The Pet Shop Boys

[Mina Alisa]

[YOUTUBE]gNliJ66WbbU&feature=player_embedded[/YOUTUBE]

 

:excite:

WOW CAN'T WAIT FOR THIS

[BiaIchihara]

From PSB FB:

 

 

And some of you with... ''no comments''... about Mika's latest outfit

 

:mf_rosetinted:

 

EDIT: there's more

 

http://www.tennant-lowe.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=229:pet-shop-boys-played-the-first-date-of-their-new-electric-tour

Edited March 24, 2013 by BiaIchihara

[BiaIchihara]

NEW SONG (Live at Cumbe Tajín Festival, March 22, 2013)

 

[YOUTUBE]7eV5ODQHpo0[/YOUTUBE]

 

 

EDIT: And they sang Fugitive (from ''Yes'' album) too

 

[YOUTUBE]t0opFBwsHGQ[/YOUTUBE]

Edited March 28, 2013 by BiaIchihara

[BiaIchihara]

Passing by here just to leave a lil gift

 

 

:mikadas:

Edited April 3, 2013 by BiaIchihara

[BiaIchihara]

From PSB FB:

 

The results for BBC Radio 2's Top 100 Albums of all time are in - and we are thrilled to reveal that the public voted Pet Shop Boys ‘Actually’ into the Top Ten!

 

Check out the full list here: http://tinyurl.com/cac5mqx

 

[BiaIchihara]

NEW VIDEO!!

 

[YOUTUBE]IDCU17wXktY[/YOUTUBE]

 

And the new album will be released on July 15th

 

 

Electric - the new album

 

 

Pet Shop Boys new album, "Electric", will now be released worldwide on July 15th (international dates vary) and is the first to appear on their own label x2 through Kobalt Label Services. Produced by Stuart Price, "Electric" features nine tracks in total – eight brand new songs plus a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s "The last to die" - and has a running length of 50 minutes. The British singer and rapper, Example, performs on one track, "Thursday". The album was recorded in London, Berlin and Los Angeles over the last six months with one track, "Fluorescent", written and recorded within the last month. Neil and Chris comment: “Our latest album often evolves as a response to our previous album and, whereas ‘Elysium’ had a reflective mood, ‘Electric’ is pretty banging! And working with Stuart Price on a studio album is something we have wanted to do for a very long time." The artwork (shown here) is by Farrow.

 

The album's opening track, "Axis", can be heard and purchased online now. An accompanying video can be viewed now at the link below where you will also find pre-order links for "Electric". The albums full track-listing is:

 

1. Axis

2. Bolshy

3. Love is a bourgeois construct

4. Fluorescent

5. Inside a dream

6. The last to die

7. Shouting in the evening

8. Thursday (featuring Example)

9. Vocal

Edited April 30, 2013 by BiaIchihara

[Mina Alisa]

NEW VIDEO!!

 

[YOUTUBE]IDCU17wXktY[/YOUTUBE]

 

And the new album will be released on July 15th

 

 

Electric - the new album

 

 

Pet Shop Boys new album, "Electric", will now be released worldwide on July 15th (international dates vary) and is the first to appear on their own label x2 through Kobalt Label Services. Produced by Stuart Price, "Electric" features nine tracks in total – eight brand new songs plus a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s "The last to die" - and has a running length of 50 minutes. The British singer and rapper, Example, performs on one track, "Thursday". The album was recorded in London, Berlin and Los Angeles over the last six months with one track, "Fluorescent", written and recorded within the last month. Neil and Chris comment: “Our latest album often evolves as a response to our previous album and, whereas ‘Elysium’ had a reflective mood, ‘Electric’ is pretty banging! And working with Stuart Price on a studio album is something we have wanted to do for a very long time." The artwork (shown here) is by Farrow.

 

The album's opening track, "Axis", can be heard and purchased online now. An accompanying video can be viewed now at the link below where you will also find pre-order links for "Electric". The albums full track-listing is:

 

1. Axis

2. Bolshy

3. Love is a bourgeois construct

4. Fluorescent

5. Inside a dream

6. The last to die

7. Shouting in the evening

8. Thursday (featuring Example)

9. Vocal

THIS IS AMAZING I already listned this 3 times

[BiaIchihara]

[YOUTUBE]GKxWCJOdjK8[/YOUTUBE]

 

[YOUTUBE]qNR8gQAoYCs[/YOUTUBE]

Edited June 18, 2013 by BiaIchihara

[BiaIchihara]

[YOUTUBE]SJzTzRGfR5U[/YOUTUBE]

 

July 15th, hurry up :excite:

[Mina Alisa]

[YOUTUBE]SJzTzRGfR5U[/YOUTUBE]

 

July 15th, hurry up :excite:

they are killing me

[BiaIchihara]

Pet Shop Boys Discuss ‘Electric’, Their Euphoric Summer Album: Idolator Interview

 

 

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are in the mood to dance. As Pet Shop Boys, the two have been pairing commentary on the ups and downs of love, nightlife, politics and history with lush pop compositions for nearly 30 years. The quantity and quality of their output is staggering — LPs, compilations, film scores, plays, a ballet, books, one-off singles and production work for other artists fill their vast catalog — and the UK duo’s 12th studio album Electric (out July 16 – pre-order here) stands among their best. (Believe me: “Axis” and “Vocal” are only the tip of the iceberg.) If you’ve been on the market for music to punctuate your upcoming summer nights, Neil and Chris have delivered in spades with this nine-track set.

 

That the beat-filled album was produced by fellow Brit Stuart Price (Madonna‘s Confessions On A Dancefloor, The Killers‘ Day & Age, etc.) shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Boys have been circling around him for years. Their remix of Madonna’s Confessions single “Sorry” preceded the Price-produced medley they performed at the 2009 BRIT Awards, and Stuart’s reworking of last year’s “Memory Of The Future.”

 

What is noteworthy is that the upbeat Electric will arrive less than a year after their previous LP, last fall’s pensive Elysium. It’s also the first Pet Shop Boys album to be released on their own label, x2 (pronounced “times two”), through Kobalt Label Services, after ending their longtime association with EMI/Parlophone .

 

I had a lengthy talk with Neil and Chris about Electric in May, in which they explained, at times hilariously so, the making of the album and the inspirations for many of their rhythm-driven new songs. Dive into the interview below.

 

It’s an absolute pleasure to speak with you both. Given that you have your own label now, are you finding there are work-related duties you never had to do before?

CHRIS LOWE: It’s very early days for us, yet, with this new arrangement and going through the label services. It hasn’t affected us personally, but it might be more work for our management company. We don’t know yet. We’re only at the beginning of the process.

NEIL TENNANT: We’ve always had a very hands-on approach to what we do anyway. So at the moment, it doesn’t feel much different, really. And also Kobalt are a big, global organization. In a sense, it’s being with a big, global record company — they have offices all over the place. I kind of wondered when we left Parlophone whether [we’d] sort of feel a bit out in the cold, but it doesn’t feel like that at all.

 

Is it within the realm of possibility that x2 will offer up releases by other artists, in addition to Pet Shop Boys?

NEIL: When we left Parlophone and signed to Kobalt, it hadn’t really been at the forefront of our mind that would involve us having our label. But when you have a label with a logo — it’s got a very elegant logo — you suddenly think of other things you could put on the label. At the moment, we have no plans [to release material by other artists] at all. But I think it’s obviously possible that we could do that.

 

Speaking of “times two,” Neil, you might appreciate this, given your background with Smash Hits. In the late ‘80s, we had the American edition of the magazine, called Star Hits…

NEIL: Which I launched!

 

Indeed you did! And I remember buying a particular issue after school one day, because you two were featured. Inside, there was a small writeup on a duo called Times Two.

NEIL: Really? Were they American?

 

I believe so. They did a reggae-pop cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia.”

NEIL: I’ve blocked that. I’m sorry, I don’t remember them at all.

 

Well, then, let’s move to your new record. I wrote last year that Elysium felt like the perfect soundtrack to the fall, while with Electric, it now seems you’ve gone in the opposite direction. It plays like the very definition of “summer album.”

NEIL: Yeah, it does. Totally.

 

 

It’s quite a fast turnaround, given that Electric will be your second album in a 10-month span. How many of these tracks were written during the sessions for Elysium and held over?

NEIL: I think about half. “Axis” was. “Axis” was written right at the beginning of Elysium. “Vocal” was almost the first thing we wrote for Elysium. And then “Shouting In The Evening,” there was kind of a rough demo of it. The new songs were “Love Is A Bourgeois Construct,” “Bolshy” — “Fluorescent” was only written in the last six weeks. It actually had the quickest turnaround from being written to being on a record that we’ve ever had. It’s one of the reasons why the record was delayed.

 

That’s right — according to the original announcement, Electric was supposed to be out by now!

NEIL: Originally it was going to be [released] in June. Well, there are other reasons as well, but six weeks ago ["Fluorescent"] didn’t exist apart from the rough instrumental demo that Chris had made. We’ve always had the idea that when you make a record — I’m talking about Elysium now — you make song choices. And we had this idea of making it a very reflective and, as you put it, autumnal album, which is a good word for it. We [then] thought we were going to do what we called the Dance album. But that, the Dance album with new songs, has turned into something bigger, which is the Pet Shop Boys’ 12th album. It’s kind of a remarkably quick turnaround after Elysium. But we feel really excited about that. When we go out on tour, we’ve got two new albums to play songs from. We’ve been through a very prolific writing phase. We’ve written Elysium, Electric and also the Alan Turing work, which we’ve pretty much finished now, and that’s all within the last two years.

 

So let’s begin with “Axis,” which sounds a bit Giorgio Moroder. I recall you were going for that sound back with “So Hard” off Behaviour. Was there ever a point in your career where you considered working with him?

NEIL: Actually, Johnny Marr mentioned to us that he’d met Giorgio Moroder, and he said, “Giorgio Moroder would like to work with you.”

CHRIS: Hasn’t Giorgio Moroder just worked with Daft Punk?

NEIL: He has. It’s funny, because when it was announced that Giorgio Moroder had worked with Daft Punk, there was a kind of brief conversation about what Johnny had said. And also, on our last album, Elysium, we actually considered approaching Nile Rodgers to produce it, because we met him at a festival in Japan. But then we heard that he’d been ill, so we didn’t. We ruled it out. Anyway, it’s great to hear that he’s back, and I think it’s great that Daft Punk have got both those guys on that record.

 

Stuart Price produced Electric. From a distance, that collaboration seemed to be on the horizon for awhile now.

CHRIS: We worked with Stuart on the programming of the last show and also on this show, so we already knew that we got on well. We like the same things, so it’s a very natural thing for us to work with Stuart. It was effortless, really. When we were writing some of these dance songs, we clearly imagined Stuart producing them.

 

Neil, you mentioned the track “Love Is A Bourgeois Construct,” which contains what I feel is one of your most “up,” giddy intros.

NEIL: It’s a sample of Purcell. It’s not a sample at all, actually. It’s being re-played by Stuart from the original sheet music.

 

Where did the idea for this song come from?

NEIL: In terms of the lyrics, I read this novel from the late ‘80s by David Lodge called Nice Work, which is one of three novels he wrote set on a university campus in the Midlands in Britain — based on Birmingham, actually. And in that novel, a university lecturer in English has to shadow a guy who runs an old-fashioned industrial factory in Birmingham. In the course of this, the guy who runs the company falls in love with the lecturer, who he can’t stand in the beginning. There’s a great moment where she says to him, “Love is just a construct of Victorian fiction. It’s a middle class idea.” It just gave me the idea of the phrase “love is a bourgeois construct.” And that, for some reason, just suggested this story about a guy whose wife — or whatever, girlfriend — left him, and he’s led a very respectable bourgeois life. He’s seen where it’s got him, his wife leaving him, so he’s going to give up the bourgeois life and lie around and be lazy and read and not try hard anymore. But it all came from a paragraph in this David Lodge book.

 

A few songs, like “Inside A Dream” and “Thursday,” capture the excitement that comes with hearing brand new Pet Shop Boys music, but they also sound like instantly recognizable compositions from the two of you. Did you set out to reference sounds you’ve worked with before?

NEIL: I don’t think we deliberately set out to do that. Some of that is probably Stuart’s influence. It was something we got into that we liked. Across the album — although I don’t know that it occurred to us until it was finished — there are a lot of bells. At the start of “Bolshy”; there’s a great bell line in “Inside A Dream” — it’s absolutely fantastic. In the mid-‘80s, we always loved the bell sound Madonna, particularly, used to get on her records in those days. I think also there’s a simpler approach. You can hear what each sound is doing. The bass sounds to me early-‘80s-ish. But we never at any point sat down and said, oh, let’s make a record that sounds early-‘80s.

CHRIS: Actually, if you play it back-to-back with a record of ours from the ‘80s, it would sound completely different. But they’re sort of from the same place. A lot of the studio production techniques are very, very contemporary. You couldn’t even do a lot of the stuff that’s on this record back in the ‘80s. It really could only be made now.

 

The track “A Face Like That” off last year’s Elysium almost plays like a preview of Electric, given that it’s more up-tempo. Did you ever consider holding it for this album?

NEIL: We could have kept it for this album. Andrew Dawson, who produced Elysium, really liked it. And also, “A Face Like That” has a very long, moody intro, which seemed to make it fit onto that album. But you’re quite right — it could easily be on this album. I’ll tell you what, EMI really liked “A Face Like That.”

 

It seemed that fans latched onto that song in particular, as well. Were you surprised at the reaction to “A Face Like That”?

NEIL: I don’t know that I was really aware of it.

CHRIS: I’m not aware of any reactions! [All three laugh] Actually one thing I don’t like now is that you can be aware of what people think of everything you do. You can’t do anything these days without comments everywhere from people. So I try not to look at all the comments on iTunes and stuff like that — because when you do, I wish that I could reply back, and we don’t have that facility to tell them what I think of their review! I’d make some horrible personal comments about them, as well.

 

I remember, Chris, there was a time when you were on Twitter — maybe about four years ago?

CHRIS: Well, that’s why we came off it! [All three laugh]

Edited June 22, 2013 by BiaIchihara

[BiaIchihara]

“Thursday” sticks out as a real pop gem on this album. How did this particular day of the week earn the honor of being immortalized in song by Pet Shop Boys?

NEIL: The song started as an instrumental demo written by Chris, which he’d written on a Thursday. The demo title was “A Thursday Night Special.”

CHRIS: Basically — I don’t know if it’s the same in Los Angeles — but in London, Thursday is really the start of the weekend now. Everyone goes out on a Thursday. No one can be bothered to wait until Friday anymore! So that was just the title. When you’re writing a song in Logic, in order to save it, you have to come up with a title. So I come up with loads of crap titles, which very rarely get used.

NEIL: Well, there are two of them on this album!

CHRIS: Yeah. But I normally come up with them simply to save the song. I never expect them to end up being used in any remote way.

NEIL: Something that happened with this album is that Stuart Price wanted us to work on the tracks in alphabetical order, which is how the album did indeed work out. And so we got up to “Thursday Night Special” in alphabetical order, and that was just reduced to “Thursday” then, when it was saved, while we worked on the music for the track. It really fits it, musically, in that place on the album. I remember being at home and thinking, well, I’ll have to think of a lyric for a song that you can call “Thursday.” I was in my kitchen and I just thought of this very simplistic thing: Thursday, then Friday — it’s soon gonna be the weekend. And it took off from there.

 

What brought about the Example collaboration for “Thursday”?

NEIL: We had this idea of having a rap on it, and we downloaded from the Internet an a cappella of Nicki Minaj. And that was in the rough mix. Actually, it sounded really good on it, too.

CHRIS: I think you could probably put her rap on any record and it would sound good.

NEIL: Yeah. What song was it?

CHRIS: I can’t remember now. Not a very famous song.

NEIL: Anyway, we discussed having a rapper — endless discussions about who to ask to do it. Then Stuart was going to be working with Example, who is, of course, a rapper and a singer, and we persuaded Stuart to ask Example if he’d do something. And Example was really into it, which was great! He said he’d do it if he could sing, as well. He took the track away and spent quite a while working on it. We weren’t there, by the way — this was all done in Los Angeles and we were in England, I think. He did this great rap and he sang a different melody and words over the chorus. So then we had that, and listening to the chorus that I’d sung — “Thursday, and Friday, it’s gonna be the weekend” — sounded like we could have something with a bit more energy. So we came up with another chorus, which was kind of influenced by what Example had sung: “It’s Thursday night, let’s get it right.” And then we put them all together. It was quite a lengthy process, but I think it works really well.

 

It’s certainly one of those songs that keeps unfolding. It’s quite beautiful, actually.

NEIL: Thank you. And his rap style is gorgeous. It reminds me of, as Stuart suggested, [something] like Sugarhill Gang, or that sort of period. It’s not like ego rap. It’s like that warm, rhythmic rap.

 

The roll-out for this album feels very similar to Elysium last year, when “Invisible” was unveiled as a buzz track before the single “Winner.” Was that the same thinking with “Axis” and Electric?

NEIL: You’re right, but the question is nowadays, what is a single? You can buy this single track on iTunes — it’s actually being released on 12” vinyl, as well — so in that respect it’s a single. We don’t expect to get overwhelming radio play with it. I don’t think it’s been formally serviced to all radio stations. It has been serviced to one or two. I think what we really wanted to do with this is establish that this is a very dance-based record. We really want to make sure that’s the vibe that goes out with this record. But it’s interesting what a single means now for us. We’re not going to get that radio play in Britain. It’s not possible because of our age. It doesn’t matter what record we made. We’re very grateful Radio 2 plays our records, and that one or two other stations do, but broadly speaking, they’re just not going to play it. So you have to look at that as a kind of freedom thing. You can put out something whenever you want, really. You don’t have to follow those airplay rules.

 

In that respect, it must feel like a very exciting time for Pet Shop Boys.

NEIL: It does — it feels like it for us.

 

I inevitably have to ask about the Bruce Springsteen cover on Electric, “The Last To Die.” I wasn’t familiar with that particular song before.

NEIL: Neither were we! [Laughs]

 

How did it come to your attention?

CHRIS: My sister liked the song and she said…

NEIL: How did she get to hear it?

CHRIS: I’ll ask her, because I don’t know. It’s quite obscure and, actually, I don’t think my sister is a big Bruce Springsteen fan. I will ask her how she came across it. But, anyway, she recommended it to us, and the thing is, when you listen to it, you can really imagine how we could do that song. It’s got a fantastic guitar riff that would immediately translate into a synthesizer riff — even though it ended up as a vocal riff on our version. But it works for four on the floor. The lyrics are very uplifting, really. I think it’s fantastic. And also, we sort of imagined that it would be a bit like a Killers record, working with Stuart —a mixture of rock and electronic dance music, with a bit of filter thrown in for good measure. [“The Last To Die”] sounds like a Pet Shop Boys record.

 

Speaking of The Killers, given that Brandon Flowers is a fan of Bruce, I was going to ask if he’d heard your take on this song, and what he thought of it?

CHRIS: Brandon would probably have heard it, I think.

NEIL: Stuart said he liked it.

CHRIS: Actually, it would it would be great to have got Brandon guesting on it. [Laughs]

NEIL: [Also laughing] We discussed it but then we thought, it’s a bit too Killers then, isn’t it? It’d seem a bit cheeky if we approached him.

 

I think that actually could have worked pretty well! Do you know if Bruce himself has heard your cover?

NEIL: No. I think we’re going to send it to him at some point.

CHRIS: I hope he likes it, because I think our version is really very good. We’ve not done it with any sense of irony.

NEIL: Far from it.

CHRIS: It’s a very genuine cover version.

 

Neil, you mentioned this being a full-on dance album, and it does feel like it’s in a similar vein as your Disco series or 1993’s Very companion Relentless, particularly with tracks like “Axis,” “Fluorescent” and “Shouting In The Evening.”

NEIL: I think they sound more like Relentless than they are Disco.

 

Let’s take a moment to talk about Relentless, which is your only release that’s no longer available. Any plans to ever re-release it with bonus material

NEIL: Well, there aren’t really any extra tracks to release it with. I agree it’s a shame that it’s not out there. We haven’t [any plans] at the moment, but one day maybe it will [be re-released]. I quite like the fact that you had to buy it at the time. I think there’s something quite exciting about that.

 

I want to thank you for the upbeat Electric closing track “Vocal,” because you gave many fans a scare with both “Legacy” on Yes and “Requiem In Denim And Leopardskin” on Elysium — final songs on each album that possibly hinted at your retirement from pop.

NEIL & CHRIS: [Laugh]

CHRIS: That’s very funny, because we have been finishing all of our albums with quite depressing songs recently. It’s quite nice to end on an upbeat note for a change — on a note of optimism.

 

You mentioned “Vocal” was written early on.

CHRIS: We started to write that song in Berlin. We thought it was fantastic when we wrote it. We started to record it with Andrew Dawson in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t really coming together right. It didn’t seem to fit the Elysium album. Then we started to work on it again with Stuart. But it didn’t really come together until the day before the album had to be delivered. It was never quite as — we’ve been using this word “banging” all the time, but I can’t think of an alternative word for it — but it’s really pumping, isn’t it, in its present form? It was a bit more laid back in its original state. I mean, this sounds to me like it should be played on the main dance floor in the middle of the night, really. It’s probably the most uplifting, euphoric piece of music we’ve put out in a long time.

 

Your Electric Tour, which seems like quite the energetic spectacle, is underway, and it hits the States in September. What can we expect from it?

NEIL: I think you can get quite a strong sense from the video for “Axis,” which is the opening video of the show. And we’ve taken very seriously — with Es Devlin and also the choreographer we’ve worked with, Lynne Page, and our light designer — that the show is called Electric. We wanted to use that word as an inspiration for the way the production feels and looks. The last show, which was very theatrical in a costume-y sense, also had…not a narrative, but a sort of through-line, with the girls with the cubes on their head. There was a relationship between the other two dancers. This one is more impressionistic and electronic. We’ve got lasers for the first time on tour. There’s a lot of backdrop film. There are two dancers who play very specific roles here and there — in that video for “Axis” they are the two people with monster heads. Like the last show, it’s structured in four parts. We went through our back catalog and chose songs that we thought fitted “electric” — songs that we’ve never done before, like “Fugitive,” for instance. It’s a bit darker than the last tour, though it gets very poppy toward the end, of course. And it gets quite euphoric, really. So it goes from electric darkness to euphoria.

 

I’m really looking forward to seeing you do “Fugitive” and “I’m Not Scared” live. Last thing: I’ll land in trouble with my mother if I don’t mention that she just texted and said to tell you hello. She’s been listening to your music since I was a kid. She had no choice in the matter.

NEIL: Oh, wow.

CHRIS: That’s so nice. Thank you.

 

See you on stage in September.

NEIL: Thanks very much.

CHRIS: Great! Bye.

Edited June 22, 2013 by BiaIchihara

[Yasi]

Thank you sooo much for the interviews:thumb_yello: can't wait to buy the album!

Edited June 22, 2013 by Yasi

[BiaIchihara]

Thank you sooo much for the interviews:thumb_yello:can't wait to buy the album!

 

not only you :excite:

 

[YOUTUBE]Po_PoW4SJ3c[/YOUTUBE]

[BiaIchihara]

I see they're liking to tease us A LOT

 

[YOUTUBE]6b6CPybxYtQ#at=15[/YOUTUBE]

 

[ängi]

Pet Shop Boys is so coool.. they're havin concert in tallin this friday .. it's the same event where mika performed last year.. Too bad I can't go

[BiaIchihara]

Pet Shop Boys is so coool.. they're havin concert in tallin this friday .. it's the same event where mika performed last year.. Too bad I can't go

 

Hope you have a next time

 

I've never been to ANY gig, everytime they come here, the place is very far from where I live (I can't travel on my own yet) and the tickets are very expensive

 

But what comfort me is Electric is coming very soon

[BiaIchihara]

A lengthy Neil Tennant interview

 

Chris Lowe was having something done to his teeth on the day we went to see the Pet Shop Boys, but Neil Tennant showed us around the band’s storage dungeon so it was alright.

 

Right then. There’s a Neil Tennant interview coming up, but first let’s get some housekeeping out of the way.

 

To kick things off, here’s an exclusive stream of one of our favourite songs from the new Pet Shop Boys album ‘Electric’. It’s called ‘Inside A Dream’ and we like it a lot.

 

IT’S GOT BELLS IN IT.

 

Secondly, once you’ve listened to that, we’ve put together a Spotify playlist of some of the songs Neil mentions during the course of the interview.

 

(Actually the Demi Lovato one is our fault, apols.)

 

Anyway once you’ve got the playlist off and running you can start the interview. It all takes place at the Pet Shop Boys’ office, a former architect’s office in a quite nice part of London.

 

So this is where the magic happens.

THIS is indeed where the magic happens.

 

I didn’t know you had an office here.

Well, it’s top secret!

 

How long have you been here?

It’s funny. Our accountant said to us a few years ago, “do you know how much money you pay on storage?” And we said, “not really”. Well it was an astonishing amount of money. He said, “if you put that into a mortgage, you could buy a little warehouse in Stevenage or somewhere”. We said: “great! We’ll buy somewhere in [PRICEY NON-STEVENAGE LONDON LOCATION]!”

 

And do you use it for storage?

Would you like to see?

 



YES.

Follow me.

 

At this point Neil leads us into the building’s basement. At the bottom of the stairs are two doors. Neil opens the first and we walk into a room with shelves full of old synths and music-making paraphernalia.

 

Blimey.

This room here is our gear. We’ve got tonnes of the ****ing stuff. Obviously we are on tour at the moment so it’s not all here.

 

Is this all quite recent or is it from ‘through the years’?

Well, this one (points at vintage-looking synth) looks quite ‘through-the-yearsy’. It’s got wood on it, anyway.

 

Do you remember what you recorded with it?

I don’t know. Unfortunately Chris is at the dentist this afternoon, which is why he’s not here. Anyway the other room is much more exciting.

 

He flings open the door to the second room full of costumes, memorabilia, props and archive material.

 

 

Goodness me.

Now! This (points at scale model of ‘Can You Forgive Her’ video) I was given for my 40th birthday by Howard Greenhalgh, who directed that video. We should dust it down and put it upstairs!

 

What’s that wire coming out of the back?
 Does it plug in?

I think it must do! (Pulls pink bobbly waistcoat off rack) ‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing!’ (Points at suit) Glastonbury 2000. (Inspects jacket) Fundamental tour. (Finds white coat.) ‘Go West’ at the Brits!

 

In the bucket!

In the bloody bucket! And this fur coat… (Pulls fur coat off rack) This is from Performance – it’s the fur coat that the singers wore in the famous blowjob scene! (Examines another jacket) The Nightlife tour! Worn with the skirt. That’s a very nicely made jacket, actually – ‘one’ could still wear that…

 

 

I can see some pointy hats.

Yes! They’re not the real ones though. The real ones got destroyed at the ‘Very’ launch party. What do you get the impression of though, from these, is how incredibly low-tech they were.

 

And this staff, as wielded in the ‘Go West’ video?

Yes it is! God! (Grabs staff, stands triumphantly)

 

How does it feel?

It feels pretty good actually.

 

There’s a certain level of authority to a man with a stick.

The great thing is, you know what you’re going to do when you’ve got a stick. You’ve got something to hold onto. (Opens box) Here are presents people give us, which we can’t bear to give away because they’ve put so much work into them. (Opens another box) This is archive stuff, for a historian of the future. (Flicks through notebook) These are Chris’ notes from the Release tour. Look, here are the notes for ‘Love Is A Catastrophe’, a very underrated song. (Plonks ‘Discography’ display stand on box) Marketing stuff, always worth keeping. A mixing desk, that Polaroid camera you’ve always promised yourself… (Picks up oddly-shaped award) What’s this? (Peers at engraving) Oh, this is only from last year! (Laughs)

 

Edited July 3, 2013 by BiaIchihara

[BiaIchihara]

What’s in this box here?

(Rifles through box) Discs and tapes. ‘TFI Friday, December 2000 – It Doesn’t Always Snow At Christmas backing track’. Elton John introduced us. There were complaints! (Opens box full of dozens of pairs of sunglasses) Chris Lowe’s sunglasses. Magazines are always saying, ‘can we do a piece on Chris Lowe’s sunglasses’, and we always say we don’t know where they are. Mind you I don’t think this is all of them.

 

Did you see that man trying to flog Chris’ ‘Suburbia’ sunglasses on that Channel 4 programme, Four Rooms?

Were they actually Chris Lowe’s genuine sunglasses? (Looks disapproving) I don’t think he should have those. They’ve obviously been STOLEN. So anyway, that’s the store room. We do still have another storage place, of course, and that is in somewhere like Stevenage.

 

We head back upstairs, where Neil makes a cup of tea.

 

When did you start work on the new album?

Well if you remember, when we saw you in Berlin…

 

This was at the ‘Elysium’ launch where you told me, on the day your album was released, that you already had another one ready to go?

That’s right. And you couldn’t believe it. But we had! Well, pretty much. But then we were writing this piece about Alan Turing, and we ended up writing new songs, like ‘Bolshy’ and ‘Love Is A Bourgeoise Construct’. ‘Electric’ was originally an eight-track album until two and a half months ago Chris made some demos at home. I remember I was cooking and flicking through things on my computer and I thought, “what’s this track?”. I thought it was something on the Kompakt label. Then I realised it was Chris, and I sent it to Stuart Price, who produced the album, saying “why aren’t we doing this?”

 

If you were thinking of it as an eight track album, were you originally thinking that it would be the next album in the ‘Disco’ series?

Well I think it’s more than that. When we started work on it, it was more Chris’ project really, and we agreed that it wasn’t going to be ‘Disco 5’. But it still had the slight feel of a side project. But then last year we sat down and said, “what is this? Is this the Pet Shop Boys’ twelfth studio album?” And the answer was: YES IT IS. And there was something rather exciting about bringing out an album – originally it was due to come out in April – eight months after our previous one. David Bowie did it with ‘Heroes’ and ‘Low’, why can’t we?

 

Is it quite a recent development in pop, to create an almost artificial delay between albums? You release an album, go on a long tour and nothing from one campaign can overlap with another? It seems that at one point people would just whack out albums as soon as they were ready.

Well when ‘Ziggy Stardust’ by David Bowie came out it was very soon after ‘Hunky Dory’. Me and my brother already knew every song apart from one, because he’d already played them on Sounds Of The Seventies on Radio 1. And so with this album, we decided that we were going to go on tour, and start the tour playing songs that hadn’t been released yet. Yes, we decided, we’re going to do that. Of course, as ‘the singer’, at the front of the stage, I was slightly nervous about this.

 

Because you thought it would all end up on YouTube?

Well, the YouTube thing kind of worked for it – again, I thought back to me and my brother Simon already knowing ‘Ziggy Stardust’ before it came out, and it just helped to create the excitement. So I was quite happy that it was a way to get the songs out. My nervousness was more about whether the audience would be bored to death. We made the incredibly crazy decision – not that I had much choice in it – to dump ‘Go West’ as the final encore, and do ‘Vocal’ as the last song. I was very reluctant about this. All the way through the concert I’m thinking, “I’m not looking forward to this”. So we come back on, and I start singing: “I like the people…” The audience look puzzled. “I KNEW IT!” I think. “I knew this was going to happen.” Then it goes into “It’s in the music…” Well, the whole place erupts. WHOLE PLACE ERUPTS. For a song they’d never heard. There is, nowadays, a very strict ‘you can only play your hits’ thing. Which I don’t really agree with. If I were to see David Bowie live, I don’t really want to see ‘The Jean Genie’ followed by ‘Suffragette City’ followed by ‘Let’s Dance’, great as they are; I want to hear something from side two of ‘Heroes’, or something from ‘Diamond Dogs’. Because I’m a fan. I know a lot of people won’t agree with that, of course. But on this new tour we have two new albums to play songs from, and they all work really well. And everything is ‘Electriced up’.

 

How is everything ‘Electriced up’? Have you just put a donk on everything?

It’s funny, you used to say ‘put a donk on it’ a lot, but I only discovered last year, while working with Stuart Price, that there’s an actual ****ing video! I had no idea! I sort of knew what it meant, but I didn’t know it actually referred to an actual song!

 

What did you think of it?

Well, it made me want to put a donk on everything. Also with this album, we were inspired by the EXTREME irritation that someone had written a review on iTunes, slagging off ‘Elysium’, saying they wanted “more banging and lasers”. And in fact, we thought, “alright then – more banging and lasers, here it comes”.

 

Is ‘Vocal’ about a particular night out?

It started off as a joke – based on the fact that dance songs don’t have vocals any more. So it’s got the line “I like the singer, he’s lonely and strange – every track has a vocal, and that makes a change”. Which was rather camp. But then it turned into something quite heartfelt. I can remember us being on the Discovery tour in Brazil, and on the last night of the tour we were all on the dancefloor – me, our dancers, Chris Lowe, Chris Heath, in this club in either Sao Paulo or Rio, and it was just . I remember having a very similar experience when we were somewhere during the era when ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ was out, which is quite a long time ago…

 

It’s fifteen years ago!

It can’t be fifteen years ago. God, is it that old? I thought it was ten years old. Anyway, you couldn’t get enough of that record at the time. I remember looking around and everyone was just so happy. Also with ‘Vocal’, while I didn’t do the rave thing in 1988 and 1989, Chris saw the light then and I was thinking of that from his perspective. It’s actually a very sincere song.

 

It’s quite ‘It’s Alright’.

Embarrassingly for him, our lighting director on the current tour said to me, ‘it reminds me of an old song called ‘It’s Alright’, have you ever heard it?” I said, “heard it? We had the ****ing hit with it!” But yes, it is quite like that. It’s about what music does to people.

 

Is it true that Chris Heath wrote a book on the Discovery tour – but it will never come out?

I don’t think we’re sure where the manuscript is. It might even be in the cellar below us.

 

Why didn’t it come out?

Well, it was too much like the previous book. Also, there was too much stuff that couldn’t be printed. (Chortles) I think we’re going to publish it posthumously. There’s another one too, actually, from when we went to Russia. I don’t know where that manuscript is either. It’s not that the content is shocking, necessarily, just what we say about other popstars. I’ll say to Chris Heath, “I’m sure I would never say such a thing about Bono.” “Yes you did.”

 

I guess you started going out in the 70s – between then and now, which has been the best decade to go out dancing?

The first club I ever really went to was this club on Neal Street, in London. It was a gay club – we used to pronounce it ‘Shag-o-ramas’, but it was spelt Chaguramas. It’s the name of a Spanish sheep or something. I was 18, coming down from Newcastle, and I used to go to Shag-o-ramas on a Saturday night with my two friends from Tottenham. It was so expensive and we were so poor.

 

How expensive is expensive?


Well, half a pint of lager was fifty pence. And fifty pence then must be eight pounds now. It was inconceivably expensive. We’d maybe have one drink each. And that was when disco music was really just starting. They’d play ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ by Lou Reed – which was meant to be a dance record. They’d play ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’ by The Temptations. We used to go crazy to that. And then I didn’t go clubbing for a while, but in the early 80s I met Chris and we started to go clubbing. We’d go to The Bell in Kings Cross, but the most fun was when I went to New York for Smash Hits in 1983. I was living in a quite smart flat on the upper west side with the designer, Kimberley Leston, who sadly killed herself in the 90s. But every night – I was only 27 – we used to go back to the flat from work, have a Chinese takeaway, then at 11 o’clock we’d be in a taxi heading downtown from West 80th Street to Avenue A to go to The Pyramid, or Area. Area was my favourite club: every month they changed the way it looked. You used to walk down this corridor and they had glass boxes with living human artworks in them. I remember once being at the bar and turning round to ask Kimberley what she wanted to drink, and Andy Warhol was standing behind me. There was an amazing mixture, which has never really happened in Britain, where you would get club kids, and boys wearing cut-off shorts and nothing else, but also the entire uptown crowd would come down too. So you’d have people in tuxedos and ballgowns mixing with drag queens. The music was amazing. And before that, when Chris and I went to New York to record with Bobby O, Arthur Baker was in the studio next door, and we’d go to The Funhouse, which was a club for Latino and Hispanic kids, really. And Jellybean Benitez was the DJ. There we were! In the booth with Jellybean! He was going out with Madonna at the time, of course. So that’s my favourite club period, but I think Chris would say the rave scene in 1988 and 1989. And one of my favourite club memories is of being in a club in Naples, rapping ‘West End Girls’ with Miss Kittin. These days, when we’re in Berlin, we go to Berghain.

 

What happens there?

It’s the best club in Europe! It’s a converted East German power station. It runs from Friday night until, I think, Monday night. Maybe even Tuesday morning. The great thing, when you get to a slightly advanced age, is you can go at midday on Sunday. Chris and I sometimes go with friends for two hours, have a couple of drinks, then go out for lunch! (Laughs) You stand at the bar, you hear what they’re playing, it’s quite interesting. I can’t really be bothered with clubbing now though – I’ve put in forty years. I deserve a long service medal!

 

You know how everyone’s gone bonkers for this new album and seems genuinely very excited for it?

Yes…

 

How does that make you feel about the way people responded to the last album?

Um…

 

The reception was quite muted.

I think we feel frustrated about the last album because we don’t like to feel boxed in as to what we’re ‘meant’ to write and record and put out. Chris and I had for a long time wanted to make a ‘Los Angeles’ album, with a very smooth sound, and we made that album with ‘Elysium’. I mean one track, ‘A Face Like That’, could be on the new album. In some ways it should be. I think it’s an amazingly good album, I’ve got to be honest with you. It’s one of the albums I feel most proud of. But for people who don’t really know us, and have a sort of an idea about us, ‘Electric’ is more what the Pet Shop Boys are meant to be. And it was interesting making that album with Stuart. What’s strange with this album is that Stuart decreed, at the start, that we would work on the songs in alphabetical order. And they’re still in that order, so it starts with ‘Axis’ and finished with ‘Vocal’. ‘Love Is A Bourgeoise Construct’ was originally just called ‘Bourgeoise’, which is why it comes after ‘Bolshy’.

 

What, the whole album recorded in alphabetical order?

Yes! ‘Axis’ was the first song that was finished, and ‘Vocal’ was the last.

 

Broadly speaking, you worked on all the tracks at the same time though, though?

Not really, no. There was one point when I had to go away somewhere for a few days and I said, “can we work on ‘Bourgeoise’ when I get back?”. I got back and Chris just went, “sorry, we worked on that while you were away because it was next in the alphabet”.

 

Did you ask Stuart why you were working in alphabetical order?

It’s pointless to argue with Stuart. In the same way that Stuart has, in the studio, daytime television on. Which is fine. But he has it with the sound up. (Looks aghast) This is unique in my experience. I normally ask for the TV to be turned off as I find it too distracting. Stuart wasn’t turning the television off. “It gives a rhythm to the day,” he said. You’ve got the property programmes, then the news, then this quiz programmes, then children’s TV, then you go home. I was in Peter Jones the other day buying a lead and they had one of those **** quizzes on the TV there…

 

The Chase is good, with Bradley Walsh.

Oh we only had the BBC on. We had Escape To The Country.

 

Before you go any further, what lead were you buying in Peter Jones?

My luggage got lost between Bogotá and Mexico City and I’ve got a new MacBook which, annoyingly, has a different size charger. Which I think should be illegal. Anyway, I had to get a new one, so I did. And of course, at that point, my bag reappeared.

 

You’ve covered Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The Last To Die’ for the new album. What would you like Bruce Springsteen to think of your cover?

I’m sure he’s going to think, “wow, that’s a good song I’ve written”. We’ve brought out its full potential. It was Chris’ sister who suggested that. It’s got a very good guitar riff, so of course you immediately think, “great, that’s the synth riff”. Then in the studio we turned it into a vocal riff. It’s a powerful song, I like it.

Edited July 3, 2013 by BiaIchihara

[BiaIchihara]

What did it feel like being an unsigned band?

Well it didn’t last very long. We were out of contract the day ‘Elysium’ was released. Actually, they had six months to pick up the option, and in fact at one point ‘Electric’ was going to come out on Parlophone. It was a very indecisive period for Parlophone, what with EMI’s sale to Universal, and partly they didn’t want to pay us the size of advance that the contract decreed, which I sort of sympathised with them over actually.

 

Why did you sympathise with them?

Because it was rather a large advance and maybe our record sales don’t justify it. (Laughs) Although, I don’t know, maybe market the records better? (Laughs) But then Angela, our manager, was talking to Kobalt. I was interested by them. They’re a huge publishing company, they’ve got everyone from Paul McCartney to Max Martin, but then they released Nick Cave’s album. And we actually thought that Nick Cave was quite a good comparison in a funny way to the Pet Shop Boys – a cult artist around the world. So we thought, “well, let’s see how Nick Cave does”. I was thinking, “yeah, Number 36 week one”. Actually, it was Nick Cave’s highest-charting record of his career around the world. And we thought, “oh, actually they can do it”. And at that point we signed to Kobalt.

 

You’ve got your own new label, x2, through Kobalt. How does it work?

With this model, Kobalt don’t pay you an advance. And an advance is sort of the ‘point’ of a a traditional record label: they give you an advance, you make a record then they own the copyright, rather bizarrely. Which I’m amazed nobody’s challenged yet. Anyway, with Kobalt they don’t pay you an advance so in a sense you ‘invest’ your recording into the project, then they do marketing and distribution and manufacture, then you get a vastly higher payoff. Vastly higher. Assuming it sells. And it feels like a partnership, not like you’re working for someone. Actually, to be honest, with EMI it always felt like a partnership anyway.

 

You mentioned Max Martin and Paul McCartney just then. Who’s best?

BEST?!

 

Yes.

You can’t really… I mean if you were to look at career overall, Paul McCartney hands down. But Max Martin helped to create the modern sound of pop music.

 

So who pays for a video now? Obviously the artist always ends up paying for the video anyway, but when it came to ‘Axis’ for instance, did you think ‘Parlophone would have paid fifty grand for this video’?

Parlophone would never have paid that.

 

Are you more careful with your money now?

We were careful with it anyway, with Parlophone. The period when we spent the most money on videos, believe it or not, was ‘Nightlife’. Those videos were all phenomenally expensive: ‘I Don’t Know What You Want But I Can’t Give It Any More’, ‘You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk’… The record didn’t sell that badly, you know, around the world. I’ve got a few gold discs in a box somewhere…

 

Do you keep all your discs in boxes?

In my house in Durham, there’s a place that we used to use as a studio, and in the toilet there are some gold discs. It’s a very random selection of gold discs: a Taiwan gold disc for ‘Very’, for instance.

 

Why do people put gold discs in toilets?

It’s because you don’t want to… Well actually, they’re not that great looking really. But it’s great to have them, I’m not knocking that! It’s good in a toilet so people can sit there and look at them. It’s a sort of ‘not taking them too seriously’ thing…

 

Is it a bit of a humblebrag?

It’s not a humblebrag.

 

Well, sometimes it is. It’s the one room of the house that you know people will visit.

Now you see, you’re looking at that as someone with no gold discs. (Guffaws) And let’s focus on which toilet they’re in. Mine are in the toilet of the studio – only used by me, Chris and Pete Gleadall. If you want a humblebrag – we worked with Blue Weaver in 1985 – he did the song ‘I Want A Lover’ on our first album – and in his toilet was a multi-platinum disc for ‘Staying Alive’. Now, I was impressed by that, humblebrag or no humblebrag. One way to handle hold discs, which don’t really work as art, but I’ve seen this in other rock stars’ houses, is just to have a corridor RAMMED with them. Now that looks great, and it does, almost, turn into art.

 

With this new label you’ve started, is there anyone you’d like to sign to it?


Yes but we don’t know who. The problem is that I don’t like that much stuff at the moment. I hate all acousticy stuff. I used to say, many years ago, ‘I’ve got this vision of a blonde boy playing guitar, at Number One in the charts’. This was when the Spice Girls were huge and a boy playing guitar having a hit was inconceivable. And now here we are.

 

It’s interesting at the moment that most pop seems to be one of two extremes: on one end very sudued and on the other really boshing ‘EDM’ or whatever…

It would not be a bad idea if the two extremes came together. I wish people would rediscover poetry. I don’t mean Wordsworth – although there would be no harm in that – I mean: “This is what it sounds like when doves cry”. Who’s going to write that nowadays? It’s an amazing line. I don’t think it even occurs to anyone now that there’s a subject for a song other than oneself.

 

If someone came out with ‘When Doves Cry’ now, don’t you think they’d be shot down as pretentious?

No. I don’t think they would. If ‘When Doves Cry’ came out now, you’d think it was amazing. But at the moment it seems there’s no imagination, imagery, or a subject other than oneself… There’s no imagery or metaphor.

 

There’s quite a lot of metaphor on the Demi Lovato album. Well, ‘Skyscraper’ is a simile, but it’s a strong one.

Maybe I should listen to that.

 

How about inventing a pop band? You can do this now!

We can – don’t think Chris hasn’t suggested it. Chris, in fact, wants to launch a range of hotels called x2. The hotel thing gets mentioned all the time. He also, always, wants to launch a range of underwear.

 

Would it be worth the BBC approaching you to be a coach on The Voice?

No.

 

Have you already said no?

No, but I have already said no to American Idol. We talked about this at Glastonbury, I think.

 

Yes we did.

American Idol approached me when Simon Cowell left to do American X Factor, to see if I would be interested in being considered to replace him. They wanted me to fly to Los Angeles for an interview with them and, frankly, I didn’t want to fly to Los Angeles for a half hour interview. I said, “I’ll do a conference call”. I was at my house in Durham, and my dog was barking all the way through it. Anyway, they were very nice. The man talking to me was FRENCH! You don’t expect that, do you? “Neil!” he says. “We love you! You’re so opinionated!” And I said, well, I’ve never seen American Idol but I don’t like the sound of it. “Well this is why we love you! You’re so opinionated!” And I said, I’ll probably just be really rude to everyone. “This is why we love you – you’re so opinionated!” (Sighs) Anyway, I got them to send me a DVD of the programme. I watched the first two minutes and I just thought, “I can’t do this”. I couldn’t do the bit where you come out, holding hands with the judges, and just stand there. I was flattered to be asked, though.

 

You seem like quite a strange choice for American Idol.

Do you know what they wanted? I think they wanted a bitchy gay Englishman, and I think someone said, ‘get that guy from the Pet Shop Boys’. Well that’s what I assume. My issue, as much as anything else, was that I don’t think it’s possible to be ‘Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys’ and ‘Neil Tennant, American Idol judge’. I think the Pet Shop Boys ‘project’, as we call it nowadays, would have been totally compromised and I would have just become Neil Tennant the TV personality. I’ve never had any interest in that sort of thing – and I’ve had some quite interesting offers over they years to present arts programmes for BBC2 and Channel 4.

 

What did you think of the Daft Punk album?

It’s very ambitious. This has been the year of two amazing marketing campaigns: David Bowie’s, and Daft Punk’s. They both revolve around neither artist having made a record for a while and creating a lot of anticipation.

 

He says, releasing his second album in the space of a year.

Exactly! (Laughs) The total opposite of what we’ve done. But they’ve also been about selling an idea. If you compare it with us, we go to Los Angeles, we make an album, we use the people who sang on Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ and all the rest of it, but we don’t make a big deal of that. We mention it in passing – we don’t say ‘we’re making a classic Los Angeles album and we’re drawing upon the history of Los Angeles to do that’. We don’t like to do anything that’s retro. We like to think, in our own way, that we’re moving on. Although with Daft Punk it’s exciting to think they’ve worked with Giorgio Moroder and Nile Rodgers. It’s a soft rock album really, isn’t it?

 

It’s interesting that people have said ‘oh here come Daft Punk showing the EDM lot how to make dance music’, because it’s not really a dance album. It would have been great if they’d stormed back with a smart electronic album to show the world that yes, you can actually make bright and brilliant dance music… This feels a bit like backing away from the fight. I mean if you walk away from a fight you win in a way, but not as much as you win by knocking someone out.

I mean on Nile Rodgers’ tracks he’s really earning his share – the first track is really just Chic, isn’t it. Have you read the Nile Rodgers book? It’s very good. He defines a pop song: the verse is only an excuse for the chorus, and the chorus is only an excuse for the breakdown. I said to Chris, ‘we should paint that on the wall of the studio’. It’s totally true. What I like on the Daft Punk album are the ballads: track two, for instance. They sound like Art Garfunkel is about to come on and sing. It feels like a very interesting and luxuriously created and expensive record and the idea is presented that this isn’t the sort of thing people do nowadays, although if you go to Los Angeles or Nashville you’ll find people doing that seven days a week. But they don’t have a computerised vocal on it.

 

Who would you like to produce your next album?

Stuart Price. ‘Electric’ is the first album in a trilogy. I think it works, as an idea. The way the three of us work together is unusual, it’s not like any other album experience we’ve had. He seems to bring out the best in us, and he has the nerve to totally overrule us, which is probably quite a good thing.

 

Would you let him join the band?

He can play live with us if he likes, but I don’t think he’d want to join the band. The Pet Shop Boys is a duo.

Edited July 3, 2013 by BiaIchihara

[BiaIchihara]

The Boys of Summer (Interview for Instinct magazine)

 

 

Summer 2013 needed a soundtrack. Thankfully it’s Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe to the rescue. Thirty years into their career as the preeminent gentleman of pop and conveyors of all that is witty, heartfelt and occasionally tongue-in-cheek under the strobe light, Pet Shop Boys are about to release their 12th studio album, Electric. For production duties, the UK duo enlisted fellow Brit Stuart Price — yes, the man behind Madonna’s Confessions On A Dancefloor and a dozen other pop gems from the past decade. The result, dare we say it, is the pair’s most banging album since 1993’s Very.

 

What brings you two to Los Angeles?

 

NEIL TENNANT: We’re just in LA for two days before going down to Chile. Our manager also lives here, so we’ve been meeting with her on a few other things. We’re about to start a South American tour on Monday, and we go to Argentina, Colombia, Brazil and Paraguay.

 

The Electric Tour hits the States in September. I caught you twice last time around, on the Pandemonium Tour, including the date in Italy with Take That.

 

NEIL: Oh, in Milan! Yeah, that was fun.

 

Do you anticipate this jaunt lasting as long as the previous one? That tour stretched on for three years.

 

NEIL: Yeah, well, we’ll see! The Pandemonium Tour was officially going to take two years. But then the Take That thing happened. You know, sometimes you just get offers to do festivals or to do certain gigs, and so we’re happy to do that.

 

Let’s discuss the new album, Electric — which is coming out on your own label, x2. Chris, do I understand this correctly, that you came up with the name, x2?

 

CHRIS LOWE: Well, actually, we didn’t think we needed a label. We hadn’t really thought about it. And then we suddenly had to have one. We came up with a few ideas. Can’t think of what they are now. But I like DSQUARED2, the clothing label, and I thought, ah, DSQUARED2 — and there are two of them; they’re twins. So I thought, what would the Pet Shop Boys’ version of that be? I thought maybe x2. I put it on my iPhone and it had a very nice simplicity to it. It looked very elegant with the “x” and the “2”. So the exciting thing is having a new brand, a new label. And we want to do different things with it — not necessarily music-related.

 

Your previous album, the beautiful Elysium, was only released last September, and yet here you are with a brand new record, out in July. This is like a feast for all the Petheads out there.

 

NEIL: It’s kind of a remarkably quick turnaround after Elysium. But we feel really excited about that. When we go out on tour, which starts Monday, we’ve got two new albums to play songs from. And also, I think, with our new label set up, we feel the freedom to do what we like. I think that’s a very important freedom for us. When you’ve been making records for a long time, it’s great to suddenly feel that you can do things and not necessarily always worry about radio play or whether the music industry finds it a bit strange to release two records in a 12-month period. And we can do that! So it feels like a great, free time for us.

 

In your video for the Electric teaser track “Axis,” it appears as if the orange cone hats are back. Is this a wink toward Very?

 

CHRIS: A lot of that is video projections from the latest show we’re doing. The designer, Es Devlin, who we’ve worked with before, wanted to reference some of our older stuff. But also, when we appeared at the closing ceremony of the Olympics in London, they wanted us to wear those pointy hats. They’ve become part of our iconography now. They’re black, though, not the orange ones, so they’re slightly different from Very.

 

NEIL: The Very ones were actually made of cardboard, or paper, even. Gareth Pugh made the ones for the Olympics. And the ones we wear for this tour are much more designer.

 

Electric is a very “up,” nine-track album produced by Stuart Price, and it plays like the perfect record for summer.

 

CHRIS: The main thing about working with Stuart is it’s just a lot of fun in the studio. There’s a lot of laughter and a lot of chatting. He works very, very quickly, which we always like with people. It’s never boring working with Stuart. He’s the perfect collaborator for us.

 

The new single, “Vocal,” undeniably has you two getting back to the dance floor.

 

NEIL: It genuinely sounds like a dance anthem. And also, it was a challenge writing the lyrics to a song about being on the dance floor without being cheesy. I’m really proud of the lyrics. I think they’ve got a lot of poetry about them — you know, “aspirations for a better life are ordained.” Sounds positively biblical! [Laughs] I think it’s a lovely song. It’s got a joke in it — which actually slightly dates it, because dance music has gotten more vocal recently — about having every track as a vocal, and that makes a change. So much dance music is instrumental.

 

Looking ahead, you’ve been working on a project revolving around the life of Alan Turing. How did this come about for you two?

 

NEIL: Chris saw a documentary on television about Alan Turing. He was, for people who don’t know, an English mathematician and inventor and code-breaker, and he invented what is now the modern home computer —the universal machine, which is one machine that would solve every problem. During the second World War, he had this big team that broke the Enigma Code, so they could find out what the German submarines were doing in the Atlantic. He very much helped to win the war. But also, he was an open homosexual. He used to tell people that he was a homosexual, which was illegal in those days and very shocking for people. He was very, very direct about it. He ended up being prosecuted for that and going to court. As punishment, they didn’t send him to prison, they gave him injections of female hormones. And as a result of being found guilty of gross indecency, his security clearances were withdrawn. He became depressed and he killed himself.

 

What a horrible end for a man who was essentially a pioneer and a war hero.

 

NEIL: He died and still remains a guilty man in the eyes of the law. Anyway, this film that Channel 4 made was very moving. We both read this biography by an Oxford professor called Andrew Hodges, who wrote this in the early ‘80s. He came from two directions: one, he’s a professor of mathematics, and two, he was a gay rights activist in the 1970s. Both of those strands came together in this magnificent biography. And that’s why [our] piece is called A Man From The Future, because [Turing] was credited as the inventor of the modern computer. Also, he was openly gay, which was an extremely difficult thing to be in those days. He was also looking forward to how things would be in the future. This piece is structured as eight different scenes in the life of Alan Turing, and it’s a spoken-word, electronics orchestra. We actually premiered one of the pieces when we did a concert with the BBC Philharmonic last year. It was called “He Dreamed Of Machines.” We went through Andrew Hodges’ book and took just phrases, really, to indicate what was going on at a particular time. That phrase, “He dreamed of machines” — which is beautiful, I think, for a piece of music — came from Andrew’s book. So that’s kind of an indication of what it’s like.

 

Thank you both very much for the chat. Looking forward to catching you on the road this fall!

 

NEIL & CHRIS: Thank you!

Edited July 3, 2013 by BiaIchihara

[BiaIchihara]

From PSB FB

 

Pet Shop Boys will join Dave Pearce on BBC Radio 2 this Saturday for a two hour takeover, playing music of their choice, discussing the creation of the new Electric album and revealing the music and artists that inspire them.

 

The show will be broadcast at 10pm, don’t miss it!

[BiaIchihara]

'If I could, I'd be a recluse... I'm trying really hard': The Pet Shop Boys on being unlikely pop stars, using Oyster cards and why they admire Rihanna

 

We can’t compete with Rihanna and One Direction, say the Pet Shop Boys. They’re proper pop stars. So how do they explain 50 million record sales and 30 years at the top?

 

 

In a dim corner of an east London private members’ club, Pet Shop Boys – Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe – are expounding their philosophy on success.

 

It’s something they know a lot about. The duo have survived three decades in the music industry, making millions from hits like It’s A Sin and What Have I Done To Deserve This?, and cleverly aligning themselves with the most relevant artists of each generation – from Madonna to Robbie Williams, Suede to Bowie, The Killers to Lady Gaga. Given all this, their take comes as a refreshing surprise.

 

‘The thing about success,’ says Tennant, ‘is you don’t have to confuse it with fame and celebrity.

 

'We’ve never wanted people chasing us down the street – can’t think of anything worse. We’re probably the only pop stars with Oyster cards (London travel cards).’

 

They are here to talk about Electric, their 12th album, supported by a new tour.

 

Given the option, Lowe admits, he’d rather be hiding at home watching Grand Designs (he studied architecture) or daytime TV.

 

‘If I could,’ he says, ‘I’d be a recluse. I do want to be one. I’m trying really hard. But it’s a difficult thing to pull off in this job.’

 

This, of course, has to be rubbish. He’s hung out with Liza Minnelli, Yoko Ono and Gaga.

 

At the Olympics closing ceremony, the two performed West End Girls on the back of a rickshaw in giant pointy helmets. ‘

 

Ahh,’ says Lowe. ‘But you couldn’t see my face, could you? I don’t think of them as costumes. I think of them as disguises. I came back from the Olympics on the Tube. No one even looked at me.’

 

 

Pet Shop Boys have sailed through 30-odd years of pop, constantly evolving their sound, brand and artistic portfolio.

 

They’ve sold over 50 million records, bagged six Grammy nominations, three Brits, three Ivor Novellos (Tennant keeps these in his downstairs loo), and a theatre award for a ballet they scored (The Most Incredible Thing). Tennant made the decision to come out as gay in 1994, whereas Lowe has never bothered.

 

The group were once highly political. Between 1997 and 2001 Tennant regularly donated thousands to the Labour Party. Things have changed, though. Asked for his opinion on Cameron or Miliband, Tennant shrugs.

 

‘I used to feel that a political party represented what I felt, but I don’t feel that any more.

 

'Politics seems somehow less intelligent than it used to, and in Britain I feel we’re sleepwalking our way into an endless surveillance culture, but if you talk about it you sound like you’re mad. It doesn’t inspire us any more like it used to.’

 

The duo have a fascination with larger-than-life superstars – like Lady Gaga and Elton John – and music legends such as Liza Minnelli and Dusty Springfield.

 

In 1986, they tracked down Springfield and asked her to sing on What Have I Done To Deserve This? At the time, she was in her late forties, broke and living in a motel.

 

‘There was a huge amount of hostility when we said we wanted to work with her,’ says Tennant.

 

‘People just didn’t think it would ever work, that it was just a very bad idea. No one even knew where she was. But she had the most wonderful voice, so we pushed it.’

 

They were proved right. The song went on to reach No 2 in the UK and the U.S.

 

When Tennant, a former music journalist, speaks on the subject of pop, it’s with an analytical, academic slant.

 

 

‘I think we admire in others what we know we couldn’t or wouldn’t do ourselves.

 

'Like Rihanna – she’s a great pop star. She’s outrageous, she looks great, she has glamour, she never stops being Rihanna. There’s a constant crazy excitement.’

 

Lowe adds, ‘And One Direction. Proper pop band. There has to be a band that people want to scream at. I don’t think I’ve ever behaved like a pop star.’

 

The duo are like a pop version of Gilbert and George. Tennant, 58, is more gossipy, more ebullient. Lowe, 53, is quieter and more reluctant. He deadpans, Tennant muses and parries.

 

Both middle-class boys who went to good schools (Lowe is from Lancashire, Tennant from Newcastle), neither of them expected a career in the music industry.

 

Since they met in 1981, they’ve never rowed. ‘I can’t think of any occasion in particular,’ says Tennant. ‘We’ve always just got along.’

 

In the early days, he confesses, they wrote a manifesto. ‘It was this full-page declaration about who we were that we put out with a photo and a cassette.’

 

Lowe coughs. ‘It was actually more a list of things we weren’t, all very negative,’ he says. ‘And it was very pretentious. We wrote something on it in Latin or Italian or something.’

 

‘We were both obsessed with Italy,’ continues Tennant. ‘The style, the language, the architecture. In fact, in the very beginning all we wanted was to be popular in Italy.’

 

He pauses. ‘The irony is, the Italians have never been interested in us. Germany, Japan, South America, Mexico… In Italy we can’t get arrested.’

 

They met in a hi-fi shop on the King’s Road and started writing songs together in Tennant’s flat.

 

When Tennant was sent – by pop magazine Smash Hits – to interview The Police in New York in 1983, he took a demo tape to producer Bobby Orlando.

 

The following year West End Girls was released in the U.S., becoming a club hit. It eventually reached No 1 in the UK.

 

The duo stood side by side on Top Of The Pops, poker-faced, not even trying to look like pop stars (on the cover of Actually, Tennant is yawning).

 

‘We weren’t like anyone else,’ says Lowe. ‘And yes, people thought we were just a one-hit wonder.’

 

Thirty years later Pet Shop Boys remain thoroughly British observers of life.

 

In their heads, they’re not stars – but as Lowe says, they’re ‘very happy, very lucky to keep doing what we do.

 

'Once it started, neither of us had a plan B. The thing to do is don’t have a plan B and it’ll make you stick to plan A – which we did.’

 

‘Electric’ will be released on July 15 on their own label, x2

[Yasi]

Thank you sooo much Bia:thumb_yello:

Only 10 days to releasing their new album:wub2:

[BiaIchihara]

Thank you sooo much Bia:thumb_yello:

Only 10 days to releasing their new album:wub2:

 

You're welcome

 

and here's more

 

Pet Shop Boys: We left major label Parlophone and now we’re in control of our destiny

 

 

A private Victorian dining room at London’s St Pancras Hotel makes a suitably grand setting for an audience with British pop institution Pet Shop Boys.

 

Not that award-winning duo Neil Tennant (58, elegantly suited) and Chris Lowe (53, yet almost boyish in a designer hoodie) will be stopping here long. They’ve just arrived back from a triumphant Manchester show on their extensive Electric tour and they’ll shortly be off for their next date in Tel Aviv.

 

‘I read a recent concert review that said Pet Shop Boys don’t do very much on stage – Chris just plays keyboards and I stand there and sing,’ exclaims Tennant, mock-outraged. ‘He’s the keyboard player, I’m the singer; what do they expect us to do? Take our clothes off? Roller skate?’

 

Frankly, stranger things have happened in Pet Shop Boys’ productions. An adventurous air has always stirred beneath their deadpan demeanour and their latest tour heralds the release of their 12th studio collection, also titled Electric. Both the concerts and the album have involved 35-year-old Brit producer Stuart Price (also famed for his work as Madonna’s musical director).

 

Electric’s tracks – the racy Hi-NRG rush of Axis; the euphoria of current single Vocal; the ‘living for the weekend’ urge of Thursday (featuring a cameo from pop star/rapper Example) – form a sharp awakening after Pet Shop Boys’ reflective 2012 predecessor, Elysium.

 

This album comes at a time of flux – it’s Pet Shop Boys’ first release on their own label since leaving British major Parlophone (recently bought by Warner Music), and it sounds like pop’s elder statesmen have reclaimed their roots on the dance floor.

 

‘Elysium was about growing old,’ says Tennant. ‘Electric is about remembering that sense of youthful excitement. We’ve had two years of intensive writing and we thought we’d do a proper up-tempo dance album.’

 

Club culture has been key to Pet Shop Boys’ music since the duo’s early 1980s Hi-NRG recordings with New York dance producer Bobby Orlando. They signed to Parlophone in 1985 and scored their debut hit, West End Girls, shortly afterwards but those underground obsessions still pulsed through their work: a fascination with nightlife and gay culture; imported vinyl and alternative versions.

 

Pet Shop Boys arguably deserve credit for bringing club remixes to the mainstream; their successful Disco mix series began in 1986 and they’ve always enlisted pioneering DJs to rework their tunes. They’ve stayed in touch, even if they’re not always out all night.

 

‘When you’re younger, you go clubbing every weekend, if not more often,’ says seasoned raver Lowe. ‘When you’re older, clubbing has to feel like a special event because you’ve done it so often – it becomes about a DJ you want to check out, or a country you haven’t been to before.’

 

When was the last time Pet Shop Boys had a dance-floor epiphany? ‘Quite recently, listening to reggaeton music at a club that was quite a long drive through the Colombian countryside,’ says Lowe. ‘The rhythm and atmosphere were so infectious. We’ve also been listening to this minimal techno music coming out of northern Brazil, with very basic synths and drum machines.’

 

‘These days, we often go to Berghain [the infamous Berlin club] on a Sunday lunchtime, or Gutterslut in east London,’ adds Tennant. ‘I personally like crazy nights with ridiculous drag queens, not people taking photos of the DJ all night.’

 

The classic dance elements on Electric surely owe something to the fact that producer Price is a long-time Pet Shop Boys fan; Disco was apparently the first record he bought and his breakthrough musical guise (as pink-haired club artist Les Rythmes Digitales) championed 1980s-styled electronic production.

 

‘We always thought we would work with Stuart,’ says Tennant. ‘Creating Electric was a real joy, quick and clever. It all flowed very freely and we weren’t bearing in mind any commercial restraints.’

 

Price is more self-effacing. ‘I actually thought Pet Shop Boys were an unreachable entity and that if we did ever meet, it might be a bad idea to work together,’ he says. ‘But that couldn’t have been further from the truth. It felt like making a record for the first time – excitable and naive. With Electric, we never set out to arrange songs in a pop format, we just let them go where they wanted. That was liberating.’

 

When it comes to working with your heroes, how do Pet Shop Boys compare to Madonna? ‘They have their similarities,’ says Price. ‘I think it comes from that early 1980s NYC music scene. They were all there, going to the same places, meeting the same DJs. On a practical level, all three of them like to leave the studio around 5pm, after some tea and a biscuit.’

 

Pet Shop Boys never claimed to be rock’n’roll but they’re now more of an independent force than ever. If Electric was a nightclub, what kind would it be? ‘Probably one with waiters in goat heads wandering around serving cocktails, maybe a little like the Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange,’ muses Price. ‘Except with a belting sound system – and less killing.’

 

‘It would have a lot of lasers on the dance floor,’ says Tennant, ‘and the crowd would be very mixed: young and old, straight and gay, rich and poor and everything in between.’