The Pet Shop Boys are back, always different, always the same, and permanently in fashion. Michael Bracewell speaks to the pair
For a pop duo who had their first number one hit – West End Girls – back in 1985, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, better known as the Pet Shop Boys, have a knack of remaining constantly modern.
They have developed a creative partnership which seems to operate beyond the boundaries of fashionability, and yet remains permanently in fashion. From such memorable occasions as Chris Lowe wearing an Issey Miyake inflatable suit while they performed on Saturday Night at the London Palladium – and refused to wave at the end of the show with the rest of the acts – to their later collaborations with artist film-makers such as Derek Jarman and Sam Taylor-Wood, they have always managed to mirror the Zeitgeist while retaining their cultural independence.
To some extent, the enduring relevance of the Pet Shop Boys could be due to the fact they found their perfect musical identity from the very beginning. By mixing the sensory rush of luxuriously orchestrated dance music with an image and lyrical style which was almost its direct opposite, foregrounding isolation and social commentary, they achieved an originality and acquired a stance which has simply intensified over the years. With the Pet Shop Boys, there is nearly always a hidden, sharp edge of critique – of society, of pop and of themselves – just beneath the lustrous sheen on the surface. After all, they even managed to cover Village People’s Go West with a Russian constructivist spin.
In a semi-derelict suite of rooms just beneath the highly ornate, neo-Gothic eaves of the old St Pancras Station hotel, Tennant and Lowe are sitting on an illuminated glass floor inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and wearing matching Versace bomber jackets made out of a gold metallic fabric designed to retain every crease and wrinkle. They look like off-duty astronauts.
“If you had this floor in your house,” announces Tennant, suddenly domestic in the midst of the Gothic-futurist ambience, “and it was taken away, you’d really miss it. Everything would look really drab, because it gives off a lovely light. It’s actually quite warm and contemplative.” He looks around the floor again, for all the world like a customer in Habitat or the Terence Conran shop, choosing interior lighting.
“I do think that the video’s quite new romantic,” says Tennant, “but new romanticism worked for such a short period of time, didn’t it? And needless to say David Bowie had the best moment in it by leaping in about two hours after it all started with the video for Ashes to Ashes. That really is the ultimate new romantic video, although there’s probably some good ones by Steve Strange and Visage. I remember when I used to live in a flat in the King’s Road, and I happened to open the door one day just as Steve Strange walked past. He was wearing look number three, which was when he had a beard and sat on cushions period, but I always remember it as quite exciting.”
“There’s not enough of that, these days, is there?” adds Lowe, as though remarking on the demise of corner shops. “The King’s Road used to be fantastic.”
“If I had the nerve,” Tennant confides, “I’d walk up and down the King’s Road dressed like we are in the video. Secretly, I’d quite like to do that. But it takes too long to put the wig on.”
“But that was the whole point,” exclaims Lowe. “The whole point of new romanticism was that it takes such a long time to get ready. That was what you did – get ready.”
Tennant adds: “I have to say that I like the bit in the video with the whole ritual of putting on the costumes. The costumes are a distancing technique – a way of saying that we’re nothing to do with anything else that’s happening in pop. Pop music, these days, is either cheesy – as in your boy bands – or it’s effectively natural-looking, and we wanted to do something with a level of artifice in it. I always liked pop that has a sense of wonder about it. I mean, would you rather see David Bowie on roller skates – like he was in his Day In, Day Out video – or would you rather see David Bowie dressed as a clown, walking along the beach at Hastings with a bunch of new romantics? I know what I would.”
Lowe continues: “Also, the Pet Shop Boys have always been obsessed with not being real, because we think that’s more interesting. But it can also look grotesque.”
“No. It really wasn’t designed for daily wear,” Tennant agrees. “It was designed like our pointy hats look a few years ago, to be seen through an electronic medium. We did the pointy hat in real life, just once, when we launched MTV in Russia. When we came out to do the press conference we discovered the ceiling of the room was too low for the hats, and then when I sat down the collar of my jacket rode up, so I had to kind of bend forward. An English audience would have found this hilarious, and we’d all have had a good laugh. But the Russians just sat there and stared at us, and then asked us the usual questions as though nothing was odd. You’ve got to have a nerve to do this kind of thing, you know. But when you look at our Pointy Hats video, it’s a classic video. It’s an attempt to move away from all the supposed naturalism in pop .”
With their new image, CD and forthcoming tour, the Pet Shop Boys are presenting, as usual, an entire theatrical package. This time, they have pulled off the considerable coup of collaborating with the visionary architect Zaha Hadid, some of whose buildings have been considered too radical to be constructed. Lowe is a trained architect and, in the light of this latest collaboration, you can see how the Pet Shop Boys are continuing their fascination with presenting artificial environments in which to perform their songs.
To judge from the exterior shots of the video, and the extreme styling of their new image, they are positioning themselves in a vision of the future in which the architectural brutalism of the 1970s has become weathered. It is, perhaps, the idea of the future itself appearing antique and old-fashioned, with every adult and child dressed, as revealed at the end of the video, in the extraordinary samurai chic which we have assumed was sub-cult gang costume – like the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange – rather than the mark of complete social conformity.
“We’re always looking for a new underground . ” Which could be a definition of the Pet Shop Boys.