Roaring Forties - Sunday Express newspaper - 16th January 2000

Or why the Pet Shop Boys aren't standing still
By Dominic Utton

NEIL TENNANT, singer with the Pet Shop Boys, that peculiarly English synth-pop duo that over the past 15 years has grown from quirky one-offers to national institution, sips tea in an elegant private club just off London's Kings Road and addresses the tricky issue of age in pop music.

Specifically, the age of people listening to his pop music. Neil and fellow Boy Chris Lowe (of the surly manner and one-fingered keyboard technique) are midway through a world tour and have noticed a change in demographics according to the countries they're playing in.

"It's quite interesting going from America to Europe to Britain," he says. "In America the audiences are in their 20s, then in Germany they're in their late 20s early 30s, and in Britain they're in their 30s, 40s and older. We get the grannies at the front these days."

Tennant himself is no spring chicken. At 45 (Lowe is 40), he has been aware of pop music for almost as long as it has been around, playing in his first group at 16. Called Dust, they spectacularly failed to make an impact. "We were convinced we'd become famous," he says. "It was very kind of stoned Seventies but, at the time, we thought it was absolutely brilliant."

Ten years later he was working for Smash Hits, the teeny pop bible. Three years after that he was on Top Of The Pops singing West End Girls, the Pet Shop Boys' first release - and first No1. It is widely assumed that after a while interviewing pop stars, Neil thought he could do better.

He laughs. "Not at all - it was all part of the same process. I'd been writing songs since I was nine, and I met Chris in 1981. We were already the Pet Shop Boys when I got the job on Smash Hits. I went to work there because they wanted me to edit a book - and also because they knew I knew loads about music. It was a bit of a shock in a way - they hired me as a book editor and I got there and found I was the news editor, which was a bit of a surprise.

"It was a great time to work at Smash Hits - in terms of music anyway, it was a fantastic time. There was so much excitement in pop, with Culture Club, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, hip-hop coming from America. After a year I went to America to supervise the launch of Smash Hits over there and by that time I was actually making records. People often assume I just thought, 'Hey I could do this!' but I was doing it beforehand."

In the 15 years between West End Girls topping the charts and Neil and Chris's latest Top 10 entry, the beautifully-titled You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk, they have enjoyed more than 30 hits and four No1s. Along the way they have also managed to create a wholly unique - though often changing - image, as well as practically defining a whole new genre of pop music.

The "two men and a synth" look might seem utterly run-of-the-mill now, and the "miserable words against a disco beat" sound might come across as similarly predictable, but it should not be forgotten that these two forty-something men (along with Mancunian synth-poppers New Order) did it first.

Despite once saying that having a No1 single is about as exciting as "having a cup of tea", Neil's enthusiasm for pop music is undimmed by age or experience. If anything, he feels more strongly about it now than ever.

"Oh God, did I say that?" he winces. "I think I must have meant it very literally - I was talking about West End Girls and it had been in the charts for so long it just seemed kind of inevitable it would end up at No1. In fact, West End Girls was probably the least exciting No1 we had. I remember when we had the Christmas chart-topper - with Always On My Mind - and that was hugely exciting because it was a race between us and Rick Astley.

"Everyone thought it would be Rick, because he was the hot thing that year. And I remember I was at my brother's house and we were having a family party, and we heard it live on the radio - ooh, it was very exciting.

"In those days it all seemed a bit more innocent. Now you get predictions every day of the week. A bit of the magic's gone, I think."

THIS LOSS of innocence in pop music is a subject that Neil is keen to expand upon. It turns out that the former editor of Smash Hits and self-styled authority on pop (after 15 years of creating pure pop records he has a fair pedigree) is not happy about the state of the nation... or indeed the nation's youth.

But whereas most fortysomething men (I'm thinking of my father at that age) traditionally bemoan modern music as destructive, subversive and rebellious, Neil feels exactly the opposite.

"The music business at the moment is going through an extraordinarily conservative phase," he says. "In fact, I don't think it's ever been this conservative - it's a little like pop music was before the Beatles. Having said that, I was watching one of those Sounds Of The Sixties programmes the other night and I realised that pop music before the Beatles was actually more exciting than it is now. It at least had a kind of musical ambition about it.

"Nowadays, music is regarded as a career, and we suffer from the fact that everyone thinks they're hip - and what that actually means is that nobody's hip. And that's very, very bad for pop culture. It means that there ultimately isn't a cutting edge.

"If you think of someone like Adam and the Ants in the early Eighties, that was some really weird punk music being made specifically for 10-year-old girls... and you compare that with I Have A Dream by Westlife! We really are now living in a sort of weird Fifties America culture.

"Pop music from the Fifties up to the early Nineties operated as an expression of youth. I don't think it does anymore. And if it does, then I think it only points out how conservative youth is."

Perhaps, as some kind of reaction to this conservatism, Neil and Chris have adopted an especially odd look for their latest single. The wild orange hair, big fake eyebrows and baggy combat pants come across as very early Eighties. Is this a case of a couple of men trying to recapture their own heyday?

Neil is nonplussed. "Our current image is just a way of saying you don't have to be yourself," he insists. "Everything nowadays has the style of naturalism; everyone dresses the same. You can no longer tell what someone is from their clothes. I saw Q Magazine last month. They had a picture of all their winners from their awards... and they all looked like students. There's no expression of anything other than utter ordinariness.

"Years ago I used to say that pop music was divided into 'He's one of us' or 'Wow - I would like to be like that'. And there's not a lot of the latter about any more. Pop has become a 'one of us' culture.

"I think what Chris and I are trying to do is something uncomfortable. We could of course present ourselves in the same way as everyone else, but I think if you look back at what we've done through the years, one of the things that makes it interesting is our very strong identity. We always created our own world that defines us against everyone else."

Who'd have thought it? The Pet Shop Boys - last bastions of youthful rebellion.