‘It worked out quite well’

Neil Tennant, half of essentially the most profitable British duo within the historical past of pop music, arrives alone to lunch with the FT. “We call this the Coldest Table In London,” he publicizes, gesturing on the naked home windows of J Sheekey in Covent Garden and the wind tunnel that’s St Martin’s Court, in entrance of which I’ve 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’ll. As with so many issues, the Pet Shop Boys are prescient. 

They have chosen this celeb fish restaurant for our lunch à trois as a result of they’ve been coming right here for many years, largely pre-theatre. They just like the wooden panelling and the partitions of black-and-white pictures of the starry clientele. I think Tennant, a remarkably beneficiant and skilled interviewee who, as a former journalist, will interrogate himself if the questioner dries up, has labored out that the venue should be within the West End, for we’re right here partly to mark 40 years for the reason that launch of “West End Girls”, a tune ranked by one critics’ ballot as the best UK primary single of all time.

In these 4 many years, the pair have offered over 50mn information, together with greater than 40 chart singles and 4 UK quantity ones. As the FT’s pop critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney places it, they’re “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.”

It’s like I’m trying on at what’s taking place. So nothing fazes me an excessive amount of as a result of it’s not prefer it’s actually me . . . I really feel fairly faraway from the truth of it’

Chris Lowe joins us, unrecognisable with out his customary hat and sun shades. His reluctant public persona is so closely disguised that he can wander round London with out attracting any consideration. He’s been doing this for the reason that early Nineteen Eighties, one other indication that the Pet Shop Boys had been all the time three steps forward of the remainder of us.

As Tennant, an FT reader, gently scolds me in regards to the on-line search perform and I bluster that this may all quickly be fastened by AI, Lowe perks up: “Isn’t it amazing?” How a lot did you utilize AI to your new album Nonetheless, I ask, figuring out they’ve been working with Arctic Monkeys and Blur producer James Ford on this and are happy with utilizing precise drums (remarkable!) as if to lastly declare a truce of their 40-year warfare on rock. I’m anticipating a rant about outsourcing creativity however Lowe leans ahead. “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 thought-about 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 digital music alongside Giorgio Moroder and New Order, make the argument for AI-generated music versus correct music? Is it an identical argument to the one you’ve made all of your profession? “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 identical factor, which Lowe selected some days in the past as a result of he likes to suppose in a semi-quantum approach about what he might be consuming over the course of per week: new season asparagus and fish and chips. “But I won’t have the egg,” publicizes 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 every little thing drily) for lunch collectively day-after-day. A producer for an earlier album, Stuart Price, labored with them in Berlin and made them exit for dinner in week two to the identical locations they’d been to in week one, in the identical order. He additionally made them document all of 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 much less about something now.” But, obligingly, he remembers a match Tennant threw when, at an outside live performance, the dancers had been anticipated to carry out on a tough concrete ground, risking harm. “It was like Neil, but as performed by Basil Fawlty,” Lowe remembers. It doesn’t sound a lot a tantrum as being an excellent 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 had been on the forefront of the tour-as-theatrical-event, which, because the trade has shifted to reside exhibits, now sees large industrial complexes transfer GDP-shifting extravaganzas world wide for months on finish. I’m curious whether or not 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 equivalent to 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 present best hits tour “Dreamworld”, which they’re two years into however will most likely proceed for 4, including two of the brand new singles to the playlist, as a result of they solely wish to do a few months at a time. 

I’d like to be within the House of Lords, as a result of it’s a job, isn’t it? . . . Go in there, have a pleasant lunch and fall asleep

The economics of a tour boil right down to amortising the massive cost of the manufacturing throughout as many years as are required, they clarify. The length is set by how lengthy 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 course of an alternate about starry collaborators equivalent to 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 really feel sorry, I say, for brand new performers, who’ve TikTookay and Spotify as a substitute. Tennant, who labored for Smash Hits journal (“I still miss it”), says the important thing lacking component in immediately’s trade 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 stuffed the prime again room round us, although everyone seems to be pretending to not recognise the pop stars grappling with large battered fish and barely too many chips, bickering about whether or not it’s potential to inform the heavy silver salt cellar from the pepper within the intimate lighting. 

Have you ever turned down an honour, I ask immediately, although I’ve deliberate this query. “We can’t answer that,” Lowe shoots again, uncharacteristically. “We’re not going to talk about that,” says Tennant. So sure, you may have, I conclude. “No, no no we don’t answer that.”

“No one’s asked us that before,” Lowe says. I really feel proud to have provide you with one authentic query of their 40-year profession. 

“I don’t get pop stars and honours. I don’t get why you want one. David Bowie turned one down,” Tennant provides. 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 suppose Neil’s going to just accept it. “I didn’t say that!” he corrects. 

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

We speak in regards to the slyly political thread of their lyrics, work which they characterise as being about human rights and social justice reasonably than party-level politics. Tennant provides a nuanced rationalization of their position on corruption, which he admits doesn’t fairly work on-line. “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 ground of the O2, surrounded by tall individuals filming on an iPad at my eye degree, and so 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 provides, easily inserting a plug for the tour. “If it was me, I’d rather be sitting down.” They like 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 however I don’t suppose you possibly can cease your live performance for a meal, I recommend. “We used to have an interval!” Lowe insists. “In the middle of our operatic shows!”

The subject they’re touchiest about is their very 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 learn that you just’ve stated that! “You don’t really pick your nose any more,” says Tennant protectively. “I don’t any more,” says Lowe. 

George Osborne stated, ‘How is it that you and Chris Lowe get on so well?’ He stated, ‘I’m simply interested by me and David Cameron’

Please, that is the Financial Times. I simply wish to know the way you haven’t fallen out. If the key to longevity isn’t killing one another, and within the music trade that should be at the very least 80 per cent of it and no one most likely will ever have a profession like yours ever once more, how have you ever survived so lengthy?

“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 by no means been a wrestle, they swear. It’s nonetheless pleasing. 

They practically broke up on the finish of 1999, on an area tour of Britain. Harvey Goldsmith, the promoter, went bankrupt. They misplaced money and had been enjoying massive arenas that had been 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 toughest age to be a pop star, I enterprise. He started our lunch by describing turning 70 this July as embarrassing. “It doesn’t really work being 70 doing this.” I informed 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 more durable than 70! He nods at me approvingly, which appears like Christmas.

We’ve completed the fish and chips and largely ignored the token salad, though one among us has been a bit too awed to eat, which is ok as a result of Sheekey’s is a venue for convening, not eating. “Pudding?” I ask, panicking that they may go away. “No, but coffee and truffles?” Tennant questions Lowe in a tone that implies “the usual?”. “Oh yes, but how many?” Lowe replies. “Ooh, two each!” he exclaims fortunately when the six chocolate truffles arrive.   

I have one last crack at defining their enduring appeal. It’s the enjoyment! People go together with a gang of mates to observe dancers in neon inflatable fits 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 launched on April 26

The caption on the {photograph} of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe has been corrected

Find out about our latest tales first — comply with FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you pay attention