Neil Tennant

I know, I don’t think it’s a used object!

You got a haversack from an army surplus store – haversacks were, I guess, military – and then you sort of wrote Led Zeppelin in biro on the back of it.

Please say you didn’t write Led Zeppelin on it.

No, it wouldn’t have been Led Zeppelin. It would have been “Bow-wee,” as we used to say in Newcastle, although I don’t think I wrote anything on the back of mine. But that’s where it came from. What song was that in? I can’t remember now. Haversack, haversack…

Is it ‘Being Boring’?

It is. “When I went I left from the station / With a haversack and some trepidation.”

Trepidation. Only Neil Tennant would use haversack and trepidation.

Well, it was true! It’s so different nowadays. The relationship of sort of adolescent children to their parents. I mean, I moved to London, you know, my parents drove me to Newcastle Central Station. We had a cup of tea in the station buffet and my mother offered me a cigarette.

You’re grown up now, Neil.

I was now an adult. Yeah.

What’s the first book that really made an impact on you as a child?

The book that really made an impact on me was all books. I remember my dad taking me to Gosforth public library when I was about five or six, because they realised Neil likes reading. You worked your way through Enid Blyton and Malcolm Saville and Arthur Ransome. Classics. ‘Kidnapped’.

I knew you were going to say ‘Kidnapped’!

What’s the one about the horse?

Oh, ‘Black Beauty’?

‘Black Beauty’, ‘Treasure Island’ – that was a good one. I was always reading. At the age of eleven, I read ‘The Hobbit’, and then ‘The Lord of the Rings’. I’d buy books inspired by the television. I loved, loved P.G. Wodehouse. Not so much Jeeves as ‘Blandings Castle’. So with my pocket money I’d get the bus into Newcastle and I would go to Fenwick’s book department.

And that’s what you were spending your pocket money on?

Yep. In those days you could buy a Puffin paperback for one and six.

How much was your pocket money?

Two and six. But a grown-up Penguin, ‘Blandings Castle’, was two and six.

Tough choices. And as you were reading, were you writing?

I started writing songs.

But not poems, not stories?

I wrote poems. This is the ’60s, now I’m about 13. I was aware of the Liverpool Scene poets. Adrian Henri and Roger McGough. There was a link between pop music and literature. And of course we were obsessed with pop music. The family took an interest. We’d sit in the garden in the summer on Sunday afternoons, having tea and listening to ‘Pick of the Pops’, my mother commenting on all the records. Then when I did my O-levels, I got a job in a department store, and in a second-hand book shop I bought a copy of ‘Decline and Fall’, by Evelyn Waugh.

Oh, a new door opens!

That is, to me, the beginning of me as a reader. That grey Penguin Classics cover. I hated the job and I thought, “Wow, this is just so great. This is what I want to be like.” When you get older, you’re starting to realise what you do want to be but also what you don’t want to be.

So what’s set on the other side? Evelyn Waugh is on one side…

St. Cuthbert’s Grammar School, in Newcastle. I don’t want to be that. And also, the most formative thing in my life is the People’s Theatre.

I wanted to ask you about the People’s Theatre. Super socialist.

It was founded as a super socialist thing. George Bernard Shaw was one of the first patrons. It was very much part of that Labour left-wing, trade union, intellectual movement of the ’30s. So you’re doing George Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, Shakespeare. I joined in 1965…

So you were a young teenager?

I’m eleven. We used to go on Saturday mornings and we’d have lessons in movement and improvisation. We did ‘Oliver’, we did ‘Under Milk Wood’. It was quite useful to learn just being on the stage.

Did you like it?

I did probably quite like it. I got used to the idea of it, in a way. So when Chris Lowe and I started doing gigs together, I had actually been on stage already. I wrote a play called ‘The Baby’, about a girl getting pregnant. It was very dreamily romantic and I wrote three songs for it.

Did it always feel like songs were the central thing?

I was always interested in theatre but I realised by the time I was 16 that I wanted to be a, quote, popstar. But the sensible part of me thought it was unlikely to happen, so I pursued different careers.

You did history at university?

I got terrible A-level results and did history at the Polytechnic of North London in Kentish Town. I graduated with a 2:1, not that it’s had any influence on the rest of my life whatsoever, and then a friend of mine who’d been a journalist on Fleet Street showed me in the ‘Press Gazette’ an advert for a vacancy at Marvel Comics, and he said if I wanted to go into publishing or journalism that would be a good one. So I ended up at Marvel Comics.

And that’s an editing job?

It was production editor. Marvel Comics back then were seven weekly comics, things like ‘Mighty World of Marvel’, ‘The Incredible Hulk’, ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’, ‘Dracula Lives’. My job was to get them off to the printers in Scotland. It was interesting, I got into it. I did that job for two years, but it was obviously going nowhere and I was always applying for jobs in publishing. I got a job at Macdonald Educational Publishers, and…hang on… [stands up and gets something]…no one’s ever seen these.

Oh my god! ‘French Family Cooking’, ‘Freshwater Fishing’. Neil! Did you write these?

That’s just copyediting. This is probably quite a good book. It’s very ’70s.

So someone else wrote it and you just edited it?

Yeah, we always got an author in – an author, a designer, a picture editor. Then I left and got a job at ITV Books. It was in that year I met Chris. There was a guy called Steve Bush, who turned out to design ‘Smash Hits’. They asked me to do their yearbook and then when I got there, I was news editor as well.

Are you segueing more into writing as well or still being predominately an editor?

I’m writing features, and reviews of course.

I loved ‘Smash Hits’.

It’s interesting, I joined at an amazing moment.

It always felt very anarchic and joyful. Did you apply those things with the Pet Shop Boys when thinking about popularity or a kind of lightness, or was it not such a conscious decision?

To me it’s all part of the same thing. Everyone at ‘Smash Hits’ knew that I was doing the thing with Chris. And Chris would very often be in the office.

Sitting on the photocopier, swinging his legs?

No, dancing by the record player! And then we’d go out, go to the studio we used in Camden and write ‘It’s a Sin’ or something. It gradually got more and more serious until I left. I was offered the job of editor at ‘Smash Hits’ just before I left and it did seem crazy…

Wow, that’s a great gamble.

Bearing in mind I’m 31.

Did you really sweat over that decision?

No.

You were sure?

We’d released a record at this point: ‘West End Girls’. I knew that we had quite a lot of good songs.

What made a Pet Shop Boys song, lyrically?

Well, when I met Chris I was basically a singer-songwriter. He thought my songs were too flowery. He didn’t say that, but he said, “Can’t you make them more sexy?” And so I started at his instigation to write ‘West End Girls’, about our experiences. We spent a lot of time just hanging around, and then going to Heaven.

And the Chris influence is: “Don’t be too sentimental, don’t be too poetic.”

It was Chris that said, why don’t you sing, “Let’s make lots of money.” I don’t know whether he was being ironic or not…

The two words I’ve felt have come up a lot are irony and understatement.

Understatement is really important.

The “don’t look triumphant” thing?

Yes, but also lyrics. If we return to ‘Decline and Fall’, it’s a very understated book. There probably aren’t that many adjectives in it. I almost disapprove of adjectives anyway. I got that from that, also from T.S. Eliot, that thing of putting brutal everyday life into a whole dreamy, what-the-fuck’s-going-on thing. So when in ‘The Waste Land’ suddenly two women are in the pub and she’s having her teeth out. “Good night ladies, good night.” I love that.

When it’s slipping between something you’ve overheard and Shakespeare.

I’ve always liked those phrases you hear. I listen to people on the street. I do that now. ‘West End Girls’ is practically a compendium of those. “Just you wait ’til I get you home,” for instance. Chris also likes romantic lyrics, but as Chris always points out, I put doubt into it.

So you have this sort of lushness but there’s an undercut.

I think that’s what life is like. To me it’s got truth in it. Even if songs are fantasies, I want them to be a truthful fantasy. That’s a big part of the process.

When you are writing things, do you think about how it’s going to feel to sing it in front of people?

No, but I remember when our first few albums came out, thinking, “God, luckily everyone thinks it’s all ironic.” A lot of the time I’m singing exactly what I feel, but I put humour in it, so people think, “Oh, he must be being ironic.”

It’s the delivery as well. It’s very interesting reading your lyrics compared to how you sing them.

In some way they feel more unguarded on the page, whereas most people would be the other way round.
I thought that doing the book. [‘One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem’, a collection of Neil’s songwriting published in 2018 by Faber.]

Did you? Because you’ve got a slightly sceptical distance to how you sing the love-song lines.

I suppose so. I remember when ‘Behaviour’ was coming out, thinking this is all so truthful.

‘Behaviour’ is a very truthful album though.

So’s ‘It’s a Sin’. ‘It’s a Sin’ is a very unusual song, really.

I was going to ask you about Catholicism.

It was a big thing.

I was raised Catholic.

Were you? Jon Savage once pointed out to me that I had a kind of obsession with ritual, presumably from my Catholic upbringing. I was an altar boy from the age of seven, and I loved being an altar boy.

Dressing up, swagger…

Incense, ringing the bells. And then when I get to St. Oswald’s Primary School, once a week they do a reading at assembly from the New Testament, and every week I played Jesus! Olivia, you have no idea what effect that had on me! There I am, I’ve come from Mass and I’m now giving the Sermon on the Mount.

No wonder you became a popstar!

This all comes out in ‘It’s a Sin’.

Did it feel emotional writing it?

It was meant to be humorous. Noël Coward-y. “At school they taught me how to be / So pure in thought and word and deed / They didn’t quite succeed.”

You don’t sing it like that though.

It’s a little bit Gilbert & Sullivan.

There’s something lovely that Derek Jarman says in ‘Modern Nature’: “Neil is the perfect vaudevillian.” I was thinking about that in terms of Noël Coward and also Irving Berlin, in the sense of light entertainment, but it’s not fully light; there’s a lot going on underneath everything. So I wanted you to talk about what lyricists have mattered to you.

Well, the first lyricists I was aware of would be The Beatles, probably. But at the same time you had these big musicals that were always on in our house. I did ‘Desert Island Discs’ and decided to do the records chronologically, and the first one I played was ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’ from ‘My Fair Lady’, because that was a big influence on me, those witty lyrics. It’s brilliant: it’s also satirical and indeed ironic, because he doesn’t really mean it, but he sort of does. [In fact, the song Neil played was ‘Why Can’t the English?’, also from ‘My Fair Lady’.] And also that style of speak-singing, the German term sprechgesang, which I do. And then a friend of mine, her mother had the albums ‘Noël Coward in New York’ and ‘Noël Coward in Las Vegas’ from his cabaret era in the ’50s, and that’s when I first heard Noël Coward.

And did it immediately make an impression?

It did, and what I liked was that it was sort of sentimental but also cynical. There’s a song I love on ‘Noël Coward in New York’ called ‘Louisa’ and it’s about a Hollywood star who’s got her therapist on the phone. “Louisa was terribly lonely…” It’s sort of sentimental and funny, and true, and critical, all at the same time. There’s an awful lot going on in them. I was really impressed by them.

I wanted to ask you about AIDS and the Pet Shop Boys. It feels like the last few years have been a moment of such reckoning around AIDS. But you’d already been writing all those AIDS elegies, like ‘Your Funny Uncle’ and ‘Being Boring’.

When George Michael did ‘Desert Island Discs’ he played ‘Being Boring’, and his take on the Pet Shop Boys was that we were the great poets of the AIDS era. The first one being the song ‘It Couldn’t Happen Here’, and it’s because my friend Christopher Dowell…

He’s the one that’s in all three of those songs?

They’re all about him. Suddenly he’s in St. Mary’s Hospital with pneumonia. All that time – we were having a great period with number one hits – I was going to St. Mary’s Hospital to see Christopher. So the ’80s period of the Pet Shop Boys was tough, really. And then Christopher dies. And so really, the first ten years of the Pet Shop Boys it was increasingly dominant, and it had an effect on me personally, because when I came out to myself, I was also aware of AIDS. It’s this weird thing, if that’s how you want to express your sexuality, but you might catch a fatal disease. I mean, it’s a pretty fucking weird thing, you know?

Which is why ‘It’s a Sin’ doesn’t resonate as a joke even though it’s got jokey lyrics, because it’s so much the spirit of the time.

It’s now assumed to be about being gay. ‘Domino Dancing’, people say it’s all about AIDS: “watch them all fall down,” and I say no, it’s just dominos falling down.

But you don’t fully control the echoes that your work has. It’s funny, before the big Derek show in Ireland I went over to Amanda Wilkinson’s warehouse space and we were looking at the paintings…

I love the big paintings.

Yes, the ones that have the tabloid headlines. It was like walking back into 1988 and remembering the toxic, horrendous atmosphere.

I knew Derek and Ian McKellen, and then Ian starts Stonewall, and Derek’s in ACT UP along with Jimmy Somerville, who’s always slagging Chris and me off.

Because you’re not political in the way he wants popstars to be political?

Yeah, and I said we do political through personal, which we still do. I mean, ‘King’s Cross’ is a song about Thatcher. I think it’s quite a strong song about Thatcher. You don’t have to say, “Step down Margaret,” though. I don’t think many directly political songs work, actually. I think you infiltrate through pop music.

Your songs are so much about politics. They’re about the Iraq War or they’re about the breakup of communism. And yet you make them into a story or a vignette or a love song.

Vignette, that’s probably a good word. I can’t not write about it, because I just write about what’s happening. That’s my prime inspiration and motivation as a lyric writer: life as it is now.

Do you feel like there’s a queer sensibility to the Pet Shop Boys or do you just hate that idea?

We’ve always resisted labels. It’s always been…

I’m aware as I’m asking.

Because there’s something glib about labels. You’re in your box. We can file you. And I don’t really want to be filed, personally.

I was thinking about this because I knew you felt like that about it. And I was thinking what it actually is: it’s not about your sexuality; it’s about having a sexuality that has been illicit and illegal and what that means in terms of having to communicate with secrecy and codes. And I think that secrecy and codes with the Pet Shop Boys is very interesting. There’s a lot of double meanings.

That also comes out of the Catholic thing.

Totally. So it feels like it’s a frequency that is audible to someone.

That’s exactly what we were trying to do, in the ’80s in particular. ‘Your Funny Uncle’ – even the title. The title actually comes from a John Betjeman poem, ‘Indoor Games near Newbury’: “And your funny uncle saying ‘[…] Dance until it’s tea o’clock.’” But the funny uncle is obviously gay. What I like about the queer thing is there’s a lot going on under the surface. The gay thing, I always felt, was homosexuality as a sporting activity, doing aerobics to Kylie.

As opposed to Cambridge spies and Joe Orton and that whole world of subterfuge.

Which instinctively I feel more in common with, rightly or wrongly.

You didn’t come out until late.

No. I first had sex with someone of my own sex when I was about 16. And I didn’t want to be gay. In the ’70s, David Bowie was sort of the gay thing.

So gay was all a bit flouncy and stylish.

It was very zhuzhy and it was very fashion. Then suddenly, whomp, check shirts and moustaches. So farewell then, Neil Tennant. It ain’t me babe. It ain’t me you’re looking for. But then luckily, early ’80s…

New Romantics.

New Romantics.

The flounces can come back out. It’s interesting, you know, Warhol talks about this, that he was just too swishy. The gay artists like Rauschenberg are homophobic to him because he’s got that…

He’s a nellie.

He’s a nellie, and butch is dominant.

I’ve always thought the nellie takes the courage and also the butch thing is a drag act.

I’m always interested in the longevity of artists. How have you kept going and kept surviving the world of fame?

I think it’s not about fame. There’s a big part of Chris and me as the Pet Shop Boys that we are playing our game. We’re not playing your game. And if you don’t want to play by our rules, you can get lost. Because we will carry on playing by our rules. We’ve tried to grow our own universe, reach out to other people that fit in it, but it’s got to fit in.

But that’s meant very interesting collaborators. Wolfgang Tillmans, for example.

Oh, exactly. Derek! I think a lot of people want you to do what everyone else does, and they want you to do what you always do.

The pressure to just make the same thing again and again.

Even the style of the song… We just put out this song called ‘Cricket Wife’. It’s about my mother, who seems to be in this interview a lot more than she normally is. I sat down at my computer in my house by myself and thought, “I’m just going to sing this as though I’m singing an aria. I’m going to make up a tune with the words as I go along.” That’s what Bob Dylan does, apparently; I looked it up. And I did that, and it was a great experience. It’s weird singing about your mother dying. I was crying singing it sometimes.

Were you writing songs all through lockdown?

Yes, Chris was. We’ve started recently writing in what we call Elton John and Bernie Taupin: I send him some lyrics and he sets them to music, or he sends me a piece of music and I’ll send it back to him as a song.

Like pen pals.

Like pen pals, awww. Your French pen pal.

‘Your French Pen Pal’ sounds like a Pet Shop Boys song.

Maybe just ‘Pen Pals’. We’ll put it on the list.

I once interviewed Sarah Lucas and we were talking about the YBAs and how they were driven by money. And she was saying, “I was never driven by that.” And I’m, like, “Well, what does drive you? Is it happiness?” And she looked at me like I was insane. It was, like, happiness, who cares about happiness? It was about continuing to collaborate with people and think with people. I thought that was such an interesting answer to what actually drives you to keep going decade after decade, and I wondered what your answer is?

Actually, I’m with Sarah on that. It’s interesting, during lockdown I’ve been transcribing my diaries. My diaries are very brief: Tube to Brick Lane, went to studio, interviewed by Olivia Laing for Fantastic Man. That’s what you’ll get, just so you know. But it’s interesting, I get my mood. I think, “Oh, I don’t feel happy here.” I get the atmosphere, it comes back at me and I’m surprised how sometimes I’m not happy.

So what’s the appeal of still making things?

It’s a sort of profound feeling of satisfaction, or… Satisfaction isn’t a very good word. You’ve thought of something and you’ve done it. And now you can listen to it. Chris loses interest in what we do once the demo’s finished. The rest of it is process.

It’s actually the making that’s the exciting bit?

For me, it is quite exciting. Chris has sent me some music through! Or I’ll have an idea and write a lyric. I’m often walking down the street and I stick it in my phone. And then I send it to Chris and see what’s going to come back.

Fantastic Man are very keen for me to ask what kind of pen you use?

Who uses a pen!

They actually instructed me to say. Do you write on your phone?

Or computer. I don’t sit with a little leather-bound notebook! I do have nonetheless a German fountain pen that I write cheques with. [A few hours later Neil emails to report that it’s a Faber-Castell fountain pen.]

It turns out you do have a special pen! This is such a ‘Smash Hits’ question. “If you were an appliance, would you be a toaster or a kettle?”

Yes, exactly. My kettle, by the way… I came back home yesterday and my kettle just doesn’t work anymore. My Dualit kettle. I’ll have to go to Peter Jones later.