Music

Pet Shop Boys

They are acknowledged as the grand dowagers of British disco, their brand of electronic pop reflecting a wryly self-conscious, thoroughly postmodern sensibility while harbouring a romantic heart that is at the mercy of a muted, peculiarly English yearning. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have, as Pet Shop Boys, long since proven their winning way with both the hi-NRG, camp dancefloor anthem (‘Go West’, ‘New York City Boy’) and the gentle excavation of a middle-class life lived (chiefly) in Thatcher’s London (‘West End Girls’, ‘Rent’, ‘Opportunities’ et al).

It’s a kind of tea-and-synthesizers aesthetic that would seem to rule out politics, propaganda and polemics, but the pair have always enjoyed flexing their creative muscle, moving beyond the confines of the pop charts to work with director Derek Jarman and avant-garde opera producers David Alden and David Fielding, collaborate with artist Sam Taylor-Wood, write a piece for the 1999 solar eclipse and to score a musical (‘Closer To Heaven’). In September 2004, PSB accepted a different artistic challenge again, writing an original score for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent masterpiece, ‘Battleship Potemkin’ and performing it live, to a screening in Trafalgar Square. It’s this event that they revisit at the Barbican on January 11. Feature continues

'Battleship Potemkin'

‘Pet Shop Boys tend to get stereotyped – especially in Britain – as camp ironists,’ says Neil Tennant of the project. ‘We’ve just had to learn to live with that, although it is a bit insulting. What’s always run through Pet Shop Boys’ music is a very strong sense of longing and romanticism, plus an idealism. In approaching “Battleship Potemkin”, Chris and I discussed what we thought the film was about. I said it was a propaganda film, which he didn’t think it was; he thought it was about the ideal of a revolution, which could apply in different situations. I agreed with him, so we wrote the music on that basis – that it was a film about people taking control of their own lives and being repressed by the state. That has resonances across history and, of course, to some extent now.’

That said, this performance will see a radical shift from the first PSB staging of ‘Battleship Potemkin’ – not only in terms of scale (40,000 people gathered for the show in Trafalgar Square; the Barbican holds around 2,000) and status (the democracy of a free event in a public space versus the ticketed elitism of an established arts venue), but also in politico-cultural significance. In September 2004, Britain had been committed to the war in Iraq for 18 months and Trafalgar Square – long a place of public protest, from Vietnam through to the 1990 anti-poll tax demonstration – had been the site of a huge anti-Iraq war rally. The chime of a movie based on the events of an actual Bolshevik-led naval mutiny could hardly have been stronger, which begs the question as to why PSB are choosing to stage it again in London. They surely can’t be hoping to strike the same performance match twice?

'Battleship Potemkin'

Tennant explains that this will actually be the ninth PSB/‘Battleship Potemkin’ event since 2004 and that they try ‘to do it in places where it has a bit of resonance. In Dresden, for example, the film was projected onto a 1970s Communist apartment building. Each member of the orchestra was on a balcony of an apartment and we were on one at the top. As a little introduction – which we always have, to put the piece in context – there was a film about the end of Communism in Germany, which had come about in the very street in which we were performing. It was also the 800th anniversary of the city of Dresden, so there was the reconciliation aspect of an English group performing in a building built on a bomb site from 1945. People in Dresden also used to see “Battleship Potemkin” at school, so here they were seeing it in a new context.’

Does Tennant have any reservations about the shift from a public outdoor space to a limited-capacity indoor venue? ‘No, I don’t. I mean, we’ve done the extraordinary democratic event and so I think it’s quite nice to do it in a more conventional context, where the sound and vision will be better. In Trafalgar Square it was very atmospheric, but there were thousands of people there and it was raining. So, this will be a more conventional concert, but it focuses on the movie and the music, rather than the event. It’s probably a more comfortable way of looking it it. Plus, we have the BBC Concert Orchestra, which is twice as big as the [Dresdner Sinfoniker] orchestra we had in Trafalgar Square.’

PSB’s score is largely instrumental and – as befits the movie – considerably darker and more complex than might be expected. Neither entirely classical nor wholly pop, it’s a large-scale, magisterial mix of strings and electro with the odd (synthesized) piano interlude, suggesting variously early Kraftwerk, Prokofiev, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Giorgio Moroder and Elmer Bernstein, with occasional overtones of techno and drum ’n’ bass.

‘Some people have criticised it as being too pretty,’ reveals Tennant, ‘because they expected us to write something more “Russian”. But I think the combination of the electronics and [German orchestrator] Torsten Rasch’s string-writing – which is sometimes quite dissonant – is quite unusual. I also think it has within it one of the best things Pet Shop Boys have ever written, which is a song called “After All”, for the famous Odessa Steps sequence. This was specifically written for the Trafalgar Square event, so the song is a kind of anti-war speech and a counterpoint to that scene, rather than a commentary on it. It’s very dramatic and powerful in its own right and it’s one of the songs I’m most proud of.’

Tennant muses: ‘There was a massive drama in performing “Battleship Potemkin” in Trafalgar Square – even the rain helped, in a way – but now people will be able to focus on the film. It’s a fantastically powerful piece of work, which is why people are still interested in it. Yes, Trafalgar Square was a wonderful set dressing for the film, but in the Barbican, you’ll really be able to concentrate on it. I think it deserves that.’

Pet Shop Boys perform their soundtrack to ‘Battleship Potemkin’ with the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Barbican on January 11.