Introspective: Neil Tennant Turns 70
Celebrating the career of the Pet Shop Boys co-founder
Let me take you back to 1991. The Pet Shop Boys, singer-songwriter Neil Tennant and singer-songwriter-synthist Chris Lowe, were on their first U.S. tour.
About a week before it hit my city, Boston, I was on the phone with Tennant and asked him what audiences might expect.
“We always thought,” he said, “that it wouldn’t be particularly interesting for us, or maybe for the audience, to just go out and do our songs in a regular concert format. Chris and I have always thought a majority of concerts we’ve been to haven’t held one’s interest all the way through, and we always wanted to do a concert where there was always something happening, where it didn’t flag after 10 minutes. That was, basically, why we decided to go down the theatrical path.”
I wondered if, in some way, what they were doing was a revival of rock theater, a la Genesis or Diamond Dogs-era David Bowie?
“It’s vaguely in that tradition,” said Tennant, who turns 70 on July 10th, “but, if you remember those shows, they were still basically musicians standing around while people wore costumes in the middle of it all.”
This was something else again. A multi-media, money-losing extravaganza, helmed by a former Pink Floyd production whiz who, chuckled Tennant, found it “a complete nightmare. And that makes it exciting.”
VIDEO: Pet Shop Boys “West End Girls”
But the critics’ knives were out. The English alternative/dance hitmakers who first made a splash in 1985 with “West End Girls,” got slammed by much of the mainstream press for not being “rock” enough or not having the musicians on stage – were there even live musicians? – or being so darn enamored of artifice. I recall after the tour that Rolling Stone ran a story noting how the duo had been slammed by virtually every outlet, save one, the Boston Globe. Which was me or my work.
Excerpts from my thoughts back then and some added bits: Call them ironic, color them arch and wonder how seriously you should take them, but don’t fail to realize this: On the final night of their first U.S. tour, six years after their studio-based inception — England’s Pet Shop Boys made one of the brightest, boldest area debuts in years.
The Pet Shop Boys are spiritual sons of David Bowie and the Peter Gabriel-era Genesis; nephews, perhaps, of Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, Donna Summer and Kraftwerk. And, while we’re adding influences and reference points, toss in Noel Coward and Joe Orton. Finally, to better get a handle on PSB, reverse the order of the common term “rock-theater.”
In concert, Pet Shop Boys turn songs into surrealistic playlets, or live-action rock videos, if you’d prefer. Lowe occasionally plays a synth, but the two primary musicians, guitarist-percussionist J.J. Belle and synthist Scott Davidson, are situated out of sight, and the show is given over to the 10 dancers, three backup singers, and the two Boys. You want costume changes? These 15 will give you costume changes — from naughty schoolboys in short pants to doctors and nurses to ballerinas to breakdancers to proper Mary Poppins gentlemen and re-occurring angels.
The two-set show hit so many dizzying, dislocating heights, touched base with so many giddy extremes, and served up such a provocative mix of dance, pop and theater, it’s difficult to know where to begin. Probably the first thing to do is to set aside the “who’s playing what?” and “is it live?” questions — much of it, apparently is computer-triggered by Davidson — sit back and enjoy the multi-leveled extravaganza. This wasn’t about instrumental showboating. It was about, well, everything else: lust and love (both gay and straight), consumerism and greed (“Suburbia” and “Opportunities”), campy pleasure (pulsing disco remakes of U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” and the Willie Nelson-identified “You Were Always on My Mind”) and the motives of facile, politically-correct pop stars (“How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?”)
The opening four songs linked religion, sin, guilt, pleasure and punishment — the standout being the glorious, gliding ‘It’s a Sin’, with the dancers cavorting amidst the five hospital beds that had been hauled onstage. The song boasted a regal, rich melody line and conflicting emotions, both PSB strengths.
Let me say that “It’s a Sin” is one of my favorite songs ever. And I’m very willing to concede that has a lot to do with my Catholic upbringing and my status as a recovering Catholic for the last, oh, 50 years.
VIDEO: Pet Shop Boys “It’s a Sin”
Sang Tennant, also raised Catholic: “It’s a sin/At school they taught me how to be/So pure in thought and word and deed/They didn’t quite succeed/For everything I long to do/No matter when or where or who/Has one thing in common too/It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a sin/It’s a sin.”
Damned, damned, damned.
The Pet Shop Boys are comfortable with fine and bold strokes. The thrust of “Opportunities,” with its big-bottomed, blue-suited, pig-snouted, money-grubbing businessmen-dancers and its “I’ve got the brains/You’ve got the looks/Let’s make lots of money” refrain, was pretty clear — there’s more to life than this. “Rent,” with most lead vocals graciously handed over to the striking diva Sylvia, was something else again — subtle and achingly plaintive, sincere.
There was a near-constant flurry of motion on stage. There were impressive, shifting backdrops, a plethora of props, and an intelligent, witty attitude shuffle — even as the music stayed true to a disco/synth-pop/Hi-NRG vein. This was a show with a wide-screen orientation, where you could pick your focal point and hope you chose correctly. At the close, following an upbeat celebration, the Pet Shop Boys did the most un-rock ‘n’ roll thing imaginable: They opted for a gentle, pensive, adult lullaby, as Tennant and Lowe, attired as angels, lay down in twin beds and feigned sleep. Call it closure.
There’s something about Pet Shop Boys music, Tennant’s wry delivery, the melancholic undertone, that just oozes ironic detachment.
“I guess I must have that ironic detachment to a certain extent,” said Tennant, “but only to a certain extent. It’s a small percentage of what we do.” He said the new cover of “Where the Streets Have No Name” was done for the pure fun of it, of turning the serious, striving rocker into a uptempo dance song. The anti-pop star-as-political leader song “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?” was a poke at self-righteous pop stars and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame reality. It was born, he said, out of “anger and the absurdity of it all – that rock and pop has to carry this weight of history with it, that it’s already a museum piece. Things like this are making it not a living thing. I almost think in America rock is ceasing to be the music for a younger generation – it’s the music of the 1960s and if it doesn’t relate to the 1960s a lot of people in the music business distrust it. The ‘hot’ new band is in their middle-30s, like R.E.M. It seems a series of imitations of old gestures and phrases.”
Tennant was a contentious, affable sort. A former editor at the magazine Smash Hits, he met Lowe in a London music store in 1981, and they decided to push the envelope as artists. They even declared themselves a disco act at a time when the term was in severe retirement.
VIDEO: Pet Shop Boys “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?”
“We don’t buy the rock myths,” said Tennant. “What we say honestly, people take as some silly or outrageous joke, but to be quite honest, most rock writing is about the reinforcement of myths, and we don’t buy it.”
Their music is often percolating, but it can be pensive and brooding, too. The Pet Shop Boys cover a wide range of emotions, from sarcasm and despair to ennui and exuberance. Behavior, admits Tennant, was their most subtle, least overtly pop-ish album yet.
“The songs we had seemed to be more complicated-sounding,” he said, “and seemed to have this mellow – although I hate the word – sound. It seems more personal.”
The Pet Shop Boys often write from the viewpoint of outsiders, and Tennant takes some measure of pride in the fact that “in America we seem to get all these disaffected kids, people that are outside of mainstream American culture, that aren’t about Whitney Houston singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ” (Of Houston’s HBO concert, Tennant says, “Appalling.”)
One outsider group, the gay male community, took the Pet Shop Boys to heart from the start. (Remember this was all well before Pride Month and LGBTQ+ mass acceptance. And it was not one big happy family; gay men and lesbians were not always on the same page.) The band’s songs and videos suggest this bond, the Pet Shop Boys being one of the few groups to employ both female and male sex symbols and not shy away from homoerotic imagery
Not that the sex symbols are them. “We don’t really view ourselves as sex objects,” said Tennant, “because we don’t feel we’re good-looking enough; alas, we’d love to be, so we use other people.”
“I think we are almost the only people who make Hi-NRG records anymore in the entire world,” he continued, “but it’s a form of music we like and it’s, more or less, a gay kind of music. And a song like ‘Nervously,’ which was written off in Britain as a filler track, has, in Miami, become a gay anthem for kids, which I was pleased about.”
I saw them again in September of 2009 at Boston’s House of Blues and thought, “Good lord, the Pet Shop Boys have entered their cubist period!” That didn’t mean the duo has become art-obsessed at the expense of music: they weren’t trying to be Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque. But, well, in cubism, objects are broken up and re-configured in abstract patterns. We try to make order out of chaos and chaos often wins. We all build walls. Sometimes they get knocked down. Our difficult, necessary job: rebuild, recast.
Tennant and Lowe took the stage wearing colored cubes over their heads. At various points, their dancers – three women, one man – did the same. Behind the Pet Shop Boys was a wall of white blocks, which first served as a video backdrop, only to topple during “Building a Wall/Integral.” They were later reassembled in different forms.
So, the order/chaos idea certainly fit the themes of much of the Pet Shop Boys’ music, from the opening “Heart” to “Do I Have To?” and “Jealousy.” Life is confusing, love is the goal – and goals are elusive. That came through early with “Love etc.,” in which Tennant – whose androgynous voice can convey both warmth and irony – struck a note against consumerism and for romance.
VIDEO: Pet Shop Boys “Love, etc.”
Lowe and offstage “musical director” Pete Gledall provided the beats and melodies, layering lush textures over and under Tennant’s nuanced vocals. Tennant and Lowe changed costumes constantly – from preacher black to a tuxedo to a space-age glam suit.
The set leaned a little heavily on ballads during the mid-section, but was kicked into the stratosphere when the Boys blended “Se a Vida E” into Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida,” “Discoteca” and “Domino Dancing.” The set climaxed with “Being Boring,” and their first hit, the ever-droll “West End Girls.” It left this thought: Pet Shop Boys have been cool for the past quarter-century. Of what other group can you say that?
The Pet Shop Boys released their 15th album, Nonetheless, in April, their first in four years. As of this posting, they are nearing the end of a long-running tour called Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live that concludes with five sold-out shows at the Royal Opera House in London at the end of July. Rest assured, theatrics and props are involved. The close of their regular set has been “It’s a Sin.”
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