Forty years after “West End Girls”, Pet Shop Boys experienced a resurgence of popularity and released a brilliant album: However.
Find this interview with Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of Pet Shop Boys in full in our weekly n° 160available via our online store.
Congratulations on your new album. How did you manage to stay inspired for so long?
Neil: Let’s try not to think too much, in case it disappears. But songwriting is our thing, really. It’s always something we do for fun, not necessarily to write an album.
Chris: We were confined and to find something to do, all we had to do was write. Just for fun. I didn’t know we’d started writing an album until Neil sent a playlist one day of everything we’d done, in order, and said: “Well, here it is. We have the next album.” I was quite surprised.
Neil: We never lost touch with that childish sense of play During the lockdown, there was literally nothing else to do except take an afternoon walk, cook dinner… So we wrote songs. It was exciting to receive an email from Chris with a new track.
Did you expect such longevity? In the 80s, you would laugh at rockstars who thought in those terms.
Neil: It always is. We never thought about longevity. We just feel like we’ve reached it.
Chris: We always thought disposable pop was actually what lasted.
Neil: That’s what we’ve been saying since the 80s But it’s also true for the pop of the 60s. It’s often important things that don’t necessarily age very well. Things that are consciously trying to make an important statement. It is what orchestrates people’s lives and what is remembered.
People thought “West End Girls” was an “easy” song, and it’s still a classic after forty years.
Neil: When we started this album, we realized that it had been forty years since “West End Girls” had been released. When we recorded it in New York, some people considered us part of the New York dance scene, and that’s how we feel about ourselves. We were at Unique Studios. Next to, [le producteur de disco] Bobby O. Arthur Baker was recording Planet Patrol. That summer he was in New York to launch Smash Hits magazine in the US. I interviewed Madonna, who performed weekly at the Roxy on Friday nights. I was breakdancing in the streets. For us, New York was the starting point.
Rob Sheffield
