Pop’s last intellectuals the Pet Shop Boys have staying power

If you spend a spare forty minutes on YouTube, you will find an experience belonging to another era, almost another planet. Kenneth Williams is interviewed by Michael Parkinson alongside Sir John Betjeman and Maggie Smith. He references Keats, Shelley, Byron and quotes Voltaire. This all happens in about twenty minutes.

Fast forward to 2019. Who does that anymore? Only one person immediately springs to mind, and he happens to be a pop star. On the Pet Shop Boys’ thirteen studio albums, Neil Tennant’s lyrics reference Pinter (Bilingual), Stravinsky (Very), Richter (Yes), Shostakovitch and the Bolshevik uprising (Behaviour) as well as contemporary issues like the Special Relationship (Fundamental) and Peter Mandelson’s multiple sackings (Release). He also writes love songs. Probably their greatest 21st century song, Love Is A Bourgeois Construct, was inspired by David Lodge’s 1988 Booker-nominated novel, Nice Work. Their breakthrough hit, West End Girls, is so far the only global number one single to namecheck critic and historian Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station.

The Pet Shop Boys closed this year’s Radio 2’s all-day festival at Hyde Park after Simply Red, country singer Kelsea Ballerini, Bananarama, Clean Bandit, Status Quo and Westlife (none of whom has written a song about the Bolshevik uprising, unless there’s a Quo B-side I didn’t hear). The light show, choreography and (small detail) songs utterly justified their headlining slot.

With a catalogue of hits including It’s A Sin, Left To My Own Devices, Domino Dancing, Always On My Mind, What Have I Done To Deserve This and Suburbia all performed, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe showed that they belong with other great British song writing duos, such as Jagger & Richards, Difford & Tilbrook, John & Taupin et al. That’s no idle comparison – on the 2006 documentary, A Life In Pop, their EMI record company head Tony Wadsworth likened them to Gilbert and George meets Lennon and McCartney. Having written the musical Closer to Heaven, a ballet (The Most Incredible Thing), and sound tracked a screening of Battleship Potemkin in Trafalgar Square, as well as holding a residency at the Savoy Theatre, Gilbert and George meets Gilbert and Sullivan might be a better comparison. (The fact they covered a Gilbert O’ Sullivan song with Elton John is a side detail.)

Art and theatre are writ large over much of their work and not since Andy Warhol has anyone entwined the words “pop” and “art” so persuasively. Wolfgang Tilmans, Derek Jarman, Sam Taylor Wood, Dame Zaha Hadid and Martin Parr have all worked with the band. The Mark Farrow design on their record sleeves, particularly the orange Lego of the Very album, is a cut above the “five blokes leaning against a wall” visual presentation of many bands, with only Peter Saville & New Order serious competitors in this area.

Chris Lowe’s signature look, sunglasses and oversized headgear, is a work of performance art on its own. It also ensures he is rarely stopped in the street for photographs. Tennant even helped judge the Turner Prize, won by Chris Ofili, in 1998. He is from the North East rather than the North West, but to this writer at least, many of his recurring fascinations in song, such as the capital (London, West End Girls), royalty (Dreaming of the Queen, the King of Rome),  spying and surveillance (Nothing Has Been Proved, Integral) and homelessness (Theatre) express an understated sense of camp and thwarted love reminiscent of Yorkshire’s Alan Bennett, who often explores these themes.

His other touchstone can be found in another comment Tennant made of the group: “I see us in the tradition of Joe Orton and Noël Coward in that we are serious, comic, light-hearted, sentimental and brittle, all at the same time.” Tennant once compiled an album of Coward’s songs recorded by modern stars including Paul McCartney, Robbie Williams, Sting and Damon Albarn.

While it may be tempting to wheel out Coward’s maxim, “strange how potent cheap music is”, that’s a little unfair on Tennant and Lowe. Besides, the playwright once famously mixed up Sibelius and Delius. Tennant, a classical musical nut, has not.

A better Coward comment might be this: “Thousands of people have talent. I might as well congratulate you for having eyes in your head. The one and only thing that counts is: Do you have staying power?” In the words of two of their album titles – Yes, Actually.