The Boys Are Back

Mad hatters: Chris Lowe (left) and Neil Tennant, aka the Pet Shop Boys. Courtesy EMI Music Canada.

The Pet Shop Boys’ new album is brilliant, but it’s hardly au courant. With its programmed beats and blustery synthesizer sound, Fundamental is anachronistic, a vestige of the days of hair spray, wine coolers and wearing shoes without socks. Enriched by big melodies, shiny bombast and a liberal application of wit, the disc indicates a renewed vigour for a duo that, in the view of many pop fans, could not be more '80s.

While their popularity has declined since their late-'80s peak, the Pet Shop Boys have retained a steadfast following – Fundamental entered the British charts at No. 5 and made the Top Ten for album downloads for iTunes subscribers in Canada, Germany, Spain and Scandinavia. Those numbers are healthy enough to spare Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe from the fate of many of their one-time contemporaries, doomed to relive past glories on shows such as VH1 Bands Reunited.

The Pet Shop Boys have always been too classy for anything so craven. Conceived after singer Tennant — a former writer and editor for British teen-pop bible Smash Hits! — met architecture student Lowe in an electronics shop in August of 1981, it was clear the project was never going to be a typical pop group. For one thing, the Pet Shop Boys were never young or pretty enough to compete with most chart acts; Tennant was 30 by the time West End Girls became a worldwide smash, while Lowe undermined his cuteness factor by deploying a deadpan demeanour.

More significantly, they’re gay — or at least Tennant is. While the ever-stoic Lowe has never said either way, Tennant came out in a magazine interview in 1996. Since this was some 11 years after West End Girls, it could be said that the Pet Shop Boys spent their salad days in the closet. But the ambiguous nature of their work placed them in a particular pop tradition. Songwriters including Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Billy Strayhorn didn’t conceal their sexual preferences in their personal lives, but they had to be more covert if they expected their tunes to be widely heard. Humour and irony allowed them to hide a queer sensibility in plain view.

The influence of gay culture has never been hard to find in the music biz, an industry that has long traded on the allure of young men in tight trousers. In the early '60s, impresario Larry Parmes built up a stable of prefab stars with vigorous names such as Tommy Steele. Nearly 40 years after his death, Beatles manager Brian Epstein is still the subject of innuendo concerning his interest in the Fab Four. Openly gay music acts were rare even amid the rampant hedonism of glam and disco — the real shocker was that David Bowie and most of the Village People would eventually be outed as straight.

Shipping out: Tennant and Lowe in 1988. Photo Deborah Feingold/Getty Images.

By the early '80s, there was a shift, especially among U.K. artists. In 1984, the Bronski Beat scored a global hit with the single Smalltown Boy, a haunting vignette of teen gay desire. Soft Cell’s Marc Almond and Erasure’s Andy Bell were equally brazen. But it was more common to avoid such openness. At the height of Culture Club’s success, Boy George famously said, “I prefer a cup of tea to sex”; in the meantime, he was having a torrid on-again, off-again affair with bandmate Jon Moss. Morrissey played it cagey, too; despite the furtive lyrical references to same-sex love and the naked man on the cover of the Smiths’ first single, Hand in Glove, Morrissey identified himself as celibate.

The Pet Shop Boys excelled at being simultaneously open and covert, a strategy Tennant achieved partially by playing the observer — the second-person narrative of West End Girls was directed more at the "East End boys" — and by assuming characters in his songs. With his mannered, oddly unemotional vocals, Tennant suggested more than he stated, whether the feeling was joy (Heart) or guilt (It’s a Sin). Love songs tended to address a gender-neutral “you.”

Meanwhile, the music was unmistakably influenced by the Hi-NRG and house music that ruled discos of the day, yet was largely denuded of sexual signifiers. In other words, it wasn’t that gay — which may be why it captivated young heteros like myself. The music dramatized battles not just between the head and heart, but the head and the feet. These dichotomies were best expressed in Introspective, a 1988 album devoted to collaborations with the most successful dance/music producers of the day. Only Tennant would combine a lush Frankie Knuckles groove with a fictional monologue by a man who ponders whether buying a chihuahua would alleviate his loneliness.

Loneliness and loss were always uncomfortably present in the band’s best music, no matter how jubilant the songs might have seemed. It’s impossible not to associate the air of grief that pervades their 1990 masterpiece Behaviour with the devastation wrought by AIDS. The connection was made clear in Being Boring, a rueful hit that served as an elegy for old friends and lovers, noting how “some are here and some are missing.”

Yet over the next decade, the Pet Shop Boys would abandon their reserve. By 1993’s much more extroverted Very, the Pet Shop Boys were camping it up on a cover of the Village People’s Go West; in Can You Forgive Her, Tennant depicted the cruel dynamic between a woman and an insufficiently manly partner whose orientation is betrayed by his preference for disco over rock.

Tennant’s emergence from the closet coincided with the release of Bilingual (1996), the group’s most listless disc to date. While Nightlife (1999) was an improvement, it was dominated by songs created for Closer to Heaven, a musical about the fictional denizens of a gay nightclub. Co-written by the Pet Shop Boys and playwright Jonathan Harvey, it would get a West End run in 2001. Yet the need to make the characters big enough for the stage meant that many of the old subtleties were lost in the Pet Shop Boys’ bid for theatrical glory. The crime of Release (2002) was not the strange abundance of mushy ballads and acoustic guitars, but simply the dearth of catchy tunes.

Everything looks better in neon: the boys promoting their new album. Courtesy EMI Music Canada.

All of which makes Fundamental’s combination of synth-driven exuberance and sly smarts particularly gratifying. The former comes largely courtesy of one of the group’s collaborators on Introspective, Trevor Horn, a producer whose masterpiece remains Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s orgasmic single Relax. But the biggest reason the Pet Shop Boys sound so firmly on target is that they have something to be subversive about again — except now it’s politics rather than sex.

Satirical early songs like Shopping and Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money) show that Tennant has long been interested in the world beyond his London flat, but his writing has rarely been as pointed as on Fundamental. The song I’m With Stupid portrays the relationship between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush as a romance between partners of rather unequal mental faculties. Indefinite Leave to Remain takes its title from the British term for permanent residence, the metaphorical conceit combining the equally desperate pleas of the lover and the immigrant. It’s unclear whether the narrator in Numb hides himself away because of love trouble or paranoia. Either way, the fact that the song was written by Diane Warren — the schlock-meister behind Toni Braxton’s Unbreak My Heart and Celine Dion’s Because You Loved Me — seems like a characteristic act of pop subversion.

One implication is that the fear and secrecy that once defined queer culture are rife throughout society in the years since 9/11. It’s not as if the Pet Shop Boys have reacted to the current social climate or their own declining profile by returning to the closet. Rather, they’ve recaptured the tone with which they were most proficient: wry and coded, yet still full of powerful emotion. Fundamental confirms the Pet Shop Boys’ masterful ability to combine the serious and the superficial within the context of dance music, pop’s most immediate yet most disposable genre. It’s a demonstration of a Noel Coward quote: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

Jason Anderson is a Toronto writer.

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