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Sunday 8 November 2009

Meet Gordon’s Pet Shop persecutors

Mary Wakefield meets the successful pop duo the Pet Shop Boys, and finds them eloquent critics of New Labour, staunch defenders of civil liberties — and fans of Vince Cable

Through the woods, the trees
And further on the sea
We lived in the shadow of the war
Sand in the sandwiches
Wasps in the tea
It was a free country

In a West End town in a dead end world — OK, no: in a nice Georgian townhouse in central London, on the top floor where once boot boys bedded down, the Pet Shop Boys are revisiting their past. ‘The Britain of my childhood?’ Neil Tennant, the singing half of the most successful pop duo of all time reclines on a chaise longue and thinks his way back to North Shields (near Newcastle) in the late Fifties. ‘Well, as it says in our song, “Building the Wall”, we lived in the shadow of the war. On a Sunday afternoon we’d all watch 633 Squadron or The Dambusters. Children would play Jerries and Tommies. Achtung! Achtung! All that kind of thing. Also,’ he says, ‘my grandmother used to hang her bloomers out to dry in the back garden.’

‘We had a mangle,’ says Chris Lowe, the other Pet Shop Boy, from beneath his baseball cap, ‘and a hand-mincer. Did you have a hand-mincer, Neil?’ But Neil is still in North Shields. ‘We didn’t have any central heating,’ he says. ‘The windows used to freeze, so we heated up pennies and melted eye-holes in the glass. And the kids rode around on bikes all day.’

‘It was a free country,’ says Chris with a grin, quoting from their song. Neil raises an eyebrow, ‘Well it was, wasn’t it?’ Then to me: ‘It probably sounds like a very weird world to you!’

What’s weird to me is that I’m sitting opposite the two men who composed the soundtrack to my youth. My teen years kicked off with the thundercrack at the beginning of their ’87 hit ‘It’s a Sin’ and stumbled on through Introspective and Very. Only the Pet Shop Boys understood back then. And now, two decades and some 50 million records later, I discover that the Pet Shop Boys still understand.

More articles from: Mary Wakefield | this section

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