July 10, 1954 – Neil Tennant:

”Something happened to us in America. The theory is it was the video for Domino Dancing. I never really believed it. America is quite homophobic, but it’s also totally gay. It’s really weird. America is traditionally a country of extremes living side by side.’‘

Pet Shop Boys weren’t writing typical pop songs in the 1980s. The lyrics for It’s A Sin and Opportunities seem prophetic now. In case you missed the 1980s, and I am sorry you did because the music was fantastic, Pet Shop Boys are an English synth-pop duo, formed in London in 1981, consisting of Tennant and Chris Lowe.

Considering the era, with Wham! and Boy George, Pet Shop Boys still out-gayed everybody. With the wit of Oscar Wilde, and the compositional and lyrical sophistication of Cole Porter and Noël Coward, plus a sense of fashion that moved from stylish and chic to rough trade, Pet Shop Boys celebrated a gay aesthetic long before Tennant came out of the closet in 1994.

Every LGBTQ person knew exactly what Tennant meant in the lyrics of It’s A Sin, the angriest and most overtly anti-Catholic song ever to reach the U.S. Top 10:

”Everything I’ve ever done

Everything I ever do

Every place I’ve ever been

Everywhere I’m going to

It’s a sin”

Pet Shop Boys have sold more than 150 million records worldwide, the most successful duo in British music history. Three-time Brit Award winners and six-time Grammy Award nominees, they have had 44 Top 30 singles, 23 of them Top 10 hits, including four Number Ones: West End Girls, It’s A Sin, an amazing cover of Always On My Mind and Heart. Other hit songs include a cover of The Village People‘s Go West, Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) and an iconic duet with Dusty Springfield, What Have I Done to Deserve This?

Billboard magazine named Pet Shop Boys the Number One Dance Music group since the chart’s inception in 1976.

In the early 1980s, when Pet Shop Boys first started working together, they had very definite ideas about what they wanted to do. Tennet:

“We thought, no one else is doing gay disco, no one else is doing New York hip-hop with white vocals … when Blue Monday by New Order came out, I more or less burst into tears.”

Recorded and released in early 1984, West End Girls finally went to Number One in January 1986; before that, the Pet Shop Boys thought they’d never get their big break. Tennant:

“I remember being interviewed by this guy in America, who said, ‘Groups like you and New Order make this great music and then just whine over the top’, he presented it as if it was a choice, as opposed to singing like Otis Redding. I said, ‘Unfortunately, that is all we can do’. What you can’t do is always what shapes your sound and defines your style. I realize a lot of people don’t like my voice, but to me it expresses quite a lot of emotion. There’s a yearning quality to it which I really like.”

One of the criticism I hear about Pet Shop Boys is that they are not emotionally engaged in what they do, but I have always found their sound to be especially emotional. Tennant’s quivering, quiet voice is filled with an icy sort of passion, but passion none the less. Tennant:

“We’ve always tried to make it look effortless, as if our pop career was something we dashed off in between doing something else much more important.”

Tennant juxtapositions his understated vocals against the over-the-top nature of passion. This conflict reflects on the LGBTQ experience itself: You’ve got all this desire in 10 percent of population, and you might you find yourself making a pass at someone who might not feel the same and who might respond with violence. So, you keep your outer voice whispery like Tennant, but underneath is the grandness of the orchestration.

Pet Shop Boys’ collaborations and covers have always seemed especially dynamic and dangerous. There is an element of righting wrongs to it: Liza Minnelli has never had a hit single, so why not give her one? Dusty Springfield doesn’t even have a record deal, let’s record What Have I Done to Deserve This? with her. Minnelli considers Tennant and Lowe geniuses in the same league as Stephen Sondheim.

Pet Shop Boys critique masculinity the way classic rock bands exude it, but rather than the flamboyance the group offer the calm control of the outsider looking in.

Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) is really a punk song. Pet Shop Boys were the first pop stars to sound and look as if they had no influence from any music before the Sex Pistols. Tennant:

“It was meant to be an attitude thing. Let’s just state the obvious over a gorgeous over-produced backing track.”

“A pop song should always try and say something that hasn’t been said before. It’s the most difficult thing you can do, but you’ve got to try, because when someone manages it – and I think we have a few times – it’s the best thing ever.”

In 1994, Tennant gave an interview to Attitude magazine where he was finally open about his queerness. The magazine claimed that Pet Shop Boys’ brilliant record, Very, was “an album about what it means to be gay in the 1990s”. Tennant:

“It’s great to be ambivalent in pop music. It’s much more fun to have everyone reading things into what you do, because then you can do something blatantly obvious and pretend you haven’t. Now it’s all sort of normal and healthy, it’s a bit boring really. It makes me feel like telling everybody I’m straight. I told Ian McKellen that I was sick of being gay and I was going to get a girlfriend and he said, ‘Don’t tell anybody’.”

“Actually, part of me – I can say this now I’ve come out – thinks it’s all a bit of a cliche anyway: we’ve invented this thing called homosexuality and now everybody is conditioned into having a way of life which is either gay or straight. I mean 50 years ago I’d have been married with three children and having affairs with men on the side and frankly, I’d probably be happier.”

It is crazy that Tennant would say that. Queerness in pop music has often been something hidden away. Yet, Pet Shop Boys have managed to appeal simultaneously to gay and straight fans without being dishonest. Tennant:

“What we do is more about a gay ideal than the way things actually are. That ties in with a certain kin of romanticism that we both have: it’s a mythic thing really, rather than being totally truthful.”

Pop culture’s gay iconography is partly about deceit, and Pet Shop Boys have never been deceitful.

Tennant:

“Chris and I always complain that we’re not really icons. These are our two complaints: 1) We’re not icons; 2) We’ve never written a rock classic.”

I am grateful to Tennant and Lowe for breaking their own rules, for demonstrating that culture and commerce are not opposites, and for constantly changing, even though their work will always be described as “typical Pet Shop Boys”. In these trumpalist times, pop music needs sophistication more than ever.

Tennant formed his first band, Dust, in 1975. Surprisingly, they were influenced by the folk group Incredible String Band. His first job after completing university was at Marvel Comics. His tasks included toning down the suggestive costumes of certain superheroes. Tennant then began writing for magazines Smash Hits and The Face.

At Smash Hits, he was sent to NYC to interview The Police. While there, Tennant met Bobby Orlando, a producer whom both he and Lowe admired. Tennant mentioned that he was writing songs in his spare time and Orlando agreed to record some tracks with him and Lowe. Orlando produced the Pet Shop Boys’ first single, West End Girls.

 

Tennant is a lifelong liberal. However, Pet Shop Boys agreed to personal appeals by Conservative figures Boris Johnson and David Cameron for the group to play at the “winners’ parade” at the 2012 London Summer Olympics closing ceremony. Using his connection, Tennant pushed Cameron to use LGBTQ scientist Alan Turing’s 100^th birthday as impetus for the British government to formally pardon Turing. The formal pardon did, in fact, go through Christmas Eve 2013, with official paperwork signed by Queen Elizabeth II.

With the album The Pop Kids (2016) they had their 40th hit in 30 years, and 11th Number One. They did it with a song as wistful as any those on their masterpiece Behaviour (1990). Embracing disposable pop, Pet Shop Boys created lasting queer culture just as it was in danger of disappearing. They celebrate the melancholia of being gay.

Pet Shop Boys began a world tour this past weekend. Their shows are an aural and visual banquet.

Pop Kids

Remember those days the early nineties?

We both applied for places

At the same university

Ended up in London

Where we needed to be

To follow our obsession

With the music scene

Wherever we went

Whatever we did

We knew the songs

They called us the pop kids

‘Cause we loved the pop hits

And quoted the best bits

 

So, we were the pop kids

I loved you

They called us the pop kids

I studied History

While you did Biology

To you the human body didn’t hold any mystery

We were young but imagined we were so sophisticated

 

Telling everyone we knew

That rock was overrated

We stayed out ’til late

Five nights a week

And felt so chic

They called us the pop kids

‘Cause we loved the pop hits

And quoted the best bits

 

So we were the pop kids

I loved you

They called us the pop kids

 

It was a wet Wednesday night

We worried that no one would be going out

How wrong we were

When we turned the corner

There was already a queue stretching down the street

We swept straight in and you said

Oh, I like it here

Oh, I love it

Oh, I am never going home

 

I loved you

They called us the pop kids

‘Cause we loved the pop hits

And quoted the best bits

So we were the pop kids

Tennant/Lowe, 2016