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Interview
by SaschaS
28-3-2002
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| PSB's 'Release' |
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Pretty sharp boys
PSB’s ‘Release’ again crosses the divide between entertaining and brainy
Music business, like Hollywood, has become a community where elaborate fiction was a way of life - a community which successfully had imposed fantasy upon reality and melded lies with truth for so long that it no longer had any interest in distinguishing between the two, and had devised an arsenal of sophisticated defences against any outsider who suggested that it should. Britney is a soft-porn pop-star, kids-inspiriting, parent-titillating… Or Marilyn Manson, or Slipknot, or… Gosh, there are so many of ‘em! Public image is reality.
Pet Shop Boys have never really subscribed to this ‘prime directive’ and although their music appeared aconic at times, it’s never been lacklustre or throwaway. Behind catchy tunes there was content, a commentary, socio-moral observations… Of the two principal members, Neil Tennant is the singing and talking part of the duo, a former journalist and editor who’s honed his opinions and can talk any interviewer under the mic, and Chris Lowe is the quiet and enigmatic part of the balance. The two have always made musical statements and it is no different on the new disc.
‘Release’ could be described as mutated guitar-rock album with Johnny Marr augmenting the sound all the way through the disc.
“The album is actually machine driven,” Tennant starts explaining in his tutorial manner, “but the source of sounds is different, we avoided using dance sounds and loaded up real rock sounds and we brought in a few guitars and Johnny (Marr)… We were probably making a statement about the music scene at the moment, like dance being so specific and targeted at really narrow categories that we saw no reason to go that direction again.”
Charting with dignity
PSB came together in the murky days of electro-pop of the 1980s but distinguished themselves with songs that combined pop with dance element, regularly charting but managing to convey a message, or at least a story rather than being just 'blah-blah-she-left' scenarios. They continue to do so and one wonders whether they are getting tired of fighting to be different for 21 years?
“Sure, it can get tiresome,” Tennant confesses, “but we try to keep our workload to a level where it leaves us wanting to do more… Also, the whole creative process is about restrictions you’ve placed upon yourself and when you break them… When we decided not to use dance sounds for our new album, it was so liberating because it allowed us to write more mid-tempo songs, more ballads. Things like that give you freedom to experiment and refocus effort on songs rather than the production.”
“The last album, ‘Nightlife’, was I think the best produced album we’ve ever made, so for this one we definitely wanted to make it sound more like just Neil and Chris in the studio and that kind of threw the spotlight on the songs, so the lyrics seemed much more important than they did on the last album. And so it reflects things in my life or our lives, but also things that are going round.”
“We were quite keen on the idea,” Tennant rolls sentences like a conveyor belt jam rolls, “that we’d play everything ourselves on this album. Because we could if we had to. But I felt with the guitar playing that it could be better, and one day I discovered Johnny Marr in the same studio where we were mastering our reissues, and er, we were chatting again. I told him about it and he said he’d love to play on it. So he came up (North of England where Neil has a house/studio) for 4 days and played on about 10 tracks, more tracks than there are on the album in fact.”
“I think ‘I Get Along’ sounds a little bit like Oasis, in fact he came from recording with Liam Gallagher to our session! He’s put in his little guitar things that I or you would never have thought of because he has that kind of dynamic as a player.”
Not all gilded
In a career spanning several boy-band’s popularity-terms, aside few under-par songs, PSB really failed in their attempt to stage a musical in West End; ‘Closer To Heaven’ closed after a very short run but that hasn’t deterred the boys who have taken the whole experience as a lesson about another world.
“We’re going to write another musical,” Tennant states convincingly, “and we’re discussing a New York production of ‘Closer to Heaven’ at the moment. That’s when you realise when you’re writing for the theatre; you’ve got to be clear. You can’t shove songs in that you’ve already written because they just won’t make any sense. You can do it in ‘Mamma Mia’ because that’s why everyone’s going. The story is neither here nor there really. In a proper musical you’ve got to be, you’ve got to write stuff that absolutely fits in and hopefully you won’t really notice the change from dialogue to music, you should be able to come in and out of it without people really thinking about it when it works properly and when ‘Closer to Heaven’ worked at its best it was like that.”
Tour dates:
06 July – Brixton Academy, London
08 July – The Centre, Brighton
10 July – Auditorium, Grimsby
11 July – City Hall, Sheffield
12 July – Apollo, Manchester
14 July – City Hall, Newcastle
15 July – Playhouse, Edinburgh
16 July – Royal Centre, Nottingham
18 July – Civic, Wolverhampton
19 July – Corn Exchange, Cambridge
21 July – Apollo, Oxford
22 July – Colston Hall, Bristol
SaschaS
9-4-2003
Pet Shop Boys’ album ‘Release’ is issued 01 April on Parlophone/EMI
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