Pet Shop Boys

Pet Shop Boys are the greatest proof that danceable pop can be, at the same time, the cleverest and deepest music in the world.

For forty years, these two Englishmen —Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe— have manufactured impeccable synthesiser songs, made for the dance floor, with melodies that stick to you forever.

But underneath that bright, apparently frivolous surface there was irony, melancholy, social criticism, poetry. They got you dancing while they talked to you about loneliness, about money, about guilt, about social class.

A journalist and an architecture student

The band's origin already says something about how odd they are.

They met on 19 August 1981 in a shop selling records and sound equipment on King's Road, in Chelsea. Tennant had gone in looking for a connector for a synthesiser he had just bought, and they ended up talking about music.

Neil Tennant, from Newcastle, was not a musician: he was a journalist, deputy editor of a pop magazine called Smash Hits. Chris Lowe was studying architecture in Liverpool.

Two cultured, ironic, wholly unglamorous men, who started making songs for the pleasure of it.

And their big chance came thanks to Tennant's job. In August 1983 the magazine sent him to New York to interview Sting, and he took advantage of the trip to arrange a meeting with a dance music producer he loved, Bobby Orlando, and hand him a demo.

On that demo was "West End Girls".

That is how it all began: a pop journalist who ended up being one of the biggest pop stars of the kind he had been writing about.

T. S. Eliot on the dance floor

And their first big hit shows their whole game at once.

The first version of "West End Girls", Bobby Orlando's, came out in 1984 and worked in the clubs of Los Angeles and San Francisco, but little more. They re-recorded it with another producer, Stephen Hague, and that second version, released in October 1985, was number one in the United Kingdom in January 1986 and in the United States in May.

It sounds like pure eighties club: dark synthesisers, a sensual trumpet, Tennant half rapping in a British accent about the London night.

Most people assumed it was a song about prostitutes. It wasn't.

Tennant wrote it about social class —the poor boys of east London and the rich girls of the west— about the pressure of life in the big city, and he drew on two sources that do not usually appear together: "The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot, one of the most difficult poems of the twentieth century, and "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash.

They smuggled T. S. Eliot into a disco hit, and nobody noticed.

That was the genius of Pet Shop Boys: smuggling literature, intelligence and melancholy inside songs that people danced to without suspecting the depth underneath.

Irony, sadness and criticism, to dance to

The formula repeated itself, album after album, always impeccable.

"It's a Sin" turns Catholic guilt and an oppressive religious upbringing into an epic, dramatic anthem for the floor.

"Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" is a biting satire of the Thatcherite yuppie and the greed of the eighties.

"Go West" took an old Village People track and transformed it into a bittersweet, choral anthem.

And in the middle of it all, songs of an exquisite melancholy like "Being Boring".

Their trademark was that constant tension: cold, ironic, distant lyrics, sung over warm, danceable music, with a contained emotion beating underneath.

Tennant sang almost without smiling; Lowe, beside him, ignored the camera behind dark glasses. They were the exact reverse of the pop star who begs for attention.

And that, curiously, is why they were the coolest of them all.

Longevity and identity

There are two more nuances that define them.

The first is their incredible survival. While almost every synthesiser band of the eighties disappeared once the fashion passed, Pet Shop Boys carried on, decade after decade, adapting to new sounds without ever losing their identity. The Guinness Book of Records recognised them in its 1999 edition as the most successful duo in British music.

The second: in August 1994, Neil Tennant spoke publicly about his homosexuality in an interview with Attitude magazine. He had avoided the subject for years for fear that it would swallow the whole conversation about the group.

And a good part of the sensibility of their music —the melancholy, the club culture, a certain elegant outsider's view of the world— comes from there, from an experience that for a long time had to be lived in code, between the lines.

Pet Shop Boys gave a soundtrack, with enormous style, to a way of looking at life from the margin and from the dance floor at the same time.

What to remember

Pet Shop Boys are the demonstration that you don't have to choose between being clever and making people dance: you can do both at once, and do them better than anyone.

If you play "West End Girls", "It's a Sin", "Go West" or "Being Boring", you will hear perfect electronic pop, the kind that doesn't age, and if you pay attention to the words you will find poetry, satire, sadness and a very rare intelligence hidden beneath the beat.

Two Englishmen who never smiled for the photograph and who, even so, made some of the most joyful and most profound songs of recent decades.

They get underestimated because they made disco pop; but few artists in any genre were as clever.

Next time "West End Girls" comes on at a party, remember: you are dancing with T. S. Eliot on, and you didn't know it.

Sources

Pet Shop Boys, British synth-pop duo formed in London by Neil Tennant (vocals, keyboards) and Chris Lowe (keyboards), who met on 19 August 1981 at the Chelsea Record Centre, a shop selling records and sound equipment at 203 King's Road, where Tennant had gone to look for a connector for a Korg MS-10 synthesiser. Tennant was then a music journalist: he joined Smash Hits magazine as assistant editor and rose to deputy editor, a post he left in April 1985; Lowe was studying architecture at the University of Liverpool. The name comes from some friends who worked in a pet shop in Ealing, whom they called "the pet shop boys". Their breakthrough came when Tennant, on a trip to New York in August 1983 to interview Sting for Smash Hits, contacted the producer Bobby "O" Orlando and handed him a demo. The first version of "West End Girls", produced by Orlando, was released in April 1984 and was a club hit in Los Angeles and San Francisco; the re-recording produced by Stephen Hague, released in October 1985, reached number one in Britain in January 1986 and number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on 10 May 1986. The song deals with social class and the pressure of urban life in London, with a declared influence from T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and from "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash; Tennant has clarified that it is not about prostitution. Among their big hits: "It's a Sin", "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)", "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" (a duet with Dusty Springfield), "Go West" (a cover of the Village People track) and "Being Boring". The Guinness Book of Records recognised them in its 1999 edition as the most successful duo in the history of British music; they also hold the record for the most entries in the British Top 40 by a duo. Neil Tennant spoke publicly about his homosexuality in an interview with Paul Burston for Attitude magazine, in the August 1994 issue. The Police and Sting have profiles of their own on Rebobinados. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Readings of the meaning of their work are offered as the author's interpretation. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Attitude, Classic Pop and other press coverage.