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Photograph by John Wright
Photograph: John WrightPet Shop Boys

U.K. synth-pop icons Pet Shop Boys celebrate New York

The story started in NYC, say British pop stars Pet Shop Boys

Written by
Sophie Harris
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“New York always blew one’s mind,” Neil Tennant says in a crisp English accent, recalling the early sonic adventures of the Pet Shop Boys. This week, the band returns to the city for two shows at the Hammerstein Ballroom in celebration of a new album, Yes, which features Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and string arrangements by Owen Pallett. (It’s been hailed as the pair’s best since Actually.) The synth-pop duo was recently given a prestigious Outstanding Contribution title at the Brit Awards in their native England, but the Pet Shop Boys’ musical story really started here in NYC—where they recorded what would become their first worldwide smash, “West End Girls.”

In 1983, Tennant was working as a music journalist for the British magazine Smash Hits (its U.S. sister publication was Star Hits). Sent to NYC to interview the Police, Tennant decided to get in touch with his dance-music hero Bobby Orlando: “I raved about his music over the phone,” Tennant recalls, “and he said, 'When you come to New York, let’s have a cheeseburger.’ So that’s what we did.” It was Tennant’s second visit to the city, which he remembers as being “really, really scary—completely different from now.” Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe toured Times Square with Orlando. “He’d say, 'Look! See that guy over there? He’s called a Pinhead!’ ’Cause they’d put stockings over their heads and rob you,” Tennant explains. “I remember when we were there, a French tourist got murdered in front of his children in Times Square. And we were just like, 'Well, this is New York, hey.’?”

Although “West End Girls” is ostensibly a song about street life in London, the song is steeped in New Yorkerie; from the arty underground clubs the pair frequented (see below) to the city’s sex industry and the porn cinemas on Eighth Avenue. “We used to go to a Puerto Rican nightclub called L’Escalita, where families sat around watching drag queens,” Tennant says. “This is so not what we had in Britain.” You can hear all this in the song’s wobbling bassline, clean synths and soulful backing vocal.

But what really blew people away about “West End Girls” was Tennant’s odd British rap. Inspired by Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message,” Tennant decided to use his own accent, and found himself simultaneously delighted and embarrassed with the result. Back in London, he played his colleagues three of the songs he wrote in New York, but not “West End Girls,” which a friend accidentally found at the end of the tape. “And it’s totally a trademark now,” Tennant says, happily.

Since that time, the Pet Shop Boys have sold upwards of 50 million records, consistently scoring number ones around the world. But the band’s pop stardom was short-lived in the U.S. Tennant says it’s been suggested that the band’s homoerotic “Domino Dancing” video killed their career here—it has two men fighting over a girl, but without the girl, he explains—and that Sam Kinison’s comedic rants didn’t help. “In Germany, homophobia just isn’t an issue, but in the U.S. it is an issue,” Tennant says. “But then, we’ve got the biggest gay following in the U.S. we’ve got anywhere. America’s the most gay and the most homophobic. It’s the most black and the most racist. It all goes together.”

Tennant supposes that while the Pet Shop Boys became “frightfully unfashionable” in the late ’90s, they’ve since evolved into a classic—“which is a funny thing to say, but having been briefly a journalist and always being interested in pop music, you can sort of look outside it a bit.” In any case, mainstream success has long been on Tennant and Lowe’s agenda. “We’ve always striven to be mass market,” he says. “We’ve never, ever wanted to be alternative music. But we also didn’t want to compromise to get there, so it’s been a struggle.” Accordingly, the Yes stage show features video projections, dazzling light effects and, um, 300 cardboard boxes (it’s fashioned by Es Devlin, the opera designer behind Kanye’s tour), as well as a special segment entirely devoted to New York, with famous city landmarks dancing around the pair. “We’ve never shied away from being pretentious, if people think it is pretentious,” Tennant shrugs. “But not being cold, I hope.”

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