Philadelphia Inquirer

Pet Shop Boys warm things up

With their tongue-in-cheek wit and sleek Bacharach-Morricone musical house blend, the Pet Shop Boys are Britain's most elegant post-modernist songwriters.

The grandeur of programmer Chris Lowe's synthetic dance-pop and the seedy satire of singer Neil Tennant's lyrics are legendary. And the outspoken duo's personal politics have made them among the gay community's highest-profile artists.

Yet despite Pet Shop Boys' acclaim, and a string of platinum albums and acerbic '80s hits that include "West End Girls," "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" and "Always on My Mind," audiences persist in thinking of the 21-year collaborators as distant.

"It's my voice," said Tennant, who with Lowe will make the Pet Shop Boys' first-ever Philadelphia appearance on Saturday at the Electric Factory. "It's been called chilly in its time."

PSB's edgy new CD Release seeks to warm up the ironic sophistication that is their trademark - emotionally, with depictions of ardor rather than the duo's usual idealized, detached romanticism; musically, with a soft parade of rock-ish guitars (provided by Tennant and former Smiths member Johnny Marr); and topically, with a treatise on violence against gays.

Tennant is well aware of how songs such as "Birthday Boy" - an allegory related to the murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard - reinforce the tidy biography the mainstream press has constructed for PSB. Sometimes, he said, he would like to forget the whole "gay thing."

"Gay people never talk about 'gay icons,' " said the singer, 47. Lowe is 42. "When Dusty Springfield died, the press wanted to know from me why Dusty was a gay icon. She wasn't. She was a bloody brilliant singer."

Image problems

The culture marginalizes non-heterosexuals by reducing them to cliches, he said. "I resent that gay people are only safe within the media when they're cuddly, muscley, tragic or" - especially in mass entertainments such as TV and film - "don't do anything with their penises for fear of tastelessness."

Tennant places himself in the Rufus Wainwright camp, where individuality takes precedence over slab-of-beef sexuality, and life and art have more value than purchasing power and a steroid-stoked body.

"Maybe the problem is I'm too feminine, or that I sing about death when being gay is all about avoiding it," Wainwright - whose lush CD Poses was one of the events of 2001 - told the New York Times last summer. The son of singer-songwriters Loudon Wainwright 3d and Kate McGarrigle loathes Madonna and loves torch songs - and it has been suggested that his iconoclastic views have produced some queasiness among gay men uncomfortable with an artist who compares himself to Cole Porter and Verdi. But Tennant couldn't agree more with the young Canadian.

"Everyone assumes being gay means being part of a community, that it's always a political response as well as a fashion or shopping response. If there's one generalization, it's that gay people don't want to be generalized."

Stereotypes' effects

Whether the stereotypes come from inside or outside the gay populace is inconsequential: They're made to divide and conquer, he said. As for the muscle-bound image prevalent in gay media, "some people like to live in a ghetto," Tennant nearly spit.

It was willful individuality last spring that brought Tennant and Lowe to organize the first gay-centric touring festival, Wotapalava. The road show was to feature PSB and Wainwright with Soft Cell, Magnetic Fields and Sinead O'Connor - acts sharing only the commonality of being gay or appealing strongly to that audience.

Said Tennant: "People assume if you're gay you like disco and show tunes" - comic pause - "which, by the way I do like. We just wanted to prove there is no one gay music." Ticket sales were said to be slow and the "gay Lollapalooza" disintegrated before it began when O'Connor pulled out. ("Guess she wasn't lesbian anymore," said Tennant, dryly - which is precisely what the gay-again, off-again O'Connor has maintained for years.) Tennant still hopes Wotapalava can be resuscitated.

In the meantime, Pet Shop Boys are busy not "being bored," as one of their signature tunes intones, by making quiet changes. Like their sexy musical Closer to Heaven, which closed its run on London's West End in October, Release is a hotbed of flesh and filibuster, torment and topicality.

Of the CD, with its dearth of samples and producer du jour beats, Tennant said: "We've desired, not so much to be timeless, but to not worry about being hip." For PSB to make a record anchored by brisk guitars and devoid of irony and epic dimension may be odd to PSB fans. Not to Tennant.

No more or less programmed or satirical than the duo's earlier CDs, Release distills big themes into story forms that offer emotion, redress and foreshadowing. "I Get Along," a tale of broken romance, was inspired by the forced resignation of a Northern Ireland politician. The disco-flavored "The Samurai in Autumn" considers "committed, flippant" renegades - a PSB self-reference to their place in the mass market. The stark "Birthday Boy" draws parallels between the birth and crucifixion of Jesus and the Shepard death. Even faux-homophobe Eminem makes his way onto Release: "The Night I Fell in Love" offers a twist on the rapper's hit "Stan" by imagining a tryst between Em and his number-one teenage fan.

"I buy [Eminem's] rationale that he's vocalizing the blindness of America, that he's playing Jerry Springer-type characters," said Tennant, who has no beef with the Grammy-winning artist, whose scenarios can be construed on the literal level as being antigay.

"I believe most people who are homophobic are afraid of sex, period - afraid to talk about it, afraid to let their kids near it. People fear homosexuality because they think it's only about sex. What they don't know is that" - he pauses, holding back the very last laugh - "well, the fact is, they're right."