Pet Shop Boys: ‘It worked out quite well’

Neil Tennant, half of the most successful British duo in the history of pop music, arrives alone to lunch with the FT. “We call this the Coldest Table In London,” he announces, gesturing at the bare windows of J Sheekey in Covent Garden and the wind tunnel that is St Martin’s Court, in front of which I have nobly placed myself. “On a cold day, you can freeze to death here.”

“I’ve kept my layers,” I say reassuringly. “You can put your scarf on if you need it,” Tennant predicts. Reader, I will. As with so many things, the Pet Shop Boys are prescient. 

They have chosen this celebrity fish restaurant for our lunch à trois because they’ve been coming here for decades, mostly pre-theatre. They like the wood panelling and the walls of black-and-white photos of the starry clientele. I suspect Tennant, a remarkably generous and experienced interviewee who, as a former journalist, will interrogate himself if the questioner dries up, has worked out that the venue must be in the West End, for we are here in part to mark 40 years since the release of “West End Girls”, a song ranked by one critics’ poll as the greatest UK number one single of all time.

In those four decades, the pair have sold over 50mn records, including more than 40 chart singles and four UK number ones. As the FT’s pop critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney puts it, they are “the eternal insider-outsiders of British pop, at once arch and aching, danceable and literary, coolly apart yet also committed — no band has mastered Oscar Wilde’s blend of frivolity and seriousness as completely as the Pet Shop Boys.”

Chris Lowe joins us, unrecognisable without his customary hat and sunglasses. His reluctant public persona is so heavily disguised that he can wander around London without attracting any attention. He’s been doing this since the early 1980s, another indication that the Pet Shop Boys were always three steps ahead of the rest of us.

As Tennant, an FT reader, gently scolds me about the online search function and I bluster that this will all soon be fixed by AI, Lowe perks up: “Isn’t it amazing?” How much did you use AI for your new album Nonetheless, I ask, knowing they’ve been working with Arctic Monkeys and Blur producer James Ford on this and are proud of using actual drums (unheard of!) as if to finally declare a truce in their 40-year war on rock. I’m expecting a rant about outsourcing creativity but Lowe leans forward. “We got it to write a quote for us for our press release. It was actually rather good . . . But we’ve not used it for writing or anything.” 

Tennant has considered it. “I thought, though, sometimes I can’t think of any words! If you put the title in ChatGPT and maybe even say it’s by the Pet Shop Boys, it might lead you down a path that’s quite useful,” he says. Could Lowe, a pioneer of electronic music alongside Giorgio Moroder and New Order, make the argument for AI-generated music versus proper music? Is it a similar argument to the one you’ve made all your career? “I think it would be more difficult,” he frowns. 

“There’s always been a sense that people just think you’ve pressed a few buttons rather than do real music,” Tennant elaborates. “The Grammys [still] have an award for electronic/dance albums, so they kind of diss two huge massive genres at the same time by putting them together.” 

We pause to all order the same thing, which Lowe decided on some days ago because he likes to think in a semi-quantum way about what he will be eating over the course of a week: new season asparagus and fish and chips. “But I won’t have the egg,” announces Tennant. “Neither will I,” says Lowe. I concur. 

Working with Ford on Nonetheless, they went out (“the wilds of Clapton!” Tennant says drily. He says everything drily) for lunch together every day. A producer for an earlier album, Stuart Price, worked with them in Berlin and made them go out for dinner in week two to the same places they’d been to in week one, in the same order. He also made them record all the tracks in alphabetical order. “And we did, didn’t we?” Tennant marvels. “And then we put them on the album in alphabetical order. It’s actually quite a good logic. It worked out quite well.” 

This seems extraordinarily biddable. Why are you so tolerant? When was the last time you had a tantrum? “Oh, it was a long time ago,” says Lowe, who is 64. “I couldn’t care less about anything now.” But, obligingly, he remembers a fit Tennant threw when, at an outdoor concert, the dancers were expected to perform on a rough concrete floor, risking injury. “It was like Neil, but as performed by Basil Fawlty,” Lowe remembers. It doesn’t sound so much a tantrum as being a good boss, and Lowe beams proudly as I say this. “It was, it absolutely was.”

“There’s always been a sense that the theatre stuff is a bit self-indulgent,” says Tennant. “But it’s not, it’s an integral part of it.”

PSB were at the forefront of the tour-as-theatrical-event, which, as the industry has shifted to live shows, now sees huge industrial complexes move GDP-shifting extravaganzas around the world for months on end. I’m curious whether they have seen these blockbusters. “I might go and see Taylor Swift,” Tennant says. “I think it must be a generational thing, because it slightly puzzles me. You’re never really aware of the music. You read that she’s unbelievably famous and you could read in the FT that she has some effect on the economy or something. But what’s your favourite Taylor Swift song?

“I think people now want the same experience everyone else has had because they want to participate.” Why is that? “I don’t know, because it’s not really what I want.”

The filmmaker Derek Jarman directed their first tour. They work with top-flight designers and choreographers such as Es Devlin (“always wants you to have your face covered”), Tom Scutt (“he did Cabaret. Have you seen Cabaret? He wasn’t even doing that when we approached him”) and Lynne Page on the current greatest hits tour “Dreamworld”, which they are two years into but will probably continue for four, adding two of the new singles to the playlist, because they only want to do a couple of months at a time. 

The economics of a tour boil down to amortising the huge cost of the production across as many years as are required, they explain. The duration is determined by how long it takes to earn out. “And then you can start all over again, which is great!”

“I don’t know about you,” Tennant says to Lowe in the middle of an exchange about starry collaborators such as Dusty Springfield, David Bowie, Liza Minnelli and Tina Turner, “but I always feel that this is not really happening to me. It’s like I’m looking on at what’s happening. So nothing fazes me too much because it’s not like it’s really me. How could I possibly be in Liza Minnelli’s suite in the Savoy Hotel and Sammy Davis Jr walks in? I feel quite removed from the reality of it.

“It’s the same when you go on Top of the Pops for the first time,” Tennant continues. “You feel completely detached from it, as if you’re not really there. Everything that has happened feels like that.”

I feel sorry, I say, for new performers, who have TikTok and Spotify instead. Tennant, who worked for Smash Hits magazine (“I still miss it”), says the key missing element in today’s industry is the music press. “Music was a surprisingly literary phenomenon that you read about sometimes before you heard it. It’s amazing that pop music could sustain something like six weekly publications. Now it can’t keep one going.”

The Sheekey’s lunchtime crowd of media, music and theatre execs has filled the prime back room around us, though everyone is pretending not to recognise the pop stars grappling with huge battered fish and slightly too many chips, bickering about whether it’s possible to tell the heavy silver salt cellar from the pepper in the intimate lighting. 

Have you ever turned down an honour, I ask suddenly, though I have planned this question. “We can’t answer that,” Lowe shoots back, uncharacteristically. “We’re not going to talk about that,” says Tennant. So yes, you have, I conclude. “No, no no we don’t answer that.”

“No one’s asked us that before,” Lowe says. I feel proud to have come up with one original question in their 40-year career. 

“I don’t get pop stars and honours. I don’t get why you want one. David Bowie turned one down,” Tennant adds. It is as if a gavel has been deployed. 

“I think I’d love to be in the House of Lords,” Lowe pitches in, “because it’s a job, isn’t it? It’s quite nice when you’re approaching retirement, I think. But also we both have to get one.”

I don’t think Neil’s going to accept it. “I didn’t say that!” he corrects. 

“Also, go in there, have a nice lunch and go to sleep,” Lowe deflects back to mocking himself. “It’s the ideal job for me.”

We talk about the slyly political thread in their lyrics, work which they characterise as being about human rights and social justice rather than party-level politics. Tennant gives a nuanced explanation of their position on corruption, which he admits doesn’t quite work online. “When Twitter started, we did it ourselves. Three days in, I’m having massive arguments about Stalinism. Literally, three days in. I thought, well, I can’t do this.”

This takes us to smartphones at gigs. “In the old days you’d get thrown out for taking photos,” says Tennant. “Now it’s why they’re there.”

“From the stage it looks amazing,” says Lowe. I grumble about being 5ft 5in on the floor of the O2, surrounded by tall people filming on an iPad at my eye level, and they tut sympathetically. 

“We went to see Soft Cell at the Hammersmith Odeon. We had really good seats,” Lowe says. “This one bloke stood up at the beginning. Huge, right in front of me, and that was that. I thought, well, I’m not going to stand up and I didn’t see most of it.”

“When we do the Royal Opera House again in July, part of me thinks, why doesn’t everyone just sit? What’s the difference?” Tennant adds, smoothly inserting a plug for the tour. “If it was me, I’d rather be sitting down.” They love to play the Opera House “because it’s the holy grail of theatre. It’s a very special experience going there and I think most people don’t have it, because they do reasonable ticket prices but most people just don’t think of going. And I feel proud of our fans that are having the smoked salmon sandwiches.” 

“We don’t have an interval though, do we?” Lowe notes. “It’s a shame because that’s when you should have . . .” 

“That’s when you could have the meal!” Tennant is delighted by this innovation. “Shall we shove in an interval so we can have the meal?”

Far be it from me but I don’t think you can stop your concert for a meal, I suggest. “We used to have an interval!” Lowe insists. “In the middle of our operatic shows!”

The topic they are touchiest about is their own relationship. “We don’t do those questions — ‘What’s Neil’s best attribute?’, things like that, ‘Chris picks his nose’,” Tennant says witheringly. But I’ve read that you’ve said that! “You don’t really pick your nose any more,” says Tennant protectively. “I don’t any more,” says Lowe. 

Please, this is the Financial Times. I just want to know how you haven’t fallen out. If the secret to longevity is not killing each other, and in the music industry that must be at least 80 per cent of it and nobody probably will ever have a career like yours ever again, how have you survived so long?

“I found myself sitting at a dinner opposite from George Osborne and he asked me the same question,” says Tennant. “He said, ‘How is it that you and Chris Lowe get on so well?’ He said, ‘I’m just thinking about me and David Cameron.’

“I know it sounds a bit lame, but we’ve been through the whole thing together. We came together just to write songs. We still do that.” It’s never been a struggle, they swear. It’s still enjoyable. 

They nearly broke up at the end of 1999, on an arena tour of Britain. Harvey Goldsmith, the promoter, went bankrupt. They lost money and were playing large arenas that were half-empty. “It was very depressing,” says Tennant in his flat rap voice. 

“Say half-full,” interrupts Lowe. 

“To be honest,” Tennant deadpans, “I don’t think they were half-full. When you’re in Sheffield Arena and you’ve sold 3,000 tickets, it’s depressing. I said to Chris in the interval, ‘Maybe we should knock it on the head?’ and Chris being Chris didn’t answer the question.”

Tennant was 45 — the hardest age to be a pop star, I venture. He began our lunch by describing turning 70 this July as embarrassing. “It doesn’t really work being 70 doing this.” I told you, I triumph to Tennant — arguably the cleverest man in pop, who wrote the lyric “I feel like taking all my clothes off and dancing to The Rite of Spring” — 45 is harder than 70! He nods at me approvingly, which feels like Christmas.

We’ve finished the fish and chips and largely ignored the token salad, although one of us has been a bit too awed to eat, which is fine because Sheekey’s is a venue for convening, not dining. “Pudding?” I ask, panicking that they will leave. “No, but coffee and truffles?” Tennant questions Lowe in a tone that suggests “the usual?”. “Oh yes, but how many?” Lowe replies. “Ooh, two each!” he exclaims happily when the six chocolate truffles arrive.   

I have one last crack at defining their enduring appeal. It’s the joy! People go with a gang of mates to watch dancers in neon inflatable suits march to “Go West”. “You see that is the thing that didn’t used to happen, I think,” says Tennant. “It’s pan-generational. I almost disapprove of that. But people take their kids to see us.

“We’ve been around a long time. We’ve never really planned for it. We’ve just carried on.”

Janine Gibson is the editor of FT Weekend. Pet Shop Boys’ album ‘Nonetheless’ is released on April 26

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