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Pet
Shop Boys Keep Fans Guessing May 20, 2002, 5:34 PM EDT Admit it. You always wondered about the Pet Shop Boys. There was always something slightly different about the British dance floor kings and the way they rolled out one smart, catchy hit after another. Maybe it was the gorgeous duet with Dusty Springfield. Or all that glorious work with Liza Minnelli. Well, wonder no longer. For the Pet Shop Boys’ latest tour of America, which starts a two-night run at the Hammerstein Ballroom Tuesday, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have decided to come out of the closet. “It’s true,” Tennant said, leaning forward in a stylish chair at the even more stylish Royalton Hotel in midtown Manhattan to deliver The Big Reveal. “We are...musicians.” Tennant laughs as he remembers how Boy George reacted when he first found out. “We were working on the song from ‘The Crying Game’ and I sat down at the grand piano and started working out the parts,” he said. “He was shocked. He said, ‘I’m going to have to re-evaluate what I think about the Pet Shop Boys now.’” Tennant and Lowe flirted with the idea of forcing everyone to re-evaluate them by making a hip-hop-influenced album — even going so far as meeting with Dr. Dre’s camp in Los Angeles to discuss it. Instead, for their latest “Release,” they opted for a more rock-oriented album, with the help of former Smiths guitarist and Electronic collaborator Johnny Marr. The first single, “Home and Dry,” reflects that orientation with Lowe’s sweeping synthesizer soundscapes and Marr’s jangly riffs. However, the track that’s getting the most attention is “The Night I Fell in Love,” a gorgeously sly ballad about a fictional affair with rapper Eminem. “This song is about a boy who goes to the concert of a rap star who’s supposedly homophobic,” Tennant explained. “He gets backstage. He gets to the hotel room. He ends up sleeping with the guy and he can’t believe it. So he says to the guy, ‘How come everyone thinks you’re homophobic?’ and the guy just shrugs like, ‘You know, it’s just show business.’ And actually, I think a lot of it is just show business.” The song, told from the boy’s point of view features lines like, “He said we could be secret lovers. ...Then he joked, ‘Hey, man, your name isn’t Stan, is it? We should be together.’” “A lot of stuff on the album is inspired by stuff happening at the time,” Tennant said. “There was a lot of controversy at the time about Eminem being homophobic. Then there was even more controversy when Elton John played with him at the Grammy Awards. Eminem’s excuse for the whole thing — his rationale for the whole thing — is that he’s not homophobic. He’s just representing the hatred in America. I think that’s probably true. He definitely plays characters all the time. “In writing our songs, I’ve often written from other people’s point of view,” Tennant continued. “I thought it would be interesting to write a song that was real pretty that brought gay and rap together. Above all, though, the song has this romantic glow. At it’s heart, it’s really sweet.” Few artists these days would even attempt such depth in a pop song. However, the Pet Shop Boys have been filling memorable pop songs with smart, stand-out stories for more than 16 years, starting with “West End Girls” all the way through “You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk.” That continues on “Release,” as glorious love songs like “London,” for example, are packed with more powerful imagery than a trailer for the run-of-the- mill action flick. On “London,” the narrator is a Russian immigrant arriving in England in search of a better life, delivering lines like, “I want to live before I die,” as well as satirizing the distrust that greets him. In many ways, “London” sounds like the opening of a Broadway musical, with a “Rent”-like chorus of “Let’s do it, let’s break the law.” However, Tennant and Lowe said the song wasn’t written during the period when they created their new musical, “Closer to Heaven,” which ran in London last year and may come to Off-Broadway next year. The duo is already planning a second musical, which they hope will be a bit more mainstream than the first — a look at drug culture — while building on the lessons they learned from that collaboration. “We don’t want to start work on any music until we know exactly what the story will be and what the songs are needed to do,” Lowe said. “Otherwise, you end up writing songs willy- nilly, without any purpose. And also, every single lyric in the song has to be relevant to what’s happening in the play.” However, first the Pet Shop Boys need to focus on the current tour, with its renewed emphasis on their musicianship and the reworking of their classics to fit a new set. They are excited about presenting their music in a more traditional, straightforward manner, even tackling interviews dressed-down in jeans and sweatshirts rather than their stylish designer finest. One song from “Release” cries out for a bit of theatrics, however. “I really wanted it to rain [on stage] during ‘Love Is a Catastrophe,’” Tennant said. “I thought it would be great if I was just soaking wet and then the show ended. That won’t happen on this tour, but maybe on an arena tour in the fall.” Yes, the Pet Shop Boys, who have doled out only a handful of major U.S. tours in the past decade, are already planning their next American jaunt, which may revive their plans of “Wotapalava,” a gay-friendly package tour that was set to debut last summer but got scrapped when Sinead O’Connor pulled out at the last minute. All they need to do now is cultivate a lineup they feel can fill arenas. “Maybe if we got Kylie to do it,” Tennant said, referring to Kylie Minogue as he thought out loud. “Kylie does a big theatrical production.” “Yeah, who doesn’t?” Lowe said, going for the punch line. “When
we started, no one was doing them. There had only been two theatrical
tours — Grace Jones and David Bowie — and then Madonna
did one, well, sort of did one, and then all the disco artists started
doing them,” Tennant said, laughing. “And now, we’ve
moved on.” |
