In 1988, when he was 20, Wolfgang Tillmans tore an A0 poster off a building site hoarding and nailed it to a wall in his flat in Hamburg. It was advertising Pet Shop Boys’ new album, Introspective, and consisted of thick vertical bars in different colours. “It was just so cool in the context of the time,” the artist says today, admiring how the pop group had gone “one level more abstract”.
Around the same time in Doncaster, teenager Alasdair McLellan – now an A-list fashion photographer – was impressed by the clothes of Pet Shop Boys’ keyboard-player Chris Lowe; for instance the cap, stripy T-shirt and Issey Miyake glasses on the cover of their single Suburbia. “I always thought he was the best-dressed man of the 80s,” McLellan says. “Obviously, he just stood there playing the keyboard and I always noticed what he was wearing, especially all that sportswear stuff. He just seemed to do it better than everyone else.” McLellan couldn’t get style magazines in his village, so his visual education came from pop and the music press. “I got into photography through album covers, Smash Hits and NME.”
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We had in our contract: total artistic control. We could do what we liked
Both men ended up photographing and making videos for Pet Shop Boys: Tillmans made a video for Home and Dry in 2002; McLellan directed one for Loneliness 22 years later. Their work, and the early visuals that inspired them, is collected in a new 600-page book called Pet Shop Boys: Volume. Billed as a “complete visual record” and spanning more than 40 years, it gathers together the record sleeves, music videos and concert imagery that have been as integral to Pet Shop Boys’ appeal as their music.
Lowe and singer Neil Tennant are chatting about their bright orange doorstopper at a table in the corner of the London restaurant Toklas. Coincidentally, we are sitting beneath a Tillmans photograph of fruit and vegetables arranged by a swimming pool. “We’ve always had joy in packaging and thought it was part of the creative statement,” Tennant says, ordering a carafe of white wine. “I won’t say Gesamtkunstwerk, but …”
“Go on, Neil, say it,” says Lowe mischievously. “I know you like saying it.”
Gesamtkunstwerk is the term Wagner popularised, meaning “total work of art”, where sounds and visuals come together in an overwhelming whole – and Pet Shop Boys were ideally placed to elevate pop in such a way. When they started making records in the mid-80s, the music business was flush with cash thanks to the introduction of the CD, which inspired many fans to buy their favourite records again, on this hi-fidelity new format. “Record companies were making money hand over fist and they had budgets to throw around,” remembers Mark Farrow, whose company has designed the vast majority of Pet Shop Boys’ visual output. “It was great!”
Back then, the group’s singles came in several physical formats: a CD single, cassette single, 7in vinyl and often two 12in singles. “Mark used to love it because you could do variations on a theme,” Tennant says. Take the sleeve for the 12in remix of It’s a Sin, which features a closeup of the keys and chains worn by Lowe, playing the jailer taking Tennant to be burned at the stake in the track’s Derek Jarman-directed video. The 12in remix of 1989’s It’s Alright, meanwhile, is fluoro pink on one side and green on the other. “Minimalism in colour,” Farrow says.
“I like fluoro,” Lowe says. “i-D magazine in the 80s was always fluoro. And that was an era I really liked – all that street fashion.”
“I’ve still got issue two, when it was like a fanzine,” says Tennant. A former assistant editor of Smash Hits before he was a pop star, he launches into a theory that the magazines whose circulations have risen amid the general decline of print are the ones with staples rather than spines: “The New Yorker. The Spectator. The Atlantic. The stapled magazine opens invitingly, whereas the instinct of a perfect bound magazine is to close.”
“Nothing to do with the content, then?” asks Lowe.
Pet Shop Boys met Farrow at the outset of their career when they were managed by Tom Watkins. “He arrived in the office from Manchester,” says Tennant, who is from Newcastle, while Lowe is from Blackpool. “We were northerners. The rest of the office was full of southern gays, basically. We immediately got on with him.” Farrow’s first sleeve was a remix of West End Girls, their first No 1. His second, Love Comes Quickly, had no type on the front, just a closeup picture of Lowe in a Boy-branded cap. It sounds dangerously uncommercial, but Pet Shop Boys have always held a trump card. “We had in our contract: total artistic control,” Lowe says. “So we could do whatever we wanted.”
The original concept for their debut album, Please, had been designed by Watkins. Tennant recalls it as “a piece of paper engineering which was 64 separate flaps of paper. It was ridiculous – it took me half an hour to get the record out.” Farrow designed a cover that took the opposite approach – largely white space, with miniature typography and a tiny picture of Tennant and Lowe’s faces in the middle. “It looked outrageous in 1986,” Tennant says, the pair agreeing that many record sleeves back then were either brash or just poorly designed. “Even Tom had to admit it was really good.”
It also chimed with their minimalist attitude to performance. Despite their soaring tunes of a banging nature, Pet Shop Boys would barely move when they played one of their hits on Top of the Pops. “I think Tom said something like, ‘Oh God, they don’t do anything,’” says Lowe, who has been reading his late manager’s autobiography, Let’s Make Lots of Money, named after the subtitle of their song Opportunities.
“There was general panic,” Tennant agrees. “But we had no performance experience, and we were trying not to look showbiz. We didn’t bend to other people’s way of doing things. For our first TV performance of West End Girls in Germany, they put about 300 teddy bears around us and two dancers pretending to be prostitutes. So, as it was too late to do anything about it, we simply ignored them.”
It was an ethos they maintained. In 1987, performing Rent at the Royal Variety Performance, Lowe wearing a dramatic inflatable Issey Miyake jacket, they caused a stir by refusing to wave at the queen and Prince Philip at the end. “It had a revolving stage,” Tennant says. “You stand there at the end, it goes round and you wave. Now, we don’t wave. It looks lame. So we just didn’t turn up for the finale. Live television is easy. They can’t do anything. Our mothers were both furious. It was the first time our parents met, actually, backstage, and they were united in fury.”
Carry On star Barbara Windsor, who appeared in their musical film It Couldn’t Happen Here, wasn’t happy either. “She slapped our bottoms,” Tennant says. “She said, ‘You’re very naughty, boys. You should have done the finale.’”
“It’s one of those things I just can’t do,” Lowe says. “You know at the beginning of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? They’re all doing that” – he waves. “If I were on the director would be like, ‘Cut! Cut!’”
“Well, you see,” says Tennant, “now the director would like it if you didn’t wave, because he would say, ‘Oh, that’s so Pet Shop Boys.’”
As well as their refusal to be ingratiating, Pet Shop Boys also didn’t sell sex – or not overtly. “You don’t think we were very sexual?” asks Lowe, pretending to be affronted. One exception came in 1994, when Tennant decided to come out in a cover feature for the British gay lifestyle magazine Attitude. Before that, Pet Shop Boys had resisted categorising their sexualities. “I had this pleated Issey Miyake shirt,” Tennant says. “I decided to undo it in an inviting way, because I’ve got a slightly hairy chest. And actually, the picture’s great.”
“Did you get a lot of offers?” Lowe enquires.
“I don’t know if I did, actually,” Tennant replies. “Well, I was in a relationship. It was quite fun doing that. But we haven’t done sexy that often.”
The video for their 1990 single Being Boring was another example: directed by the photographer Bruce Weber, it horrified the record company as it opened showing a naked man bouncing on a trampoline. “We were basically told off,” Tennant says. “I remember saying, ‘The Chart Show [a pop video programme] only shows the middle bit, so they won’t show the guy jumping naked at the beginning, and you won’t see the couple screwing at the end. So what’s the fucking problem? This is the era of Bruce Weber’s Calvin Klein underpants adverts. It’s mass culture. It’s not some weird, sleazy thing we’re doing.’”
They were recently aghast to discover, about 35 years later, that the video had been censored. “We had a sample DVD of Smash, our singles compilation, and I loyally flicked through the whole thing,” Tennant says. “Being Boring starts with Bruce Weber’s lettering over a plain background. EMI America had edited out the naked guy.”
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I always remember Adam Ant’s great line: ‘Ridicule is nothing to be scared of’
Were they expressing what would now be called a queer sensibility? “Someone recently said we were queer trailblazers,” Tennant says. “We want to do a T-shirt: queer trailblazer. We went through the late 80s totally undefined. That word sounds quite liberating, doesn’t it? Now everything is defined completely. In fact it’s disapproved of, not being defined.” Ambiguity and complexity, he says, are key to Pet Shop Boys. “They are at the very core of the culture. Always.”
One reason their work has earned enduring respect is that, while always proudly pop, it hasn’t been afraid to be awkward. In the 90s, they had periods of wearing odd costumes, such as the orange suits and dunces’ hats they wore to promote their single Can You Forgive Her? “Our manager was worried that we would be ridiculed,” Tennant says. “But I always remember Adam Ant’s great line, ‘Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.’ We wanted to side-step the pop-star thing. Also, that was a reaction to ageing and maybe feeling insecure. In 1993, I was about to be 40.”
“That young!” Lowe says. He is 66, Tennant now 71.
“Well, of course, being middle aged is much worse than being old,” Tennant says.
Perhaps Pet Shop Boys’ most left-field moment is Tillmans’ video for Home and Dry, which consists almost entirely of grainy footage of mice filmed at Tottenham Court Road tube station in London. “As much as I love their detached aesthetic, I wanted to bring a matter-of-factness to the mix,” Tillmans says. “It is so good to work with them because they mean what they say. When I delivered it and the record company said, ‘This is not a video,’ they stood by it.”
“Was he expecting us to change it?” Lowe asks. “‘What the hell is this? Go away and make a proper video!’”
“I thought it was cute,” Tennant says. “A more typical thing would have been to accept it and then make a conventional video, but I think we like the fact that we never do things the easy way. You’ve always got to work at liking Pet Shop Boys because we do a lot of things to put you off.”
One thing that is reliably crowd-pleasing is their greatest hits tour, called Dreamworld. It started in May 2022, has played everywhere from festivals around the world to the Royal Opera House in London and so far shows no sign of ending; there are another 10 dates this summer. “It’s going on for ever,” says Lowe, laughing. “Get used to it.”
“It’s a bit like having a successful musical,” Tennant says. “Some people come and see Dreamworld who wouldn’t go and see Pet Shop Boys normally: and so as it goes on we’re often playing in bigger venues. It’s great to have a more mass market thing where you haven’t given an inch in the way it’s presented. We come on wearing masks and we stand there, stock-still, and the audience just has to deal with it.”
Its ultimate appeal, of course, is Pet Shop Boys’ weapons-grade hits, but these will be absent in a series of five gigs they’re putting on this week at the Electric Ballroom in London. Since they’ll be playing only B-sides and album tracks, they’re calling the shows Obscure. Intended for hardcore fans, they say it’s partly to promote Volume. “One of the motivations behind it was we didn’t have to do book signings,” Tennant says. “I find them too weird. They’re a bit unnerving.”
“Although we have signed a lot of books,” says Lowe.
They have rehearsed 35 songs in all, and will play 24 each night; the setlist (and intro music) will change. Lowe chose the songs, culled from a playlist he made of the ones he wanted to play live.
“It lasted five and a half hours,” Tennant says.
“Only four hours, 42 minutes,” Lowe says, examining the playlist on his Spotify account. “And Neil said, ‘You can’t do a concert that long.’ So then we went through the list. Neil added a couple.”
“As a special treat, I’ve been allowed to add a couple,” Tennant smiles. “If this show was played to a mass audience at the Uber Arena in Berlin, I think a lot of people would just spend the whole time in the bar. But I’m hoping at the Electric Ballroom they’re not going to.”
Tennant is keen to make a final point before they leave. “There’s a tendency to assume that everything with us is thought-out and plotted,” he says. “But actually, the reality is it’s much more improvised and instinctive.”
He gets the bill and they head out of the restaurant, by chance bumping into – and getting kissed by – someone else responsible for legendary record sleeves: Peter Saville, designer for New Order. “Don’t tell Mark Farrow,” chuckles Lowe.
Pet Shop Boys: Volume is published by Thames & Hudson on 7 April. Obscure is at the Electric Ballroom, London, 6-10 April. Dreamworld continues at Medimex festival, Taranto, Italy, on 20 June
Source:
www.theguardian.com
