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18/05 Velvet Nation, Washington DC Pet Shop Boys Rock Out? By
Richard Harrington THIS TIME around, Pet Shop Boys are leaving the glitzy costumes and extravagant wigs at home, along with their dancers and elaborate stage sets. Instead, the venerable synth-pop duo are bringing . . . electric guitars! And, in the tradition of Wings 30 years before, they've just finished an impromptu tour of British universities, with singer-lyricist Neil Tennant performing in jeans and a black T-shirt. Sounds more like Pit Stop Boys. According to the other Boy, keyboardist Chris Lowe, "Our new album, 'Release,' sounds quite a bit different from our previous stuff -- there's more guitar and things like that. So we decided to play universities and see how the songs went down, sort of the traditional rock 'n' roll way. "And we kind of liked it," he adds. "We've usually put this wall between us and the audience with costumes, wigs, set designs, lights, the whole theatrical thing, and we realized that we've never presented ourselves as musicians. We thought now was the time to do that. So it's no dancers, no singers -- no backup singers," he says with a laugh, acknowledging Tennant's take-it-or-leave-it vocal skills. The back-to-basics band consists of "two guitarists, a percussionist and our programmer and it's great," Lowe gushes. "It's the first time we've had that close contact with the audience. For most bands, this would be how you start out, but we do everything in reverse." That includes Lowe actually playing his keyboards onstage rather than simply programming them. "I find it a lot more rewarding," he says. "Before, I could never actually rationalize the point of playing anything live because I could always put it in the computer and the computer could play it better. But this time I'm playing a lot of piano, which is really enjoyable, and I'm getting a lot more out of it." It was Lowe's desire not to make another dance record that shaped "Release," which features substantial input from former Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr and a turn away from the uber-production that has defined the Pet Shop Boys' sound for 20 years. "This album is basically about songs, not the latest production techniques," Lowe explains. "And it's just a different mood. When we recorded it, we took all our studio equipment to Neil's house in the northeast of England, which is remote, on the edge of the moors, very isolated. I think this album reflects where we were when we were writing it -- we weren't being affected by the latest club scene and smash hits. It was all coming from within us." Thus the melancholy that's always been evident in Tennant's vocals is front and center in such romantic ruminations as "Home and Dry," "I Get Along," "E-Mail," "You Choose" and "Love Is a Catastrophe." It's a sound that's been around since Pet Shop Boys burst on the scene in 1984 with "West End Girls." Lowe, a former architecture student, and Tennant, a rock journalist who augmented his income by anglicizing spellings for British editions of Marvel Comics, gravitated to lush, danceable synth-pop that seemed a reaction to guitar-centric rock 'n' roll. They even wrote a song titled "How I Learned to Hate Rock and Roll." So why draft the likes of Marr on the new album? "I really wasn't ever against guitar, as such," Lowe says. "In fact, we've used guitar pretty much throughout our career, but we tended to use disco guitar. I was more against everything it symbolized -- the look of it, the posturing, the whole ego that it implied. When we were starting, it was so exciting because of the new technology of synthesizers and sequencers and all these kinds of things; guitar didn't fit in with how I saw music at that time. "But times change," he says. "Actually, we've never been purists in terms of technology, and we've used orchestras where required, and all instruments, really. On this album, the use of guitar is simply a lot more dominant." It's not that the Boys are abandoning clubland -- "Break 4 Love," a collaboration with DJ-producer Peter Rauhofer, was recently a No. 1 dance hit. It's on a bonus disc included with the first 60,000 copies of "Release," as are several songs from "Closer to Heaven," the musical that turned Tennant and Lowe into West End Boys. Though its run lasted only four months and its original cast recording was released only in England, "Closer to Heaven" may be closer to New York after recent discussions with theater producers there. A boy-meets-boy musical set in a gay nightclub, it charts the adventures of Straight Dave, who dreams of making it big in pop music but works as a dancer. He has to choose between the owner's daughter and a handsome drug dealer, all the while fighting off the attentions of a would-be manager putting together a boy band -- with everything set to dance grooves. Some liked it: Boy George, whose own clubland musical, "Taboo," opened recently, gave "Closer to Heaven" a rave in his regular Sunday Express column: "I was dancing in my seat the whole way through -- and I bore easily." Others hated it: One critic suggested it was "Closer to Hell." "It was never meant to be 'Les Mis,' a blockbuster musical," Lowe says. "Because of its subject matter, it was never going to appeal to mass-market audiences. We were trying to get a new audience, which we actually succeeded in. The audience this was aimed at doesn't generally go to the theater -- I mean, I don't normally go to the theater, so it's not an easy thing to do." Still, any show whose score draws on the synergy of pop, club and gay cultures has potential, and Tennant and Lowe will do some tinkering before any transatlantic crossing. "But we're still setting it in England. We're not transferring it to Brooklyn," says Lowe, adding that a second musical is in the works for 2003. "Closer to Heaven" took its name from a song on the Pet Shop Boys' 1999 album, "Nightlife," so perhaps the next one will be titled "The Night I Fell in Love," a track from the new album. It tells the story of a homosexual English schoolboy who falls in love with a blatantly homophobic American rap star. After a backstage concert visit, he follows the star to his hotel room for a "private performance." Turns out that homophobia was but a front. The tenderly wrought song doesn't name Eminem, but its lyrics spell out the star's identity. "I said we could be secret lovers/ Just him and me/ then he joked/ Hey man, your name isn't Stan, is it?/ We should be together," referring to the rapper's hit, "Stan," about an obsessive fan. Tennant, who is gay, has said that if Eminem's music was going to be provocative, he was going to be provocative back. The question is, can Eminem take what he dishes, or disses? After all, his new single "Without Me," from June's highly anticipated "The Eminem Show," attacks the FCC, 'N Sync, Limp Bizkit and Moby for their criticisms of his homophobia. So far, there's no comment from Eminem himself, but "MTV News" played "The Night I Fell in Love" for his producer and mentor, Dr. Dre (referenced in the lyric "over breakfast we joked about Dre and his homies"). Dre's reaction? "We needed another song anyway. They just gave us a concept. Oh my God. I hope they can stand the backlash. That's funny as hell." "We're not too worried," insists Lowe, who has an Eminem doll on his mantel at home. "We're actually big fans of Eminem." PET
SHOP BOYS -- Appearing Saturday at Nation. • To hear a free
Sound Bite from the Pet Shop Boys, call Post-Haste at 202/334-9000
and press 8121. (Prince William residents, call 703/690-4110.) |
