Ticking The Right Boxes: Pet Shop Boys

It might be an undisputed, albeit under-rated, world beating, cultural staple of British society, but pop music is often dictated by the fickle nature of the music industry, making independent voices in pop few and far between. But the Pet Shop Boys are one of those voices, and one endorsed by The British Phonographic Industry recognizing their outstanding contribution to music with a gong of the same name at this years Brits, echoing an Ivor Novello, nine years earlier, of nearly the same name.

“We’re running out of these awards to get now” laughs Chris “It’s nice to be recognized for still being around more than anything, the music industry is one of fast turn over and to still be around is an achievement. But hopefully we’re being recognized for the songs we’ve consistently managed to write over the years. Twenty-five years in pop terms is actually quite a long time."

Although recognition in the form of awards is, for the best part a positive, when being rewarded for what essentially amounts to job satisfaction, means that accepting them isn’t always straightforward as Chris famously illustrated in 1987 when he watched the Brits on TV as Neil accepted Best Single for ‘West End Girls’ as Chris explains:

“They remind me a bit too much of prize giving at school, I’ve always thought that the music itself was the reward. But it was nice that they gave it to a pop band, it doesn’t happen very often and we definitely accepted it on those terms. Pop music I think sometimes is undervalued, people might think that writing a great pop song is easy for some reason, but actually to write three minutes of sublime music, which is uplifting, escapist for the listener and can define that moment in someone’s life is actually quite an achievement. I always think that if you look at any period, the music that you tend to remember is the great pop music rather than the sort of introspective rock of the time, but ironically the music that takes itself less importantly seems to be the more important of the musical forms”

With music the reson d'etre of a group capable of courting nonchalant indifference and iconic reverence in equal measure, ‘Yes’, their tenth studio album and first for three years, is the real prize and one that leaves the politics of ‘Fundamental’ behind for a return to pop opulence reflecting the current optimism of the group.
“We didn’t really have any strong idea what we were going to do with this album” says Chris “We went into the studio with no preconceptions and when we realized that we were writing more poppy sort of songs we thought that the best people to work with would be Xenomania because we loved the records they made with Girls Aloud, the Sugarbabes etc. and we thought that they’d really bring out the best in the songs we’d been writing.”

Work with Brian Higgins’ production team Xenomania yielded four co-written tracks; three, including album forerunner ‘Love etc.’ were deemed good enough for the track-listing of ‘Yes’, the fourth, ‘The Loving Kind’ was sequestered by Girls Aloud for their album ‘Out Of Control’ and the experience was an enjoyable one.

“The process of writing with them was fantastic. They have lots of backing tracks lying around and basically we would take some of those and then write top lines and lyrics and stuff on top of those, so that was the co-writing aspect of it. But when they worked as production team on the songs that we’d written, it’s a fantastic operation Brian’s put together, a really great team of people who are so into pop music and really enthusiastic about what they do. All the time we were working there, Girls Aloud would be popping down and Alesha and it felt great to be connected with contemporary British pop”