SOURCE - West End Boys

'People used to say we'd only last three years...but we had other plans'

From their base in a derelict station the Pet Shop Boys tell MIKE JONES how they're determined to keep their career on track with a new album and confess that after 14 years at the top they're still searching for a new musical underground.

EARLY morning at a disused railway station in central London. Somewhere inside are two of British pop music's most enduring stars. Quite where, though, is another matter.

Amid the faded grandeur of peeling paintwork, rotting plaster and the memories of a million train journeys, a series of tiny arrows leads the way up several sweeping staircases.

Yet it seems like a wild goose chase when the top floor reveals nothing but wrecked floorboards and a labyrinth of empty rooms,

And a single closed door.

A turn of the handle, though, triggers a thumping disco beat and suddenly a giant video image lights up the back wall.

To the side, a couple of dogs start howling. Appropriately, really, considering these two have always seemed a little bit barking.

Welcome to the mad world of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe - a.k.a. the Pet Shop Boys.

"What else did you expect?" laughs Tennant from around the corner.

Indeed.

"It's much better here that a hotel, don't you think? There's more of a vibe."

You can say that again. The dogs might have stopped but the walls of St Pancras station are still shaking to the sound of one of their new tracks.

So much so that a sign falls off and hits the floor behind them.

"Better get some more Blu-Tak," says Lowe. Let's hope the dogs are tethered more securely.

"They're not real," says Tennant, still looking cool at 45.

"The noise is recorded so that when you walk through the door the barking starts."

"Some people have been quite scared".

You don't say.

"Actually, maybe we should have real ones to s**t people up," says Lowe.

As he finished his sentence the noise behind starts to fade the cranks up into a rising Village People-style anthem.

This, the lads inform me, is their new single, New York City Boy. Not exactly Y.M.C.A. for the new Millennium but probably as close to it as you're going to get. The track is the follow-up to the succinctly titled I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It To You Any More.

It is the second release from their forthcoming album Nightlife.

This appears to be not so much of a stab in the dark as a move into the realm of the concept album.

Not, they claim, that this is a deliberate move.

"It's a real mixture of songs," says Tennant, "but all the ones we recorded more or less seemed to happen at night."

The theme was prompted by the pair's long-held love affair with dance music which they virtually brought into the British mainstream single-handedly with their first No 1 smash West End Girls in 1985.

Their early success came at a time where the British club scene was hidden deeper underground than the Northern Line.

Back then a night out meant a trip to the local disco and Phil Collins was almost trendy.

All right, the last bit's a lie, but then the music scene was struggling to find a new direction for itself until Lowe and Tennant started to stir things up.

Far from being one hit wonders, the band have been breaking new ground ever since. They followed up their debut success with a string of classic hits such as What Have I Done To Deserve This?, Always On My Mind and Go West! Fourteen years later, though, and club culture has become the dominant force.

"We're permanently searching for a new underground because it doesn't really exist now," says Lowe, 39. "Something like the Chemical Brothers would have been underground once but now it's just mainstream."

As a result both he and Tennant are determined to set the agenda once again.

And their next project will see them take a serious change of direction.

"We've written a musical with the playwright Jonathan Harvey, who did the film Beautiful Thing," says Tennant. "We wanted to do something that's not like Phantom of the Opera.

"We wanted a comtemporary story with comtemporary music which no one's really done in England for a long time."

In the meantime, the Boys are preparing their first British tour for eight years which kicks off in Glasgow in early December.

Not a bad end to the year for a band who are one of the few survivors of the Eighties.

"People used to say we'd only last three years," says Lowe before Tennant interrupts: "But we had other plans."

And with that the doors opened, the dogs barked again and they were gone.

*New York City Boy is out now. Nightlife was released on October 11 1999.