Pop go the Pet Shop Boys
Jon Perks discovers a link between the Pet Shop Boys and Girls Aloud.
For a duo who are the epitome of brevity when it comes to album titles – Please, Actually, Very and the new long player, Yes – Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are a hugely eloquent pair when it comes to discussing their work.
Since first meeting on London’s Kings Road in 1981, they have made some of the most interesting and memorable electronic pop, including their breakthrough number one West End Girls, It’s A Sin, Being Boring and Heart.
Now the former architect student (Lowe) and Smash Hits journalist (Tennant) are back with a new album, produced by Brian Higgins, Miranda Cooper and the team at Xenomania, responsible for much of the success enjoyed by the likes of Girls Aloud and Sugababes.
While they’ve often collaborated with singers (Dusty Springfield, Liza Minnelli to name but two), this is fairly new territory. So why plump for them?
“Well, actually Neil introduced me to their productions through Girls Aloud because Neil really liked Biology,” says Lowe.
“Then I listened to them and just thought, ‘Wow, really good pop productions, really good sounds, very fresh sounding,’ and actually we’d already thought of working with them on the last album, but New Order had kind of got there first and we thought we couldn’t appear to copy them, so that’s why it’s happened with this album – which is quite good really because it coincides with us writing more poppy songs.”
Tennant adds: “I mean, on the last album we worked with Trevor Horn because we wrote quite a few songs we thought were epic-sounding. This album, the songs seemed to be much more sort of poppy and so it seemed like a great idea to go with the best pop producers there are at the moment.
“We agreed as part of the process of recording the album to write three songs with them, which we don’t [usually do]; we have done it before with people, like What Have I Done To Deserve This, but we haven’t done it very often, so it was interesting seeing their process,” he adds.
“They have lots of little studios and people writing stuff and so they actually played us about six backing tracks that had no words or melodies. They were just backing tracks and I guess we chose the ones we liked and then we wrote over them.
“Chris played keyboard melody lines and Miranda and I, and Brian as well, wrote melody lines and vocal ideas and lyric ideas. We sang them into little Dictaphones, which at the beginning I found slightly embarrassing but I soon got used to.”
Lowe says: “If you’re working with them, you’d write lots of different melodies and ideas over the same bits of music and then they might be shifted over to a different piece of music and sort of miraculously work, or interesting things will happen, so you never fully understand how it’s going to work.
“It’s quite an interesting way of working because we would tend to have one melody, which went with one piece of music or some chord change, whereas they wouldn’t just have the one, they would have several and then they would see if it worked on a different bit or it would work on a different song, so it’s a far more fluid way of writing.”
After the political undercurrent of last album Fundamental, Yes is a far poppier affair – hardly surprising given the production and writing ingredients. First single Love Etc is a good barometer for the album’s overall sound – although, as Neil reveals, it very nearly never appeared on the album:
“[That’s] actually a track that Brian and Miranda were keeping for another project,” Neil recalls.
“Driving back from Xenomania with Chris, he kept saying to me, ‘I like that track they’re keeping for themselves. That’s the best one, I think,’ and so I was despatched to say to Brian, ‘Can we just get that sort of swingy sounding track up again, do you think?’ and, anyway, we managed to wrestle it from their solo project into our album and then I came up with the idea of, ‘You don’t have to be beautiful but it helps’, and so that became the basis of the lyric and then Miranda and I sat and wrote the lyrics, and Miranda wrote the melody. Actually, she did a very clever melody for the, ‘boy it’s tough getting around the world’ bit, which is not a melody I don’t think either of us would have come up with.”
Another key track on the new album is Pandemonium, which, while written by Tennant and Lowe, was destined for someone else. “[That] wasn’t written for us originally, it was written for Kylie Minogue, two years ago,” says Tennant.
“We were asked like many songwriters in London to write some songs for Kylie Minogue, and we wrote a few things and we really liked this song and it didn’t end up on her album.
“It’s a very, very, very ‘up’ song. It’s about a dangerous attraction. In fact, when I was writing the lyric I was sort of thinking – not totally – of Kate Moss and Pete Doherty, so you could listen to the song as being sung by Kate Moss about Pete Doherty because actually that was pretty much the inspiration for it.
“I’ve forgotten the words now. ‘It’s like … You’re smashing china, spinning on icy roads. Major troubles since you’re almost a minor. I sometimes think we’ll both explode.’
“It’s the joy of chaos and the way falling in love with someone can just throw your life, throw all the pieces of your life up into the air and they fall back in a different way.”
* Pet Shop Boys – Yes is out today on Parlophone Records
