Bittersweet smell of success
(Filed: 27/11/2003)

The Pet Shop Boys have had 38 hits over two decades - so why, Tom Horan asks them, are their songs so infused with melancholy?

'I was against the idea of mayors of London. The post is inclined to attract publicity-seeking egomaniacs. I'm against the idea of leaders in general. And heroes, too. I go with the Bob Dylan line, 'Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters', or whatever it is. The point of a democracy is that everyone discusses everything, and out of that discussion you create a kind of policy dialectic by bringing together opposites."

The Pet Shop Boys: 'We're great ones for pissing off our audience'
A kind of policy dialectic? There is only one pop star in the world who could come up with that one. Neil Tennant, urbane front man of the Pet Shop Boys, is sitting on a chaise longue in a cavernous, bare studio space, saturated in late-autumn sunlight. Three feet to his right is Chris Lowe, his co-Boy, who has yet to say anything. The building belongs to the fashionable Brit artist Sam Taylor Wood. The duo have a recording studio on the ground floor here. To paraphrase one of their finest lines: she loves them; they pay her rent.

For nearly 20 years Tennant and Lowe have turned out impeccable, burnished pop music, songs of warmth, intelligence and humour that have sold in vast quantities around the world. They have amassed personal fortunes reckoned to be in excess of £30 million each. Over this period they have been among Britain's greatest cultural ambassadors, transmitting through music an almost tangible sense of wisdom and tolerance, humanity and fun. Today, however, Tennant is exercised by the vagaries of UK transport policy.

"My advice to the Tory leader if he wants to get elected," he says, "would be to announce that you were going to re-nationalise, as a conservative measure, the railways. We used to have this system and it worked well; I'm going to turn the clock back to the 1950s and bring back British Rail." Lowe looks on impassively from beneath a curious hat.

It is no surprise to find Tennant chiselling away at this deeply un-rock-and-roll topic. This week he and Lowe release a 38-track double album called, with laudable Pet Shop understatement, The Hits. Covering all their chart successes since 1985's West End Girls, it is a towering collection of work, with a diversity of themes that few other popular artists could hope to match. "The thing about Pet Shop Boys songs," says Tennant, "is that there's a lot of content, isn't there? They're very meaty. We always try to bring in subject matter from outside pop music."

When early copies of the album arrived, my colleague on the pop desk took the CDs to the gym, up-tempo disco rhythms being the Pet Shop Boys' basic raw material. But when she came back, she reported a curious phenomenon. "There are so many brilliant songs - it's fantastic to work out to. But somehow I come away feeling really sad."

And it's true. Shot through almost every track is a subtle but profound melancholy. I ask Tennant if this is an effect he has consciously sought.

"It's not sadness in our music - it's realism," he says. "There's a strong element of what we do that is similar to kitchen-sink drama. We take real life and set it to beautiful music, or stomping dance music. That combination can be read as melancholy, but I don't particularly admire melancholy. It's a bit self-indulgent."

Looking at the owlish Tennant, 47 and conservatively dressed, it is easier to imagine him pondering railway management strategy than experiencing ecstasy on a dancefloor. Yet, listening to The Hits, it's striking that there has been no diminution in the quality and intensity of his song-writing. It is true that the duo no longer sell quite the truckloads of the early 1990s, but they seem still to have a huge creative appetite.

'The hunger lies in the pleasure of doing it," says Tennant. "It's a wonderful feeling to make a song. And even better if people appreciate it. But when they don't, you still think: this is a beautiful thing we have created. Anyway, Chris still goes clubbing, don't you?"

Lowe, 44, fidgets. "Clubbing?!" he mutters. "Ha ha. Yes - dads down the disco. That's one thing I've always liked about Europe. People go out dancing who are much older. It's only in England that the only people who go are 20-year-olds. You go to Ibiza, there are granddads on the dancefloor. Hell's Angels. A real mix. We seem to have a cut-off point in this country: right, that's it - I'm old now. It's rubbish."

"In the 1920s and 1930s in this country, people used to sit down to dinner and then go out to a nightclub," says Tennant. "Now that music is so non-generational, I find it surprising that people don't still do that. But it is frowned on, the dads down the disco. Mind you, these days, most of the dads down the disco are the DJs."

Tennant embarks on a rolling critique of the "superstar" DJs, most around his age, who dominate club culture. "They're the new rock aristocracy, and when one of those comes along it's a sign of complacency. I've always been against rock aristocracies.

"I mean, why does Mick Jagger accept a knighthood? It seems totally to negate the Rolling Stones' career. It rewrites it retrospectively as a career in showbusiness. The idea that it actually meant anything, the idea that it represented any kind of alternative to conventional society, is ruled out. Why would they want the blessing of the establishment? But, in his heart of hearts, that must be what Jagger always wanted."

So are they not interested in recognition for their work, I ask Lowe, whose outstanding musical arrangements are so often overlooked amid the plaudits for Tennant's wry lyrical observation.

Lowe: No. I don't really like getting praise or credit for anything.

Tennant: That's why we're not after a CBE.

L: In fact, I would quite frankly be insulted.

T: We did get an award two weeks ago, however. We got the World Arts Award 2003. From Mikhail Gorbachev.

L: If you want to meet the person who's going to give you the award, then of course you accept it.

T: His daughter told us, 'When I was a teenager I used to listen to your records all the time.' And we had this great image of It's a Sin playing in the Kremlin, during glasnost.

So it's down with leaders and establishment recognition, and up with democracy. Are the Pet Shop Boys a democracy?

"A thriving democracy. Of two," says Tennant. "People are astonished at how democratic we are. We have this theory that our fans believe that we should be sacked from the Pet Shop Boys and someone else should do it. They think we're misrepresenting the brand by making records with guitars on.

"We're great ones for pissing off our audience. Every now and then, we have a cultural revolution and see how it ends up. Although I do think they like to pretend they hate it much more than they do."

"We had a meet-and-greet after one concert recently, where you get to meet the fans," says Lowe. "A conversation developed between me and two fans, and I just got blown out of it because I didn't know anything about the Pet Shop Boys. I wasn't worthy of being part of the conversation. They turned their backs on me."

But here, in the obsessive attention to detail that characterises both band and fans, lies the key to why The Hits is such fantastic listening. It's easy to make sloppy records with computers; to make ones that endure, that embody something human and universal requires a pursuit of precision that borders on the heroic.

It's there in everything from Tennant's near-pedantic enunciation to the witty and immaculately realised packaging of the music. Only the Pet Shop Boys could have delivered promotional copies of their latest single in sleeves impregnated with the scent of lavender.

"It was a bit old-fashioned Yardley," says Tennant, "but it was rather nice.

" 'We love the smell of your new single.' That's very us," says Lowe. " 'It's our best-smelling single.' Yes. Very Pet Shop Boys."