Downtown magazine

IT IS MIDNIGHT in Britain and Neil Tennant is alone at home dialling my number. What, no lackeys? Given his venerable position after more than 20 years of success with his musical partner Chris Lowe in the Pet Shop Boys, the Geordie-born singer is both figuratively and literally the grey eminence of international pop.

Surely putting through an international call for an interview is exactly what minions were created for?

"We travel quite lightly. We don't like to have a big entourage or anything," an amused Tennant says. "I think it's just being an adult. I don't know how [those with an entourage] can afford it. I've never liked to wander around in a huge group of people."

Maybe that's because when the Pet Shop Boys had their first hit, West End Girls, Tennant was already 30, with seven years in publishing and three years as a writer on the British pop culture magazine Smash Hits behind him. He had a chance to be an adult before he became a pop star.

"I think it probably was that," he says. "I think that if that had happened to us when we were 18 we would be completely different people. But that Smash Hits period was a great time - all that '80s pop stuff like Frankies [Frankie Goes to Hollywood].

"I think [Pet Shop Boys] were a reaction to that kind of group. We were the next generation, very, very different from them."

It wasn't just that Lowe and Tennant's eminently hummable pop songs folded into electronic rhythms were less in thrall to glam and disco than their compatriots' music. Nor even that Tennant's lyrics were spare but pointed, amused but never impersonal.

Their immediate predecessors had been wildly flamboyant; the publicly taciturn and motionless-behind-the-keyboard Lowe quickly adopted the uniform of casual (if expensive) street wear, permanent cap, sunglasses and expressionless face.

Meanwhile, Tennant affected the elegant, tailored look of the moneyed set and the droll delivery of a refugee from the Bloomsbury crowd with moves more Noel Coward than David Bowie. And it worked a treat, giving them 36 top-20 hits and 10 top-10 albums in Britain alone.

Even at the height of their fame the Pet Shop Boys could probably still wander about more anonymously than far less successful figures. "I think the Pet Shop Boys were more a brand name for a time," Tennant says. "I do get recognised all the time, actually, but in a very mild sort of way."

Is some of the distance people keep from Lowe and Tennant a reflection of the distance that the pair have quite deliberately put between them and the standard behaviour of a pop star?

"That's quite a good point. I don't know that that's deliberate, but [it's] what I am," Tennant says. "Morrissey wants the audience to throw themselves at him ... with us there is more of a dignity thing. We would be embarrassed by that behaviour, and we don't really want to be embarrassed.

"We do want the audience to love us," he adds, laughing, "but it's a matter of how it's displayed."

The downside to creating that distance, engendering that public decorum, is that quite often, particularly outside Britain, the Pet Shop Boys have been seen as ironic, playing with the emotion of the song and with pop stardom even as some of their songs delved into much deeper waters than those of other dance pop acts.

"I've never been able to understand that," Tennant says, slightly annoyed. "Because I think you can feel the emotion, sing the emotion, without having to do it in a conventionally emotional fashion. You can do it without going over the top about it. It's not in my nature to do that and it's more honest [for me] to do it my way.

"Nowadays people often think that for an artist to be an artist he or she has to very, very, very overtly express their feelings. But, for me, art has to have artifice to be art. You create something - it's not a case of it just is. That sort of sentimental wallowing glosses over, paints over, all the cracks and shoddy workmanship and I don't feel like that.

"My favourite singing stars have tended to be conversational. I often think that approach expresses more emotion. What you don't express, what you don't give, makes for a pop performance."

Sydney Morning Herald - 24th March 2007.