to go right back to the start. But when it works it's like Warhol meets The Wizard of
Oz."

If previous PSB shows took their music and attached it to song and dance narratives, Somwhere sounds like it will be a 3-D version of their record sleeves: ultra designed and deadpan on the surface, rather funny and human undernearth.

"One of the reasons we wanted to do Somewhere," Neil says, "was that we haven't had a big idea for a live show lately, and this is definetly a big idea. It is a different way of doing Pet Shop Boys songs. This is more
modern and more intimate. In fact, " he beams, "for the encores I am going to do my awful acoustic guitar bit. I'm going to have my Wonderwall moment."
This is the kind of perspective on pop music that sustains the Pet Shop Boys into the middle age of their pop life. The affect to believe that it's

a load of silly fluff which is all about having your "Wonderwall moment", but they secretly take it very seriously indeed.

In Britain, the Pet Shop Boys are not quite the commercial force they once were. The later singles from their current album Bilingual album went in and out of the charts as if they were doing the hokey cokey. While the record
is more successful in American and other lucrative territories than any PSB album since their very early days, at home it seems destined for the same under-appreciation as their last "adult" album, the 1991 effort, Behaviour.

Tennant and Lowe's response to this is pleasingly consistent - they just carry on regardless.

Neil came to pop stardom comparitively late (aged 30), while Chris is adept

and maintaining the integrity of his inner 14 year old football hooligan. In the Dadrock era, when young bands want to sound like old bands, the Pet Shop Boys seem like the living embodiment of the theory that pop stardom is
wasted on the young. Something in them champions values that are still older and more traditional than any atavistic need to sound like The Small Faces.

The Pet Shop Boys stand for proper songs, hard work and value-for-money entertainment just as much as Oasis. "It sounds corny," says Neil, "but we do still look for new and different things to do, and generally we find
them. You could repeat yourself endlessly with the costumes and wigs, but it's nice to be different."

At a stage in their career when most bands want to escape the identities they've built up, the Pet Shop Boys just want to be more like themselves. With that in mind, the next Tennant-Lowe project will be even more Pet Shop

Boys than Somwhere. They are writing a musical with Johnaton Harvey, who also wrote the play Beautiful Thing, has a script based around London club culture in progress and Neil and Chris already have seven or so songs under

construction. Neil quite like the idea of a minimial musical, too.

"Everything in the West End at the moment has to be a spectacle, whereas they used to stand or fall on their songs and the story," he says. "We want

to do something where the songs and the story are the strong point. When you make it into spectacle, in the end it becomes a tourist attraction rather than a piece of theatre."

Videos whine, tapes spool, and it looks like the Somewhere rehearsal is starting at last. When the show's season was extended in April, it became a

standing joke for the crew and "cast" that the posters would soon have flashes reading "Third great year!" plastered over them. Would the Pet Shop

Boys warm to becoming tourist attractions themselves?

"No," declares Neil. "It would be too boring."

* Pet Shop Boys Somewhere is at the Savoy Theatre from Thursday 5, until
June 21 (except Sundays 8 and 15)
* The single is released on June 23