The story of Pet Shop Boys

A Geordie and a Blackpool boy

The singer's story starts in the North East of England. Neil Francis Tennant was born on the tenth of July 1954 in North Shields, just east of Newcastle, and grew up in the suburb of Gosforth. His father was a sales manager for a rubber company, and the family was Roman Catholic. Neil served as an altar boy and went to St Cuthbert's Catholic Grammar School, where he never fitted in with the football culture or the strict moral lessons. He later said he built an aloof survival persona there and dreamed of leaving Newcastle to become a pop star. At twelve he taught himself guitar from a Bert Weedon book, and when a film crew came to Newcastle to shoot Women in Love, he worked as an uncredited extra and spent his wages on the Beatles' White Album.[1]

In 1970, as a teenager, Neil formed a folk group called Dust with his friend Christopher Dowell, whom he knew from the Young People's Theatre in Newcastle. They worshipped the Incredible String Band, and in 1971 they even recorded a session for BBC Radio Newcastle. Tennant later told a funny story about a talent contest. Dust sailed through the first heat, but in the second heat Christopher's zither was tuned a semitone lower than Neil's guitar, and they lost to a local act that did dancing and played kazoos. The group split soon after over musical differences, with Neil wanting to rock like T. Rex and Christopher staying folk. The friendship survived, and Christopher Dowell would become one of the most important people in the Pet Shop Boys story.[1] [2] [3]

In 1972 Tennant moved to London to study history at North London Polytechnic, spending his summers working in the manuscripts department of the British Museum. After graduating he became a production editor at Marvel UK, turning American comics into British weeklies. Part of the job was making sure that risky characters like Red Sonja were redrawn wearing more modest clothes. He then edited illustrated books, including The Dairy Book of Home Management and a Mary Berry cookbook. His break into music journalism came in June 1982, when the editor of Smash Hits, David Hepworth, made him news editor. Neil rose to assistant editor, set up the American spin off Star Hits in New York in 1983, and interviewed a rising singer called Madonna.[1] [2]

Christopher Sean Lowe was born on the fourth of October 1959 in Blackpool, the eldest of four children, into a musical family. His grandfather, Syd Flood, played trombone in a comedy jazz troupe called the Nitwits, his mother was a dancer, and his father could play piano by ear. Chris learned trombone and piano, played in his school orchestra, and joined a semi professional dance band called One Under the Eight. As a teenager he preferred his grandparents' records, Frank Sinatra and Dorothy Squires, to what his friends liked. Then disco arrived. Working as a glass collector at the Dixieland Showbar on Blackpool's Central Pier, he fell for the dance floor. Worried about job security, though, he chose architecture, and in 1978 he started a course at the University of Liverpool.[1]

A chance meeting and Bobby O

On the nineteenth of August 1981, two strangers met in a hi fi shop called the Chelsea Record Centre on the King's Road in London. Neil Tennant, then twenty seven, had bought a Korg synthesiser and needed a connector so it would play through his old stereo. Chris Lowe was in London on a work placement at an architecture practice, where he had just designed a staircase for an industrial estate in Milton Keynes. They started chatting about disco and electronic music and discovered they loved the same records, from Soft Cell to New York club tracks. Tennant still remembers that the shop assistant welded a jack plug onto the prongs to make his machine work, and that the shop smelled of welding. MusicBrainz still dates the band from that very day.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They began writing together in Tennant's flat in Chelsea, and from 1982 in a tiny studio in Camden Town owned by Ray Roberts. Neil played acoustic guitar while Chris played bass lines on the Korg. Tennant later admitted that bass lines had simply never occurred to him, and that something clicked between them immediately. In 1982 Lowe wrote a piece on the piano at his family home in Blackpool and gave Neil a cassette. It became Jealousy, the first song Chris said he had ever constructed. It's a Sin was written that same year in Camden. They briefly called themselves West End, then settled on Pet Shop Boys, after friends who worked in a pet shop in Ealing. Tennant has said the name means nothing at all, and that Chris used to be embarrassed by it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Both men worshipped a New York producer called Bobby Orlando, known as Bobby O, the king of the pounding Hi NRG sound. Lowe called one of his productions, Passion by the Flirts, the most important song of their lives. In August 1983 Smash Hits sent Tennant to New York for an interview, and while he was there he arranged to meet his hero. He handed over a demo tape that included It's a Sin and Opportunities. Orlando liked what he heard and agreed to produce them. Over 1983 and 1984 they recorded about a dozen songs with him at Unique Studios in New York. On West End Girls, Orlando played most of the instruments himself and borrowed a drum part from Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. His idea was simple: a rap record in a British accent.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tennant started writing West End Girls while staying at his cousin's house in Nottingham, after watching a gangster film late at night. He wanted it to sound like the rap records coming out of New York, especially Grandmaster Flash's The Message, but the structure came from T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. Tennant has said he never fully understood the poem but loved its collage of different voices, so he wrote the song as overheard dialogue. He also slipped in a nod to Edmund Wilson's history of socialism, To the Finland Station. The Orlando version came out in April 1984 on his Bobcat label. It became a club hit in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and a small hit in Belgium and France, but in Britain you could only buy it on import.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By early 1985 the duo wanted out of their deal with Orlando. After long negotiations they cut ties in March 1985, with a settlement that gave him significant royalties on future sales. They hired a larger than life manager, Tom Watkins, a designer whose studio had made record sleeves for Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Watkins signed them to EMI's Parlophone label on a seven album deal. Tennant thought that was ludicrous, since making even one album seemed like so much work, and Watkins bluntly predicted they would last three years. Neil later said his reaction was simple: I'll show you. In April 1985 he left Smash Hits, even though he had been offered the editor's job, and Chris quit architecture before his final year of practical training.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

West End Girls conquers the world

The first Parlophone single was Opportunities, subtitled Let's Make Lots of Money, released in July 1985. It was produced by J. J. Jeczalik of the Art of Noise, took three weeks and cost forty thousand pounds, and it crawled to number 116. The song itself was a joke that many people missed. Lowe had asked Tennant to build a lyric around the phrase about making lots of money, and Neil turned it into a portrait of two losers. The narrator boasts about fake qualifications, and the punchline, Tennant said, is that these people are never going to make any money. For decades afterwards, television documentaries used it as cheerful background music for yuppies waving champagne, which the duo found both funny and exasperating.[1] [2] [3] [4]

EMI wanted the hit factory Stock Aitken Waterman, but the duo were allowed a trial with the American producer Stephen Hague. Hague slowed West End Girls down, made it moodier and gave it a film noir opening. He recorded the traffic noise himself with a Sony Walkman on Gosfield Street, outside Advision Studios. The trumpet solo was actually Hague playing an Emulator sampler, and the engineer said it took about six hours, with wrong notes played on purpose to sound more like jazz. The new version came out in October 1985 and entered the chart at number eighty. Within eight weeks, in January 1986, it was number one in Britain. On the tenth of May 1986 it topped the Billboard Hot 100 in America too.[1] [2] [3]

The video, directed by Eric Watson and Andy Morahan, simply followed the pair through London, from the empty East End at dawn to the neon of Leicester Square. Tennant, in a long coat, sang straight at the camera while Lowe trailed behind, blank and unimpressed. That look was a plan. Watson said Chris did not want to be seen playing keyboards at all, and they realised that one person singing while the other did nothing created an odd, creepy tension. During the shoot a tramp appeared and started walking in step with them. The rule carried on to television. On Top of the Pops, Tennant recalled, Lowe insisted they were never allowed to look thrilled to be there, and would warn him not to look triumphant.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The debut album, Please, came out on the twenty fourth of March 1986. They chose the title so that fans could walk into a shop and politely ask for the Pet Shop Boys album, please, and it began their habit of one word album titles. It was made in ten weeks at Advision, sequenced as a loose story of running away to the city, chasing money, falling in love and going clubbing. Manager Tom Watkins proposed an elaborate fold out cover, but designer Mark Farrow went the other way, with a tiny photo on a plain white sleeve. Please reached number three in Britain and number seven in America, where it is still their biggest album and their only American platinum record, with more than a million sold.[1] [2]

There was a wobble. The follow up single, Love Comes Quickly, only reached number nineteen, and the duo worried they might be one hit wonders. A reissued Opportunities, remixed by Hague, got to number eleven in Britain and number ten in America, their only single ever to do better in the States. Then came Suburbia in September 1986, inspired by a bleak Penelope Spheeris film and the riots in Brixton. For the single they recorded real dogs at Battersea Dogs Home and real breaking glass. It reached number eight in Britain and number two in West Germany, and Tennant later said it led to everything that followed. Its B side, Paninaro, was Lowe's first lead vocal, built partly around a TV interview where he listed all the music he hated.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The imperial phase begins

Tennant later coined a phrase for what happened next: the imperial phase, the stretch when a band can do no wrong. It began with It's a Sin, released on the fifteenth of June 1987. Neil wrote the words in about fifteen minutes after hearing Chris play something that sounded like a hymn, drawing on what the priests had taught him about sin at his Catholic school. He intended it, he said, as a camp joke. Producer Julian Mendelsohn took them to record the atmosphere inside the Brompton Oratory, and at Westminster Cathedral they caught a sung Mass that happened to be in the same key as the song. Tennant called the result a heavy metal record at heart. It spent three weeks at number one in Britain and topped the charts in many other countries.[1] [2]

It's a Sin brought the duo's first big fights. The Newcastle Evening Chronicle ran a front page story calling it an attack on the values taught at Tennant's old school, and an anonymous teacher said Neil had painted a distorted picture. Tennant replied that the article embarrassed his parents, who still lived in the city, and that it was cowardly to hide behind anonymity. A local priest even preached a sermon about the song. Then the pop impresario Jonathan King claimed in his column in The Sun that the melody was copied from Cat Stevens' Wild World, and released his own Wild World in the style of It's a Sin to prove it. His record flopped. The Pet Shop Boys sued and won damages out of court, and gave the money to research into sexually transmitted diseases.[1] [2] [3]

Next came a dream duet. Tennant's favourite album was Dusty in Memphis, and he wanted Dusty Springfield on What Have I Done to Deserve This?, written with the American songwriter Allee Willis. EMI was against it and offered stars like Barbra Streisand or Tina Turner instead. Dusty had not had a British top forty hit since 1970, and her life had been sliding into drink, drugs and self harm. In 1985 she had been admitted to a psychiatric unit in New York after cutting herself. People warned the duo she was difficult and could no longer sing. She came to London in December 1986, arrived on time with her lyric sheet annotated, and Tennant said her voice was exactly as it had always been. The single reached number two in both Britain and America, the biggest American hit of her life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Actually, Elvis and a surreal film

The album Actually arrived on the seventh of September 1987 and stalled at number two behind Michael Jackson's Bad, but it became their best selling album in Britain. Underneath the gloss it was a quiet attack on Thatcher's Britain. Shopping mocked privatisation, and King's Cross, Tennant said, was an angry song about Thatcherism and the people left at the back of the queue. In November that year a deadly fire broke out at King's Cross Underground station. The Sun wanted the song released as a charity single, and the duo refused. The track It Couldn't Happen Here, co written with Ennio Morricone, took its title from an early belief Neil shared with Christopher Dowell, that AIDS would never hit Britain badly. By the time Neil wrote the lyrics, Dowell had been diagnosed.[1] [2] [3]

At the end of 1987 they sang Always on My Mind on an ITV special marking ten years since Elvis Presley's death. Lowe, who had a knack for picking covers, had turned it into pounding Hi NRG, and the reaction was so strong that they released it. It became the Christmas number one, beating The Pogues' Fairytale of New York, and held the top spot for four weeks. In a BBC poll in 2014 it was voted the best cover version of all time. Then, in March 1988, Heart became their fourth British number one, and still their last. It was first called Heartbeat, but they changed the title when Culture Club's drummer Jon Moss launched a band called Heartbeat UK. In the video Ian McKellen played a vampire who steals Tennant's bride.[1] [2] [3]

Instead of touring, which they could not afford to do the theatrical way they wanted, the duo made a feature film. It Couldn't Happen Here was directed by Jack Bond and shot over three weeks in November 1987, mostly in Clacton on Sea, with Barbara Windsor, Joss Ackland and Gareth Hunt. It was a surreal road movie in which Joss Ackland plays both a ranting priest and a knife carrying hitchhiker, and a ventriloquist's dummy lectures on the nature of time. After the King's Cross fire, one scene of a commuter walking to work in flames was nearly cut, but it stayed at the request of the victims' families. Critics hated it. Tennant joked that if they had made a simple rags to riches story ending with a number one, it would have worked.[1] [2]

Losing friends, making Behaviour

In September 1988 the single Domino Dancing, recorded in Miami with the producer Lewis Martinee, entered the chart at number nine and peaked at seven. Tennant remembered thinking, that's that, it's all over. The run of number ones had ended, and he named it the end of their imperial phase. Their third album, Introspective, was a daring six track record of long dance versions, and it still reached number two, kept off the top by U2. Tennant has said it is their best selling album around the world. On the fifth of June 1988 they played It's a Sin at a benefit at the Piccadilly Theatre against Section 28, the Thatcher government's law banning the so called promotion of homosexuality, and Tennant later said they were the only pop group there.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the hits, a tragedy was unfolding. Christopher Dowell, Neil's friend since the Newcastle theatre days and his partner in Dust, died of AIDS in 1989. Tennant wrote three songs about him. It Couldn't Happen Here recalls their early complacency about the disease, Your Funny Uncle describes his funeral, and Being Boring is about their friendship. The title came from a Japanese review that called the duo boring, which reminded Neil of a Zelda Fitzgerald quote Dowell had once printed on a party invitation. As teenagers they had promised each other never to settle for boring lives. Tennant wrote the final verse in a rented room in Munich, wishing his friend were still there. He later said the loss of so many friends to AIDS would always be part of who he is.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Being Boring appeared on the fourth album, Behaviour, recorded in Munich from April 1990 with Harold Faltermeyer, an expert in the old analogue synthesisers they now preferred. Johnny Marr of the Smiths played guitar, and Chris said Depeche Mode's Violator had raised the stakes. Lowe admitted they set out to make an uplifting album during the rave boom and ended up with the complete opposite. Released in October 1990, Behaviour won some of the best reviews of their career, but Being Boring stalled at number twenty, breaking a run of ten top ten hits. Bruce Weber's black and white video was banned by MTV because of brief male nudity. Decades later it is often named their greatest song, and George Michael chose it on Desert Island Discs.[1] [2] [3]

These were also the years they became producers for their heroines. They wrote and produced Nothing Has Been Proved and In Private for Dusty Springfield, and half of her 1990 comeback album Reputation. Tennant admitted that a whole album with Dusty might give you a nervous breakdown, since she recorded one song a syllable at a time over two days. Tom Watkins, busy managing Bros, heard that Liza Minnelli had signed to Epic and suggested the duo. The result, Results, gave her a hit with Stephen Sondheim's Losing My Mind. Tennant also co wrote Getting Away With It for Electronic, the new band of Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr. By 1990 the duo had parted company with Watkins and hired Jill Carrington as manager.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

They finally went on tour in 1989, to Hong Kong, Japan and Britain, in a show staged by the film maker Derek Jarman, who made films to project behind the singers and dancers. Jarman had been diagnosed as HIV positive in December 1986 and had gone public about it. The first proper world tour, Performance, opened in Tokyo on the eleventh of March 1991, designed by David Alden and David Fielding from English National Opera. At first they left out Being Boring, and fans, including Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses, complained, so they added it as an encore. That year they also had a number four hit with a disco mash up of U2's Where the Streets Have No Name and Can't Take My Eyes Off You. U2 joked back by asking what they had done to deserve this.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Very, Go West and coming out

In 1992 Derek Jarman asked them to play an AIDS charity night at the Hacienda club in Manchester. Chris Lowe picked a Village People song, Go West, to perform, and although Neil forgot the words on the night, they decided to record it. First came a total reinvention. In June 1993 the single Can You Forgive Her?, named after an Anthony Trollope novel, arrived with a computer generated video of the pair in orange suits and towering dunce caps, a deliberate reaction against grunge. Go West followed in September with a male Broadway choir and a Soviet themed video. It reached number two in Britain and number one in Germany, and football crowds from Arsenal, Chris's team, to Borussia Dortmund turned it into a terrace chant.[1] [2] [3]

The album Very, released on the twenty seventh of September 1993, became the only Pet Shop Boys studio album to reach number one in Britain. It came in a bright orange plastic case covered in raised bumps, which ended up in an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Critics called it their coming out album. Through the 1980s Tennant had neither confirmed nor denied the rumours, and the singer Jimmy Somerville had publicly accused them of exploiting gay culture without giving anything back. In August 1994, in an interview with the gay magazine Attitude, Tennant finally said plainly that he was gay and had written songs from that point of view. He added that he rejected the idea of being anyone's role model. Chris Lowe has never spoken publicly about his own sexuality.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Loss kept coming. Derek Jarman, who had directed the It's a Sin video and their first tour, died of an AIDS related illness on the nineteenth of February 1994, aged fifty two. The same year brought lighter moments. The duo turned samples from the sitcom Absolutely Fabulous into a Comic Relief single, remixed Blur's Girls and Boys, and wrote a song for Kylie Minogue. In October 1994 their Discovery tour took them to places they had never played, including Singapore, Australia, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Brazil. While in Australia, Chris Lowe filmed a cameo in the soap opera Neighbours. The Latin American drums they heard on that tour, and in a New York club, would shape their next album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That album, Bilingual, came out in September 1996, full of samba drums from the Scottish women's drumming group SheBoom and lyrics in Spanish and Portuguese. The single title Se a vida e was meant to mean that's the way life is, but it actually means if life is, and Tennant kept it anyway. Earlier that year they remixed David Bowie's Hallo Spaceboy, cutting up lines from Space Oddity for a new verse. Bowie sounded unhappy on the phone at first, then loved it. In June 1997 they became the first band to hold a residency in a West End theatre, two weeks at the Savoy with films by the artist Sam Taylor Wood. The shows lost money. Tennant also sat on the jury for the 1998 Turner Prize.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nightlife, near collapse and a musical

For the 1999 album Nightlife the duo transformed themselves again, with spiky yellow and orange wigs, thick Kabuki style eyebrows and dark glasses designed by Ian MacNeil, and a tour set by the architect Zaha Hadid. But it was a hard time. Nightlife reached only number seven, their first studio album to miss the top five, and in America they were dropped by Atlantic and picked up by Sire. During tour rehearsals, the company of the promoter Harvey Goldsmith went into receivership and they lost a seven hundred and fifty thousand pound advance. They carried on at a loss, playing half empty arenas. One night at Sheffield Arena, Tennant said to Chris, why don't we just pack it in? Chris did not answer, so they started talking about something else.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the second of March 1999 Dusty Springfield died of breast cancer at the age of fifty nine. The Pet Shop Boys were among the mourners at her funeral in Henley on Thames, and Tennant said in his eulogy that when she sang, he knew he was in the presence of greatness. The next summer, on the twenty fourth of June 2000, they made their Glastonbury debut on the Pyramid Stage at sunset, with Cerys Matthews of Catatonia singing Dusty's part on What Have I Done to Deserve This? It was hailed as a triumph. A week later, at the Roskilde festival in Denmark, nine people died in a crowd crush during Pearl Jam's set, and the Pet Shop Boys and Oasis refused to play when organisers carried on.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In May 2001 their long planned musical, Closer to Heaven, opened at the Arts Theatre in London, with a book by the playwright Jonathan Harvey. It was set in a gay club, featured drugs and a fatal overdose, and starred Frances Barber as a burnt out rock icon called Billie Trix. Tennant insisted they never sat down to write a gay musical, and they refused to make a jukebox show out of old hits. It was produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber's company, and Tennant remembered Lloyd Webber telling them afterwards that it was probably a bit too much for everybody. Reviews were mixed, audiences thinned over the summer, and it closed on the thirteenth of October 2001. Later revivals were much better received.[1] [2] [3]

The 2002 album Release was a sharp turn. Recorded mostly at Tennant's remote home studio on the edge of the moors in County Durham, it was guitar based at Lowe's suggestion, with Johnny Marr on seven tracks. The first video, by the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, showed little more than mice scurrying under the London Underground, and music channels deemed it unplayable. They toured British universities, inspired by Paul McCartney's Wings tour of 1972. Reviews were split. They then went somewhere nobody expected. In September 2004 they performed a new score for the 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin with the Dresdner Sinfoniker in Trafalgar Square, and in 2005 they headlined the Live 8 concert in Moscow's Red Square in front of tens of thousands.[1] [2]

Fundamental, in 2006, reunited them with Trevor Horn, who had produced Left to My Own Devices in 1988. It was their most openly political record. I'm with Stupid mocked Tony Blair's closeness to George W. Bush, with the Little Britain comedians Matt Lucas and David Walliams playing the duo in the video, and Integral attacked the government's identity card plans. Tennant, once a Labour donor, said he voted Liberal Democrat in 2005 over those cards. The album was dedicated to two Iranian teenagers, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, hanged in July 2005. Some reports said they were executed for homosexuality, while Iran said the charge was the rape of a boy. For the album Horn also sampled Tennant singing every note over three octaves, a keyboard instrument nicknamed the Neilotron.[1] [2] [3]

Brits, Olympics and a new label

In February 2009 the Brit Awards gave them the Outstanding Contribution to Music award. They played a medley arranged by Stuart Price, with Lady Gaga, who said she listened to them while making her debut album, singing Dusty's part. Their tenth album, Yes, was made with the hit pop team Xenomania, whose boss Brian Higgins nearly said no after a bad experience with another band who wrote their own songs. It reached number four, their best in thirteen years, although copies accidentally sold early on iTunes cost it about two and a half thousand chart sales. In China, the closing track Legacy was released only as an instrumental because of a line about governments falling. In 2011 they even composed a ballet, The Most Incredible Thing, based on a Hans Christian Andersen story.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Their 2012 album Elysium was recorded in Los Angeles and was mostly about growing older. Tennant called it the album where they went to LA and made a record about being old, and it came in the wake of the deaths of his mother Sheila in 2008 and his father William in 2009. The same year, their long time photographer and video director Eric Watson, the man who shaped their deadpan image, died of a heart attack in March 2012, aged fifty six. Then came a global moment. At the London Olympics closing ceremony on the twelfth of August 2012, Neil and Chris were pedalled around the stadium in chariots, wearing pointed hats, singing West End Girls to a worldwide audience.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

After the Olympics they played the winners' parade at the personal request of Boris Johnson and David Cameron. Tennant enjoyed it and then sent a cheeky text to one of Cameron's advisers, suggesting that in Alan Turing's centenary year it would be inspiring to pardon the wartime codebreaker, who had been convicted of gross indecency in 1952 for a relationship with a man, and whose death in 1954 was ruled a suicide. The adviser replied immediately. On the twenty fourth of December 2013 Turing received a posthumous royal pardon. In July 2014 the duo premiered A Man from the Future, an orchestral work about Turing's life written with his biographer Andrew Hodges, at the BBC Proms. They rewrote its ending to point out that thousands of other men's convictions still stood.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In March 2013 the Pet Shop Boys left Parlophone after twenty eight years, as EMI was broken up and sold, and started their own label, x2, through Kobalt. Their album Electric, produced by Stuart Price, reached number three in Britain, their best since Very. It opened a trilogy with Price, followed by Super in 2016 and Hotspot in 2020, the last recorded partly at Berlin's Hansa Studios. The duo had a flat in Berlin with a studio in the kitchen, and liked to drop into the techno club Berghain at Sunday lunchtime for a glass of prosecco. In 2017 NME gave them its Godlike Genius award. Their 2019 EP Agenda contained some of their angriest songs ever, including one called Give Stupidity a Chance.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the twenty fourth of February 2020 Tom Watkins, the manager who had signed them to Parlophone and steered them to four number ones, died after years of poor health, including type two diabetes and a liver transplant in 2014. Watkins had gone on to manage Bros and East 17, and wrote a memoir with the title Let's Make Lots of Money. Just weeks earlier, in January 2020, Hotspot had arrived, with the single Dreamland featuring Olly Alexander of Years and Years. The BBC called them still the cleverest men in pop. They had racked up forty four British top forty hits and were listed by Guinness as the most successful duo in British music history. A greatest hits tour was booked. Then the pandemic hit.[1] [2] [3]

Dreamworld and Nonetheless

Lockdown split them up physically but not creatively. At Lowe's urging, Tennant downloaded GarageBand, bought a keyboard, watched a YouTube tutorial for about ten minutes and started programming songs, swapping files with Chris. He also recorded some of his old 1970s folk songs, and Chris told him bluntly that this was not the Pet Shop Boys. In January 2021 Channel 4 aired Russell T Davies's drama It's a Sin, about friends living through the AIDS crisis, named after their song. Tennant said he found it painful to watch. Olly Alexander's cover raised money for an HIV charity, and the same month an Allstate Super Bowl advert sent Opportunities to the top of Billboard's dance download chart, thirty five years after its release.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The Dreamworld tour, billed as their first ever greatest hits show, was postponed twice by the pandemic and finally opened in Milan on the tenth of May 2022. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Tennant changed the line in West End Girls that names Lenin's Finland Station so that it named Mariupol and Kyiv instead. They closed the Other Stage at Glastonbury that June, co headlined an American arena tour with New Order and saw in 2023 at Edinburgh's Hogmanay. In 2023 they learned from a young nephew that Drake had used an unlicensed piece of West End Girls in a new song. After a cross public message, Tennant said, Drake's people were helpful and apologetic, and yes, the Pet Shop Boys certainly did get paid.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their fifteenth album, Nonetheless, came out on the twenty sixth of April 2024, produced by James Ford, and brought them back to Parlophone after twelve years. The title, Tennant said, meant simply that despite everything they had carried on. It entered at number two, their highest album chart placing since 1995. Tennant called it their queer album. New London Boy tells of his arrival in London in the early 1970s with dyed hair, and Dancing Star celebrates the ballet star Rudolf Nureyev's defection from the Soviet Union. Films brought new fans too. Barry Keoghan sang Rent at karaoke in Saltburn, and All of Us Strangers used their Always on My Mind. In July 2024 they played five nights at the Royal Opera House.[1] [2] [3] [4]

As of 2026 the Pet Shop Boys are still on the road. Dreamworld played Europe in 2025, visited Japan for the first time in January 2026, and was booked to bring Chris home to Lancashire for a headline show at the Lytham Festival in July 2026. In April 2026 they played five intimate nights called Obscure at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, promising no hits at all, only B sides and fan favourites, and debuting a song from Naked, an unfinished stage musical based on The Emperor's New Clothes. In September 2026 they announced a reworked album version of A Man from the Future, their Alan Turing piece, due on the ninth of October, with Juliet Stevenson narrating and strings from the Manchester Camerata.[1] [2] [3] [4]

More than forty years after two strangers met over a synthesiser connector, the Pet Shop Boys have sold over a hundred million records. Billboard ranked them the most successful duo or group ever on its Dance Club Songs chart, fifth overall behind only Madonna, Janet Jackson, Rihanna and Beyonce. Their mix of dance floor rhythms with clever, sad and funny words has been cited as an influence by artists such as Lady Gaga. Asked how they have lasted so long, Tennant prefers not to analyse it. They met by chance and started writing songs, he says, and it is best not to dwell on it too much. As for retiring, he suspects there will be no announcement. One day, people will simply notice they have not been seen for a while.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Pet Shop Boys

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. The talker and the silent one. Tennant writes most of the words and does the interviews, while Lowe writes much of the music and, as their programmer put it, most of the backing and often the melodies. Lowe also pushed for their boldest moves, from the cover of Go West to the guitar album Release. They have worked together since 1981 without a split, and when asked why, Tennant says they met by chance and it is best not to analyse it.[1] [2] [3]

Neil Tennant and Christopher Dowell. Childhood friends from the Newcastle Young People's Theatre who formed the folk group Dust in 1970 and became fierce rivals when it split. Dowell's party invitation quoting Zelda Fitzgerald inspired Being Boring. He was diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980s and died in 1989. Tennant wrote It Couldn't Happen Here, Being Boring and Your Funny Uncle about him.[1] [2] [3]

Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield. Tennant's favourite singer became their first great collaborator. Against EMI's wishes they brought her back for What Have I Done to Deserve This? in 1987, which reached number two in Britain and America, then wrote and produced her singles Nothing Has Been Proved and In Private and half of her album Reputation. They attended her funeral in 1999, where Tennant gave a eulogy.[1] [2] [3]

Pet Shop Boys and Tom Watkins. Their loud, flamboyant first manager, from 1984 to 1989. A designer turned impresario, he got them signed to Parlophone and guided them through four number ones, while also managing Bros and later East 17. He predicted they would last three years. His memoir borrowed the title Let's Make Lots of Money. He died in February 2020.[1] [2] [3]

Pet Shop Boys and Bobby Orlando. The New York Hi NRG producer they idolised. Tennant tracked him down in 1983, and Orlando produced the original West End Girls and about a dozen demos. Breaking the contract took long negotiations in 1985, and the settlement gave him significant royalties on future sales. Two Divided by Zero, co written by Tennant and Orlando, is their only original song without a Lowe credit.[1] [2] [3]

Pet Shop Boys and Derek Jarman. The radical gay film maker directed their It's a Sin and Rent videos and staged their first tour in 1989 with projected films. It was Jarman who invited them to play the AIDS benefit at the Hacienda in 1992 where they first sang Go West. He had been HIV positive since 1986 and died of an AIDS related illness in February 1994.[1] [2] [3]

Pet Shop Boys and Jonathan King. A feud that ended in court. In 1987 the pop impresario accused them in The Sun of copying Cat Stevens' Wild World for It's a Sin. They sued and won damages, which went to medical research. King's own career ended in 2001, when he was convicted of sexually abusing five teenage boys in the 1980s and sentenced to seven years in prison.[1] [2]

Neil Tennant and Jimmy Somerville. In the 1980s the openly gay Bronski Beat singer publicly accused the duo of exploiting gay culture without putting anything back. In his 1994 coming out interview, Tennant called that arrogant and rejected the idea that pop stars must be role models, while saying he had loved Bronski Beat's records and respected Somerville as a political voice.[1]

Pet Shop Boys and Eric Watson. The Smash Hits photographer from Newcastle, a friend of Tennant's since the 1970s, shaped their deadpan look of silent Chris two steps behind singing Neil. He helped get the first West End Girls released in Britain and directed about a dozen of their videos, including West End Girls and Domino Dancing. He died of a heart attack in 2012.[1] [2]

Pet Shop Boys and Liza Minnelli. In 1989 they wrote and produced her pop album Results, which gave her a hit with Sondheim's Losing My Mind. Tennant pushed her to sing lower than she was used to. The title came from a joke by their friend Janet Street Porter about clothes she called her results wear. The pairing was, Tennant said, politely greeted with horror, but it worked.[1] [2]

Pet Shop Boys and Stuart Price. The producer, who was musical director of their Pandemonium tour, became their key studio partner of the 2010s. He arranged their 2009 Brit Awards medley, then produced the trilogy of Electric, Super and Hotspot, and co produced the 2021 It's a Sin duet for Elton John and Olly Alexander. He also produced Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor, whose track Jump echoes West End Girls.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pet Shop Boys and Olly Alexander. The Years and Years singer is one of their best known younger allies. Their joint single Dreamland was first written for a Years and Years album, and he joined them on stage at Glastonbury in 2022. His 2021 cover of It's a Sin, for the drama in which he starred, raised money for an HIV charity, and Tennant called the cover beautiful.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Pet Shop Boys

• As a teenager, Tennant was an uncredited extra in the film Women in Love and spent his pay on the Beatles' White Album. When the film Women in Love was shot in Newcastle in 1969, the young Neil Tennant got work as an extra. He used the money to buy the Beatles' White Album.[1]
• At Marvel UK, part of Tennant's job was getting Red Sonja redrawn in more modest clothing. As production editor at Marvel UK in the 1970s, Tennant adapted American comics for British weeklies, anglicising the dialogue and making sure risky characters like Red Sonja were covered up for younger readers.[1]
• Before pop stardom, Tennant edited The Dairy Book of Home Management and a Mary Berry cookbook. Working in book publishing, Tennant edited household and cookery titles, including one of Mary Berry's cookbooks for ITV Books. He later joked that he used to wonder whatever happened to Mary Berry.[1] [2]
• Chris Lowe's grandfather, Syd Flood, played trombone in a comedy jazz troupe called the Nitwits. Lowe grew up in a showbiz family in Blackpool. Tennant once teased that forty years earlier Chris's granddad was playing Las Vegas. Chris learned the trombone too.[1] [2]
• Lowe's first love of the dance floor came while collecting glasses at the Dixieland Showbar on Blackpool's Central Pier. Working there as a teenager, he was swept up in the crowd dancing to floor fillers like the Gap Band's Oops Up Side Your Head, an experience that shaped his love of dance music.[1]
• When he met Tennant, Chris Lowe had just designed a staircase for an industrial estate in Milton Keynes. Lowe was on a 1981 work placement at a London architecture practice. He finished two parts of his architecture training but never did the final practical year, so he never qualified.[1] [2]
• The talking calculator on Two Divided by Zero was a Christmas present Tennant bought in New York for his dad. The voice counting and dividing on the opening track of Please came from an electronic gadget Neil picked up as a gift for his father.[1]
• Two Divided by Zero is the only original Pet Shop Boys song on which Chris Lowe has no writing credit. The track dates from 1983 and was written by Tennant with Bobby Orlando, who wrote the backing track. Every other original song is credited to Tennant and Lowe together.[1] [2]
• The trumpet solo on West End Girls is not a trumpet at all. Producer Stephen Hague played it on an Emulator sampler. The engineer said it took about six hours, with wrong notes played on purpose to make it sound more like jazz.[1]
• The street noise that opens West End Girls was recorded on Gosfield Street, right outside the studio. Stephen Hague captured the traffic with a Sony Walkman outside Advision Studios in central London, giving the 1985 version its film noir opening.[1]
• While filming the West End Girls video, a tramp appeared and started walking in step with the duo. Eric Watson and Andy Morahan shot the pair strolling through east London at six in the morning. The uninvited extra became part of the video's legend.[1]
• Heart was meant for the Steven Spielberg produced film Innerspace, but the tempo did not suit the dance scene. The song also nearly went to Hazell Dean or Madonna, but the duo kept it. It became their fourth and last British number one in 1988.[1]
• The Heart video with Ian McKellen as a vampire was filmed at Mokrice Castle in what is now Slovenia. Director Jack Bond reset the Dracula story in a castle in the then Yugoslav republic. He said the image of the bat came from Werner Herzog.[1]
• It's a Sin includes the sound of a real Mass recorded at Westminster Cathedral. The service happened to be in C minor, the same key as the song. They also recorded the atmosphere inside the Brompton Oratory for the bridge.[1]
• The Actually album cover was meant to be a painting, but Chris Lowe did not like how he looked in it. The Scottish artist Alison Watt painted the duo, but the portrait was shelved even after reworking. Tennant bought the painting himself.[1]
• After the King's Cross fire, a film scene of a commuter walking in flames was kept at the victims' families' request. The scene in It Couldn't Happen Here was set to their song King's Cross and was nearly cut after the 1987 Underground fire.[1]
• The title Being Boring came from a Japanese review that accused the duo of being boring. The insult reminded Tennant of a Zelda Fitzgerald quote from an old party invitation sent by his late friend Christopher Dowell.[1]
• Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses complained when Being Boring was left out of their 1991 shows. Fans objected to its absence from the Performance tour, so the duo added it as an encore. It then got the best reception of the night.[1] [2]
• The bumpy orange CD case for Very was shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Designed by Daniel Weil of Pentagram, it appeared in the 1995 exhibition Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design.[1]
• Chris Lowe had a cameo in the Australian soap opera Neighbours. It was filmed while the duo were touring Australia in 1994 and aired the following year.[1]
• In 1993 Lowe wrote and produced a single for Arsenal striker Ian Wright. Called Do the Right Thing, it was made for a player from Lowe's favourite football team, with remixes by Rollo.[1]
• The Bilingual single Se a vida e does not mean that's the way life is. In Portuguese the phrase actually means if life is. Tennant noticed the mistranslation and decided to keep it anyway.[1]
• The Home and Dry video was almost entirely footage of mice at Tottenham Court Road Tube station. Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans directed it in 2002. Music channels including MTV deemed it unplayable, which some felt hurt the single.[1]
• For Fundamental, Trevor Horn sampled Tennant singing every note across three octaves, creating the Neilotron. The samples could be played on a keyboard like an instrument made from Neil's voice.[1]
• In China, the Yes album track Legacy was released only as an instrumental. A line about governments falling was judged politically sensitive, so the vocals were removed.[1]
• Stuart Price recorded the Electric album in alphabetical order. He started with Axis and finished with Vocal, which was completed on the very day the album was due.[1]
• A limited Electric vinyl box set of 350 copies later sold for more than two thousand dollars. The five disc glowing acrylic box, with white gloves for handling the records, became a collector's item. One went for 2,243 dollars on Discogs in 2023.[1]
• Neil Tennant sat on the jury for the Turner Prize in 1998. He is a serious art collector, with interests ranging from Victorian painters to queer art.[1]
• At the 2012 Olympics, George Michael burst into their dressing room after they asked him to turn his music down. He demanded a hug, went back next door and played West End Girls loudly. Tennant had first interviewed him for Smash Hits in 1982.[1]
• The duo were early adopters of Twitter and early leavers. Lowe said the only thing he liked was blocking people. Tennant joked that if Chris had been a 1970s pop star, he would have sent something truly nasty in the post to people he disliked.[1]
• Liam Gallagher once told Chris Lowe they were alike, because neither of them really does anything on stage. Lowe recalled the remark from an early Oasis afterparty. Mike Myers also confessed to them that he fought insomnia by writing fake Pet Shop Boys songs.[1]
• George Osborne once asked Tennant the secret of his partnership with Lowe, thinking of himself and David Cameron. Tennant told NME the then Chancellor approached him at a party with the question.[1]
• In 2014 the Pet Shop Boys appeared in the radio soap The Archers as last minute festival headliners. They played themselves topping the bill at Ambridge's fictional Loxfest, recorded at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios.[1]
• For Schlager Hit Parade, Lowe translated Tennant's lyric into German online and wrote the music to the German words. Tennant then sang it in English. Lowe said it sounded a lot more German in German.[1]
• The glowing mouths on the Nonetheless cover were made with bicycle lights. Photographer Tim Walker had the duo hold bike lamps in their mouths, dressed in vintage black suits and white gloves.[1]
• The Liza Minnelli album title Results came from a joke by Janet Street Porter about her clothes. She called certain outfits her results wear because, she said, they always got results.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.