It’s May 1993 and you’re not feeling very high-minded.
As you storm down Notting Hill Gate in the blistering heat, you consider your options. You can really feel that hole in the ozone layer at this time of year. The tarmac is sticky.
You decide to stay angry. A man shouldn’t spend his best years apologising. It’s not becoming. The world is at your fingertips but you’re miserable. Why are you always so miserable? The ins and outs (you wince) of your past are none of her business. You should never have told her about. . . you know. This weather is absurd. It’s a Bank Holiday. Surely it should be raining.
Anyway, saying what she said – and in front of all those people – well, that was taking it too far.
It wasn’t that they had laughed. Actually, hardly anyone had laughed. That was kind of the problem. No one had seemed particularly surprised.
How can it be this hot? This is the West End, not the West Coast. Your body is shutting down. You feel like you’re wading through the streets. Your vision is hazy.
And then, with tedious inevitability, he’s there at the front of your mind. You’ve given up trying to forget his name, the pattern of his freckles, what colour his eyes are.
You’re doing it again. Chill the fuck out. It was fifteen years ago – nowadays you probably wouldn’t even recognise him in the street. Boys are always mucking about, and everyone remembers their first kiss.
It’s all you can do to stay standing. You start to unbutton your shirt. The sunshine is unbearable. You glance above the horizon, half expecting to go blind.
Instead, you find yourself staring into darkness. It’s the middle of the night.
You’ve turned south now, autopilot engaged. The streetlights and shop displays have been replaced by neon. Soho. You know where the shadows are, how not to be spotted.
You swerve, almost gravitationally, into a bar and the door shuts behind you.
Further west, a blue egg is metamorphosing impossibly in the night sky. If anyone had looked up they’d have seen it growing suspicious orange spikes.
You’re in a room with a grid. You don’t seem to be able to feel the floor.
Someone has released an ostrich into the bar area. This should probably be your cue to leave. But which way is the exit?
Now there are two men. They look solid enough, but somehow they’re even less real than the room.
What are they wearing?
The first thing you notice is the headgear. Even before you hear that crashing B-minor chord, you’ve definitely clocked the Pet Shop Boys’ hats.
Landing four months before Very, ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ is a peculiar manifesto, bundling the album’s obsessions with identity and sexuality into a four-minute single. The Pet Shop Boys are wearing tall, striped, pointy hats in the video, the press photographs and the sleeve artwork.
Recall, if you will, that “to wear many hats” is an idiom referring to the different roles people are required, or able, to play – often simultaneously. The song’s protagonist, who is encountering some problems dealing with his sexuality, is wearing a few too many. He suffers ritual humiliation at the hands of a girlfriend who presumably knows full well what he sees when he shuts his eyes. The breathless memory of a first love, played out behind the high-school bicycle shed, returns to haunt him even as he tries to convince her he isn’t hiding anything.
Except, of course, his preposterous outfit and those orange bubbles coming out of his mouth can’t really be explained away.
‘Can You Forgive Her?’ is about dreams: fantasies, yes, but also the things Freud wrote books about. It anticipates much of Very by taking place entirely at night and partly while its narrator is unconscious.
The fantastical imagery of the song’s video recasts the problem of what is and is not real. Those oversized dunce caps hint at the schooldays the man is trying to forget. Nonsensical motifs like giant blue eggs and an ostrich plodding across a Tron grid suggest he is losing his mind. Tennant and Lowe’s elaborate theatrical outfits imply pretence, the concealing of identity.
If you had to sum it up in one word – the denial, the costumes, the man’s difficulty in the bedroom – you’d use the name of the Pet Shop Boys’ 1991 tour: Performance.
But Very hits the shops in a year of grunge and grit. The trappings of the Eighties are anathema. The key words for rock stars are “unplugged,” “real,” “naturalistic.” Performance is out.
So why have the Pet Shop Boys picked this moment to be less “real” than ever?
To answer this question we need to go back, beyond Very, to when its predecessor Behaviour was but a twinkle in the eye.
In the pages of Literally, Chris Heath’s travelogue of the Pet Shop Boys’ 1989 world tour, Neil Tennant says:
A lot of people, like Wet Wet Wet. . . I tend to feel they’re quite talented but they’re aping other songs. ‘Sweet Little Mystery’ is an American phrase; it sounds as if it’s out of a 1950s song. They’re not really writing about their own real lives.7
Then it’s U2’s turn. “They’re saying nothing but they’re pretending to be something,” he complains of the Irish rockers’ latest effort ‘When Love Comes to Town’. “I think they’re fake.” 8
The way he sees it, bands like U2 and Wet Wet Wet may be venerated by the rock press and the singles charts but they’re out-of-date, doing little more than paying homage to previous eras. Wet Wet Wet write like it’s the Fifties; U2 buy themselves credibility by working with blues veteran B.B. King. By contrast, he says, “the Pet Shop Boys are utterly contemporary. We do not pay homage to a previous era. I’ve got nothing against previous eras but I’m bored with people paying homage to them.” 9
Two years later, channelling Baudrillard as the duo promote the single ‘DJ Culture’, he sounds angrier. The song is “about how facile and pretentious modern life is,” he explains. “Just as in DJ records everything is sampled to sound authentic, so in a lot of aspects of modern life it is almost as though attitudes are sampled.
“Everyone pretends that the Gulf War was a real war, and that President Bush or John Major are successful war leaders. In fact they sample the past – the Second World War, or a war movie.” He concludes: “The whole thing is sort of fake.” 10
Evidently, the idea of “reality” in pop music has been fermenting in Tennant’s mind for some time before Very’s release. For him, it would seem, reality isn’t so much about how real something sounds and looks as about how genuinely it reflects the people who made it.
Look at the lyrics of ‘Sweet Little Mystery’ and you can see where it comes unstuck. Wet Wet Wet’s first single ‘Wishing I Was Lucky’ dealt with unemployment and echoed the Scottish dialect of its writers,11 but this follow-up is all earnest posturing, a supposed heart-on-sleeve confession that is so clichéd as to mean nothing at all. They’re real enough words but somehow the effect is totally artificial.
Even the most profound statement loses its power if you repeat it enough, in enough contexts that don’t really merit it. It’s not a thousand miles from Walter Benjamin’s argument in 1936 that mass reproduction destroys the “aura” of an artwork.
Now, in the Nineties, the illustrious but slippery notion of being “real” has become the new “aura” – prized by virtually everyone who makes records but somewhat complicated by their means of distribution.
Look a bit closer at the Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 press cuttings: the word “real” is everywhere and it only ever appears within quotation marks. For example, as they prepare to put out ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ Tennant tells the NME: “Everything has been so ‘real’ recently, with grunge and all the rest of it.” 12
“Grunge” is the other word that seems to follow the Pet Shop Boys around; it gets at least a passing reference in practically every interview they give to promote Very. Unlike ‘Can You Forgive Her?’, grunge is noisy, lo-fi, wild and imprecise. But in cultural terms it’s hangover music, stepping gingerly over the broken glass and condom wrappers the morning after a decadelong party.
The Eighties are remembered – when they can be remembered at all – as having been excessive and decadent. For ten years Thatcher and Reagan set ruthless economic policies that rewarded greed. Fashions became garish and extravagant. Rock music was pompous and hollow.
Grunge offers something that appears to be refreshingly straightforward. It’s music for dropouts, not executives; it doesn’t seem to care how it looks; it isn’t expensively overproduced. Most importantly it gives the impression of being the work of real people – musicians who don’t edit out their fuck-ups, who look like they’re on the dole.
The real accessibility [of grunge] came from the forwardness of the bands and their members, or at least the perception of this phenomenon. The mistakes were right up there in the mix; sometimes, the mistakes were the focus.13
It comes with a dress code. In his infamous 1992 New York Times feature ‘Grunge: A Success Story’, Rick Marin tartly refers to the grunge “look” as “hair-sweat-and-guitars.” He points out the “threadbare flannel shirts, knobby wool sweaters and cracked leatherette coats of the Pacific Northwest’s thrift-shop [a]esthetic.” 14
Jonathan Poneman, one of the founders of key grunge label Sub Pop, tells him by way of explanation: “This stuff [clothing] is cheap, it’s durable, and it’s kind of timeless. It also runs against the grain of the whole flashy [a]esthetic that existed in the Eighties.”
Looking back a little more sympathetically, grunge biographer Kyle Anderson will write:
As far as the construction of the public persona for most bands in the grunge movement went, they were the righteous warriors saving music fans from the artificiality of metal. You either stood for the empty, decadent overlords (metal) or the message-driven, wholesome working-class (grunge).15
Grunge pin-ups Nirvana seem to lead this crusade against fashiness and fakery. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor will later observe how Kurt Cobain and his bandmates “always appeared absolutely genuine in everything they did, [which] was one of their attractions for an audience jaded with the contemporary music scene.” 16
But things are rarely so simple. The culture industry turns Sorcerer’s Apprentice, copying and pasting Nirvana all over the music press, hoping to wring as much money as possible out of bands, videos, clothes, films.
Marin observes how the “thrift-shop aesthetic” has somehow migrated into the pages of glossy magazines. And a year later Rich Shupe will note the absurd irony of grunge-inspired shirts being sold for $275 by luxury US chain Bergdorf Goodman.17 Meanwhile, the actual records – many of them now being released on major labels – are all over MTV, frequently outselling everything else in the charts.
Cobain responds by raising the “real” stakes, positioning himself as the gatekeeper of authenticity – no longer calling out the “empty, decadent overlords” of the Eighties but other grunge musicians. This most conflicted of singers, who has “gone to tremendous lengths to ‘keep it real’ [and] rebel against commercial expectations,” 18 tells Rolling Stone: “I do feel a duty to warn the kids of false music that’s claiming to be underground. They’re jumping on the alternative bandwagon.” 19
Chris Lowe’s claim that “everyone” is “being grungy” and doing “that Nirvana thing – looking ordinary” 20 could almost have come straight out of Cobain’s mouth. But in some ways the Nirvana frontman isn’t really that different from the people he despises. Even this prophet of the new asceticism, preaching the evils of “false music,” is prone to “embellishment and self-mythologising” when it comes to his own backstory.21
It isn’t only the dodgy claims of authenticity that rub the Pet Shop Boys the wrong way – on a much more basic level they just find the grunge scene a bit boring. Cobain’s pursuit of realism borders on the puritanical, whereas even Very’s title seems to celebrate excess.
“We’re doing something that is the opposite to what everyone else is doing,” Tennant tells Chris Heath the month before ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ is released. “Everyone’s being ‘real’. [. . .] We’re not about being ‘real’.” 22
A terse exchange about MTV Unplugged buried in the pages of a fan-club magazine a few months later makes this abundantly clear.
“Have we not been asked to do MTV Unplugged?” grumbles Chris.
“I bet they think we couldn’t do it.”
“That’s bloody typical,” agrees Neil. “I bet they do.”
“Do you want to do it?” asks Lynne,23 interested.
“No,” snaps Chris.24
MTV Unplugged, launched in 1989, asks musicians quite literally to unplug – though only, of course, to some extent, since they are still being amplified and broadcast to millions from a TV studio. It seems to share grunge’s mission to shake off the paraphernalia of the music industry, to be “real” again. The New York Times describes MTV Unplugged in 1992 as “artifice giv[ing] way to art.” 25
[MTV Unplugged is] a format that couldn’t be more different from the hyperactive, sound-thumping videos that put the cable service on the global map. How’s this for a radical concept: no amps, no visual frills, no dancing, no audience distractions. Just a nonde-script performing space, maybe a few stools, some musicians and their instruments. Just, in short, getting down to basics or, as the trade prefers, back to acoustics.26
Dave Karger in Entertainment Weekly explains: “Unplugged was conceived as a pared-down antidote to the Milli Vanilli-esque image-over-substance musical atmosphere of the late Eighties.” 27
Unplugged soon becomes a multi-million-dollar brand, releasing acoustic records by everyone from Alice in Chains to Mariah Carey to Nirvana themselves, and being called things like “a revolutionary and cultural landmark in the music industry.” 28
It’s not surprising this troubles the Pet Shop Boys: put simply, they have no “basics” to “get down to.” Even before Very, their live shows have embraced bombast, theatre, performance, electricity, artifce – a suspiciously Eighties shopping list.
When Tennant and Lowe took the elaborate Performance tour to America in 1991, the reviews read like adverts for MTV Unplugged. The show attracted comments such as this, printed in the Houston Post: “One couldn’t help but pine for the good ol’ days when a vocalist simply stood at a microphone and sang.” 29
Or this from the San Jose Mercury News: “Was all this a crutch for songs that couldn’t stand on their own? Yes and no.” 30
Or this from the New York Post: “Hardly recognisable as a pop music performance. [. . .] Call me picky but I want to see who’s making the music.” 31
The Pet Shop Boys laugh these comments of but the critics’ words obviously leave an impression: two years on Tennant parodies them in the lyrics of ‘Yesterday, When I Was Mad’, Very’s sixth track. So his distaste for “all this supposed naturalism in pop” 32 can be understood on a couple of levels – sure, he finds it dull, but he’s also on the defensive.
Either way, he kind of has a point. For all its rhetoric, MTV Unplugged does seem to obsess over appearances – its defining feature isn’t the skill or songwriting it showcases, but how the music is presented. Likewise, grunge’s increasing efforts to appear unselfconscious do rather make it look image-obsessed as the Nineties wear on.
So Very puts the Pet Shop Boys’ performance centre-stage, just as grunge celebrates its imperfections. Tennant and Lowe make a show of embracing the artificial – both to turn the heat up on their contemporaries and to prove (maybe to themselves) they aren’t cowed by the pressure to “be real.”
We’re no different from any other pop stars, they might as well be saying as they don the hats and jumpsuits. At least you can see our performance for what it is.
Dressing up, the argument goes, doesn’t always involve sunglasses and stick-on moustaches. You can do it in $275 “thrift-shop” chic. Or, in the case of our friend in that peculiar orange room, you can live a lie, leading one life by day and a very different one by night – whether in dreams or in strangers’ bedrooms.
Before he can object you’ve ordered another round.
It’s essential you have this to fall back on, this excuse of inebriation, in the morning.
You know the routine well. The idle chatter about your respective girlfriends, work, football. The bashful compliment. The glance at your watch.
The rain lashes your face as you hail the cab but his firm hand on your shoulder is comforting.
He mutters something as the vehicle pulls up. You give the driver the name of the hotel.
You can call her tomorrow.
There is one important concession to make here. All this puts the Pet Shop Boys in a rather privileged position outside the mainstream, looking into the bubble, playing the game without being affected by it. And of course that isn’t quite how it happens.
When in 1989 Tennant criticises Wet Wet Wet for not “writing about their own real lives” in ‘Sweet Little Mystery’, he goes on to describe ‘Suburbia’ – one of his own songs – as “real,” 33 and we are left in little doubt that this is a Good Thing.
So perhaps, four years on, it isn’t just the other bands in the top ten they want to call out. Maybe they feel part of their own act has fallen prey to this quest for naturalism after all, and it is time to shake it off.
Perhaps, too, they are wary of themselves becoming a cliché and in doing so losing their meaning.
“I’m bored by us,” Lowe will tell Heath backstage in 1991.34
And a decade later, Tennant will admit:
I think we thought we’d done to death the classic Pet Shop Boys thing. It was finally completely summed up on the cover of [1991 singles collection] Discography, Chris stony-faced and me with an ironically arched eyebrow. We kind of thought: right, we’ve just completely done that now; let’s do something not real.35
The car screams to a halt.
The two men are in the middle of the road. They seem to be
walking towards you.
As you try to focus through the windscreen you realise the peculiar glow isn’t coming from the illuminated strip-club signs but from something entirely worse.
A few feet in front of the vehicle a huge egg, the height of a man’s waist, is pulsing gentle flashes of blue light like a lethargic police car.
Feverishly you claw at the door handle and the rain comes blowing in.
But as you try to climb out of the cab your head catches on something. Instinctively you put a hand up – and feel the base of what seems to be a huge cone.
You open your mouth. Bubbles come out.
The men are almost at the car now.
You awake drenched in sweat.
Tennant was born a few weeks after the suicide of Alan Turing, the gay cryptographer who effectively won the war for the Allies only to be rewarded with chemical castration. By the time sex between men was legalised in 1967, the Pet Shop Boys’ frontman was already midway through his tenure at a strict Catholic secondary school. And if, then, he had any inkling of his orientation – how many of us didn’t at thirteen? – he kept quiet about it. By his own account, he was in a heterosexual relationship as late as 1979, by which time he was nearly twenty-five.36
Not until an interview with Attitude in 1994 does he actually tell the public what many have taken as read. “I am gay,” he says, “and I have written songs from that point of view.” 37
Pending that conversation, eleven months after Very’s release, it has been left to the listener to fill in the blanks. And there are plenty of blanks to fill in, as Attitude writer Paul Burston notes drily:
They have somehow managed to spin a career around the fears, the frustrations and (just occasionally) the fun of being young(ish), gifted and gay without being drawn into discussions about that all-important, always-absent “G” word.38
Tennant had in fact gone even further, baffling the NME in 1986 by saying the absence of that “G” word was half the point. “Obviously people are going to look at our songs and read this or that into them,” he had said, tantalisingly, “but the end result of people just speculating about things is far more accurate than them thinking one thing or another.” 39
It might sound like a convenient bluff but on some level it does ring true: Tennant is an arch universalist, telling Burston even in his “coming-out” interview: “I don’t want to belong to some narrow group or ghetto.” 40 When on a Very B-side he opines that he might be ‘Too Many People’, he isn’t necessarily admitting to lying about who he is, but rather saying he genuinely might be all those contradictory identities at once.
Take regionalism, say: the Pet Shop Boys are not wholly of the north like New Order or The Smiths, and yet they sing about London like outsiders. In the same way, they are neither solely a gay band nor one that simply confirms the heterosexual status quo; they are neither disco nor indie nor hip-hop; they are middle-class but only recently so, aloof but desperate, seedy but principled. They are wary of labelling themselves because they feel no single group has a special claim over their art – so perhaps Tennant’s failure to publicly commit to his sexuality is borne in part from a fear of excluding his audience.
All the same, breaking his silence in the pages of Attitude, he comes to the conclusion this between-the-lines approach has been a “complete cop-out.” 41
So it’s fair to suggest the central figure in the lyrics of ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ – which predates that interview by more than a year – is at least in part inspired by his own experience.
What, then, draws those three words out of him in 1994 after a decade of telling people to mind their own business?
From Attitude we can glean that he has recently come out of his first long-term gay relationship. Before that, he was “not exactly celibate, but not far from it” 42 – perhaps he never really felt the confession was his to make.
Or maybe he feels some kind of guilt. Not, despite the best efforts of the priests, about his sexuality, but about keeping quiet.
An opinion persists throughout the Eighties and Nineties, largely thanks to Communards singer Jimmy Somerville 43 and critic John Gill,44 that the Pet Shop Boys owe gay culture some sort of debt – that they have drawn liberally from it for their records without giving anything back.
“The Pet Shop Boys still haven’t taken that one step, publicly admitting they’re gay, and that’s the important thing,” Somerville had told the NME in 1986. “Until they do, their music will always seem calculated and economic. [. . .] Tey have to be more upfront – it’s their duty.” 45
Why this demand they lay themselves bare? What right did Somerville have over the Pet Shop Boys’ sex lives?
“When people are blaming gays for Aids and the end of civilisation, you are under an obligation to be counted,” he had explained. “It’s no good taking a stance like the Pet Shop Boys. No matter how private a person you are, Aids has forced gays to be public people.”
It was a position that would be echoed by Gill, who maintains oddly in 1995 – even after Tennant has actually come out – that the singer is somehow in the closet, that he has not done enough to make his sexuality public, to fight the good fight.
“The Pet Shop Boys have yet to make any public statement about their sexual orientation,” he writes in Queer Noises, “although they have managed to position themselves in such a way that their sympathies are unambiguous. [. . .] They do not actually intend to commit themselves verbally in a way that might set the hounds of Fleet Street on their trail.” 46
A few pages later he adds, sadly: “The debate about their ambiguous sexuality is already over, without actually having taken place.” 47
One might again ask why the Pet Shop Boys’ failure to discuss their orientation should bother someone who doesn’t even know them. The answer comes in the form of two epigraphs at the beginning of Queer Noises and turns out to be pretty much the same as Somerville’s.
“The only way to attack homophobia,” reads one, “is to refuse to maintain the secret of homosexuality, either your own or anyone else’s.” 48 The other adds: “Anyone who says, ‘Well, I don’t care if he/she is gay, it’s nobody’s business,’ is the voice of heterosexual culture inviting gay people to be invisible.” 49
So Gill labels the Pet Shop Boys cowards, part of the problem rather than the solution – whether or not they have brought comfort, joy or escape to its victims.
Neither band member will ever answer Gill on this point, although as Time Out’s outspoken music editor and someone who apparently goes to the same sorts of parties, we can assume his position filters through to them at some stage.
But when asked about Jimmy Somerville’s comments, Tennant tells Burston:
I do think that we have contributed, through our music and also through our videos and the general way we’ve presented things, rather a lot to what you might call “gay culture.” I could spend several pages discussing the notion of “gay culture,” but for the sake of argument, I would just say that we have contributed a lot.50
His words are indignant, just as they are when the Pet Shop Boys round on musicians’ attempts to appear “real.” And though, of course, Tennant is fully entitled to say his sexuality is no one else’s business, perhaps Somerville’s criticism a few years earlier had hurt more than he cares to admit. Aids had claimed one of his best friends’ lives and here was a gay activist accusing him of being a collaborator. All it takes for evil to prosper, someone once said, is for good people to do nothing.
So is a shamefaced Tennant staring back at himself from within the lyrics of Very’s first single? Does he know first-hand the sleepless nights of his tight-lipped, not-so-secretly gay protagonist?
Certainly, we can find both defensiveness and cop-outs in ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ – starting with its hero’s astonishing belief that forgiving his girlfriend, not confronting his sexuality, is the challenge here. Tennant can’t help but scoff at this astounding act of displacement – it’s even repeated in the song’s title.
There’s the video, too. Perhaps the image of the Pet Shop Boys, dressed head-to-toe in bright orange as they ride a tandem bicycle through a greyscale city, says more than just “we’re not about being ‘real’.”
Looking back it’s hard to ignore the context. Somerville’s criticism was that Tennant and Lowe were, in effect, hiding in plain sight. And a year before Tennant finally makes his sexuality public, here they are in costumes so brash they would be visible a mile away, totally failing to blend in. Sure, they’re only riding a bike, feeding the ducks, bidding at the London Stock Exchange, using an escalator – but that doesn’t stop you noticing their hats.
Remember: Tennant will say the Pet Shop Boys have contributed through their videos to “gay culture.” It’s difficult, then, not to see the ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ clip as a pre-emptive swipe at anyone who thinks the Pet Shop Boys owe them a confession. The whole thing is writ large, as it has been time and again in Tennant’s lyrics, in black and white and, well, orange.
“We have created a storyline about two characters who are born from an egg,” costume designer David Fielding tells Chris Heath shortly before the song’s release. “I wanted to create a metaphor about being born, and being brought up in what seems to be an alien landscape on the Earth, and looking out beyond it, looking at the heavens, and thinking: ‘Why are we here?’” 51
Given that, moments later, Fielding is discussing the orientation of the song’s main character, it doesn’t take much to read sexuality into the plot of the video. Anyone who has felt the isolation, fear and rejection that can go hand-in-hand with growing up gay will be familiar with “being brought up in what seems to be an alien landscape.”
The idea of gays-as-aliens is echoed in ‘We Came from Outer Space’, one of six dance tracks the Pet Shop Boys release as a bonus album with early copies of Very. This bricolage of sampled dialogue and Nasa-inspired synth effects posits obliquely that people who deviate sexually from the norm are as good as extra-terrestrial: a woman asks a man over and over if he can tell the difference between genders and repeats the song’s title in between his nervous, faltering attempts to respond.
As well as the confusion and terror of the “alien landscape,” there’s a kind of post-religious influence at work, too. ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ is set in a world in which science, as rational and fantastic as it dares to be, has replaced theism. The reality of homo-sexuality gives the arrogance and prejudice of religion the lie, just as we discover the physical universe is capable of being as incredible and unknowable as any god. ‘Can You Forgive Her?’, with its characters arriving from space and hatching out of giant blue eggs while Lowe gazes at the sky through a telescope, draws its myths and its sense of wonder from decidedly non-religious places.
The colours are just an emotional response. [. . .] When we do the video then hopefully what we will actually be doing is putting them in these costumes in very normal situations, so it just happens to be how they dress. They’re still going to work, and feeding the ducks in the park, and rowing on the lake, and maybe bidding for shares at the Stock Exchange. It’s just that their outlook is far more colourful than some of the things that surround them.52
Whether or not Fielding intends this “colourful outlook” to be a veiled reference to the Pet Shop Boys’ sexuality, there’s something oddly poignant about watching the duo in those “very normal” situations. The colour bled out of the world around them, the bright orange of their costumes standing out almost pain-fully – there’s a kind of sad farce to the whole thing. Here they are acting as normally as it is possible to act, and they are still the most visible people in the entire street. If they want to fit in, to be “one of the crowd” – as Lowe claims on the 1989 B-side of the same name – they are doomed to fail.
Still, I don’t think ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ should be seen as any sort of political statement.
Somerville’s musical vehicle, The Communards, had been pretty dogmatic. The band had taken part in Aids education programmes; their first album sleeve had listed the ages of consent for gay sex in various European countries and advertised the phone number for a gay helpline. The Pet Shop Boys’ first album cover, on the other hand, had contained mostly white space.
“The Pet Shop Boys came along to make fabulous pop records,” Tennant tells Burston. “We didn’t come along to be politicians, or to be positive role models.” 53
Nor, ultimately, does he fall into the same trap as the song’s main character: Tennant has never claimed to be straight during the Pet Shop Boys’ career. “It’s not an autobiographical song,” he tells Heath in 1993. “I’ve never been in that situation, and I’ve never had sex behind a bicycle shed.” 54
But as someone who lived as a heterosexual well into his twenties, surely he has some experience to draw upon as he writes those lyrics.
In a roundabout way he will end up saying as much on ‘Too Many People’, that inventory of his multiple lives that gets hidden away on the B-side of Very’s third single. We first hear this windswept, mid-tempo dance song in December 1993, a few months after the album drops, and it’s here that Tennant at last confesses he isn’t always the master of his own performances, that he finds himself changing roles – and, perhaps, obscuring his sexuality – almost involuntarily as a means of impressing the people around him.
I have a very bad habit which is to keep different parts of my life separate, and when they mix I get what they call “role strain.” I worry about whom I’m going to offend most.55
Unlike ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ – which essentially deals with the same problem – ‘Too Many People’ doesn’t sound judgemental. It goes no further than cataloguing its hero’s different roles (or hats). He calls it a “bad habit,” but on vinyl at least Tennant doesn’t seem to know whether or not his compartmentalised (and, implicitly, closeted) life represents a problem.
The songs the Pet Shop Boys record in 1993 don’t generally have fade endings, so when – as here – a track does, it’s an indication that we’re dealing with something unresolved. Sure enough, the gorgeous, wistful ‘Too Many People’ will turn out to be the last and probably most blatant of Tennant’s many lyrical firtations with coming out/not coming out.
But in a sense his Attitude interview will render the song somewhat out-of-date by solving its supposedly insoluble puzzle. So maybe the Pet Shop Boys choose not to add the song to Very’s final tracklist – it is, after all, recorded for the album – because they know they are dealing with a developing story.
Let’s say the reason Tennant comes down so hard on his villains – U2, Wet Wet Wet, Bush and Major, grunge musicians, the hero of ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ – is that they don’t notice themselves changing hats. At the very least, they don’t seem to believe anyone else does.
Tennant treats songwriting like scriptwriting: his job is to imagine himself as different people, in different situations, and so perhaps it’s no big jump for him to make an admission like the one in ‘Too Many People’ that there basically is no single “real” Neil Tennant. But it’s pretty controversial in the pop world of 1993; indeed, it’s the opposite of the message at the heart of MTV Unplugged. To be “real,” says Tennant, is to embrace complexity and contradictions; none of us really has “basics” to go back to.
The Pet Shop Boys’ love/hate affair with artifice reaches a head on ‘Shameless’, another song the duo boot off Very at the last minute. On the surface, it’s a vicious takedown of “plastic” celebrities who are famous for being famous, of people who would sell their own grandparents for the chance to appear on TV. “Performance” is the buzzword yet again: although the song sounds half in awe of its subjects, it also slams them as “poseurs” and “prostitutes.”
But like all the Pet Shop Boys’ studies of performance in the Nineties, I’m sure Tennant and Lowe see themselves in there somewhere: desperate for success, doing ridiculous things – albeit in full knowledge of their absurdity – for attention. The line between malleability and shamelessness, between role strain and posing, between being artificial and being plastic, is blurred.
Performance is a subject the Pet Shop Boys find endlessly fascinating. People change hats constantly; the danger comes when we forget that fact and start to worship the images we project. It’s a fallacy that makes pop stars look silly and threatens to destroy the sanity of our friend in the orange room.
But it’s a mistake Tennant and Lowe treat with differing levels of compassion. They raise a wearied, cynical eyebrow at the claims of authenticity made by other performers; elsewhere they explore, a little painfully, what makes people wear masks (or hats) in their personal relationships. And finally Tennant looks at his own performance, the extent to which he has been “real” in the public eye and in his private life.
The victim, not for the last time during Very, is a gay man, but that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t smile at his expense.
