The royal family is in your kitchen. The Queen and Princess Diana stare silently through the fifth-storey windows at London’s gloomy September skyline; at the trail of brake lights blinking down the A12 and the darkness that lurks in the corner of the sky.
The kettle boils and you direct them to the breakfast bar. The Queen studies her reflection in the scarred laminate like she’s never seen it before; you slide her one of the slate coasters you stole from the bar at the Royal Garden Hotel.
You can’t recall how or when these unlikely guests arrived but, amnesia aside, everything seems to be going well. Then Princess Diana starts crying.
Is it treason if the royals cry in your kitchen? It does little to quell your nerves when Diana locks wet eyes with you and explains through her sobs that love is dead. Not her love, or yours, but love itself. She is weeping into the tea.
You don’t understand, not at first – not until Lady Di gestures to the daily papers beside you, which are for some reason spread out like something from an MFI brochure.
You struggle to read any of the headlines but you go cold as you realise what she’s talking about.
You try to remember the face of the man you were sat with a moment ago. Weren’t there two of you in bed before the royals stepped out of the creaking lift and knocked at your door?
Or was he sat at the table? What was his name? What happened to him?
You’re sweating profusely, now, and it’s nothing to do with the temperature.
As you turn from the newspapers you realise Diana isn’t crying anymore – she and the Queen are staring at you. Not into your face, but halfway between your eyes and the floor.
Diana’s trying not to laugh.
It’s a moment before it dawns on you that you don’t have any clothes on. But something else is wrong, too.
You follow the royals’ gaze. Where has your body gone? How can you still be sweating without it?
With what seems like a tremendous effort you’re able to make the scene vanish, and you find yourself alone, back in bed.
Then the real terror hits you.
No, it isn’t illegal to be gay in Very’s Britain, and perhaps we should be grateful for that – but nor is it exactly encouraged. Homosexuality is demonised by education policy and newspaper columnists while gay men are implicitly (sometimes explicitly) blamed for a disease they have seen kill their own friends and lovers.
In 1993, men who have sex with men still overwhelmingly bear the scars of the illness once known as “gay-related immune deficiency.” It had been 1987 by the time the British government had launched its first HIV-prevention campaign,56 and for many men – certainly those of Neil Tennant’s age – it was too little, too late. One of his closest friends was being treated for the illness as early as 1986 and had died in 1989.57
Doing press for Very, Tennant describes the experience as “traumatic” and, in 1994, adds that three people he knows have died of Aids that year alone.58
Trauma is about right. Lush, towering songs like ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ and ‘To Speak Is a Sin’ are shot through with it; half paralysed by fear, Very can do little more than excavate the paranoia and alienation of love in the Nineties over and over and over.
When the Pet Shop Boys had arrived on the pop scene in the mid-Eighties, newspapers were still referring to Aids as “the gay plague.” 59
“Since the perverts offend the laws of God and nature, is it fanciful to suggest that one or both is striking back?” enquired The Star in 1986, while the Daily Express berated the dead and dying for their “self-indulgence.” 60
Compassion was off the agenda. Woodrow Wyatt opined in the News of the World that councils who gave grants to gay-rights projects were committing “murder”;61 across the pond, William Buckley in the New York Times suggested the involuntary tattooing of gay men known to be HIV-positive.62
But of course the newspapers were only repeating what was being said in the streets and behind closed doors.
The criminal law forbidding homosexuality may have been scrapped in 1967 but that had not altered attitudes overnight. Many people treated the idea of gay sex with hostility and distaste, and thought that the victims of Aids should be left to their fate.63
The people running the country made no effort to challenge public prejudice. In 1986 Margaret Thatcher reportedly tried to put the brakes on the Aids information campaign because she thought it would introduce young people to “risky” sexual practices they didn’t already know about.64 Sex between men, it seemed, was something she didn’t want happening at all if it could be avoided. Bizarrely, the Prime Minister also seemed to think a generation of teenagers might be looking to Whitehall for its sex tips.
Having failed to stop the leaflets being printed, she instead set about sucker-punching gay liberation back two decades: section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 made it illegal for tax-payer-funded institutions to “promote” homosexuality, a piece of legislation that was not repealed until 2003. Thatcher’s own health secretary Norman Fowler would later admit he “deeply regret[ted]” the law,65 particularly in light of what he saw even then as a strong link between homophobia and the spread of HIV.
As the Pet Shop Boys tread delicately into the final decade of the 20th century, things go from bad to worse. In the year Very comes out, the number of Britons dying from Aids is at a new peak – more than 1,500 annually – and the disease has claimed about 8,000 lives, mostly men, in the UK.66
Tennant tells the NME while promoting ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ that “today I find myself knowing quite a few people who have Aids.” 67 And twelve months later he will admit that Aids is “at the back of your mind all the time. Actually, it’s at the front of your mind all the time.” 68
The sentiment is straight out of Very’s fifth track. ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ shows us a man whose sanity is buckling under his terror of the “gay plague.” But as on ‘Can You Forgive Her?’, Tennant must play the hypnotherapist to get any answers, sending his subjects to sleep before he is able to probe their deepest fears.
I read somewhere that one of the most common dreams people share is that the Queen comes round to their house; sometimes it’s an anxiety dream and sometimes it’s a nice dream. [. . .] The idea of dreaming of the Queen [in a song about Aids] made sense because of Lady Di’s work with Aids. [. . .] She is saying “there are no more lovers left alive” because one of her friends has died of Aids.69
More accurately, ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ is set half in a dream and half in a waking nightmare. It tells a story whose logic is distorted by the darkness: Princess Diana arrives for tea and casually suggests to the narrator that love has died just as Tennant realises he hasn’t got any clothes on and wakes with a start.
It is with something less than tact that Diana, who once made headlines by shaking hands with an Aids patient, reminds our hero that all his former partners are dead – because where, statistically, does that leave him? “Waking up in a sweat refers it back to Aids,” Tennant tells Heath, “because people with Aids have night sweats; the person is worrying about having Aids.” 70
Both the princess and the homosexual look around and find themselves chillingly alone. Perhaps the narrator is the only friend Diana has left; maybe this wasn’t an unannounced visit to a crumbling council flat but a weekly appointment to see an in-patient whose drug-addled brain can only half make sense of what is happening.
Either way, we’re so excited about the celebrity visitors we almost neglect to notice the most important person on Tennant’s doorstep. As the royals arrive, our hero is reunited with someone so familiar he is only addressed in the second person: the first figure over the threshold is neither Diana nor the Queen but his lost love. You accompany the women through the door; yet, with memory fading just as quickly as bodily health, this is the last time the ghost is mentioned (until, perhaps, the end of the album) and his cameo is all too easy to miss. Does the narrator even register the face he has seen, or is his attention immediately stolen by the royals as he makes the tea? How long has it been?
We don’t seem to be dealing with the closeted character we met in ‘Can You Forgive Her?’. Our hero in ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ is apparently an active gay man, having lost multiple lovers to the disease. And although we are discussing the actual monarch, the double meaning of the word “queen” is likely not lost on Tennant.
The music, too, is more stately than sneaky, sorrowful rather than angry. ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ captures the jumpy denial of a man backed into a corner, snapping at the wrong targets; our latest narrator, by contrast, sounds resigned to his fate thanks to the weighty arrangement.
‘Dreaming of the Queen’ patently isn’t one of those “nice” royal dreams Tennant was talking about – but in truth it’s all pretty amusing until the first chorus, when Princess Diana starts talking about death.
If we take a step back, this looks like a tragically apt metaphor for Aids, the unwelcome guest that crashes the party of gay liberation and makes something as fun as sex into a dice with mortality.
The emergence of the disease had turned gay people – grudgingly accepted by law for less than a generation – into bogeymen. Sexual minorities had simply wanted the freedom to be them-selves; now they were the victims of a witch-hunt – even though they, not the columnists and priests, were the ones getting sick and dying.
It’s possible, then, to see ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ as a requiem not just for the narrator’s lovers, but for his entire world. Like ‘Go West’, this is an anthem for the loss of a generation, a culture still rubbing its eyes against the daylight of legal acceptance even as it is crushed by an indiscriminate virus.
Being gay often means growing up afraid of your own fantasies. ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ is a hymn to the legions of uncertain men who survived the violence and fear of adolescence only to have the ground whipped out from beneath their feet. We do not believe we will find love, and yet we find it; we do not believe we will grow old, and so death instead rushes forward to meet us. Time and again young men lower their friends and lovers into the ground, look up and find no one left to comfort them.
It isn’t just people that Aids kills – it kills the mood. It pours cold water all over the romance of clubbing, meeting new people and, of course, sex.
The Pet Shop Boys’ first and perhaps clearest examination of this chilling effect comes not from Very but from ‘Hit Music’, released in 1987 on their second album Actually.
“It’s really all about Aids, this song,” Tennant would tell Heath of ‘Hit Music’ in 2001. “It’s about how sex had gone out of the entire nightclubbing ethos because of Aids. Nightclubbing is about sex, really, so when it’s not, what’s left?” 71
Steve Redhead had made a similar observation in 1990, though he was concerned less with specifically gay clubs. “In acid house, and connected scenes, dancing no longer solely represented the erotic display of the body,” he wrote. “After Aids, sexuality has come to involve hidden dangers which leave the body (though no longer safe) as the last refuge.” 72
So the man’s realisation in the second verse that he’s naked is devastating. Like Aids, nudity leaves him both defenceless and involuntarily sexualised: with neither pants nor a functioning immune system, he can no more escape Diana’s gaze than he can infection, while his diagnosis and the fact his cock is on display draw attention to his sex life even when he’s only making the tea.
Just three songs earlier, amid the dizzying sugar rush of ‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing’, Tennant was considering taking his own clothes off – but the two references to nakedness are a world apart. For the man in ‘Dreaming of the Queen’, removing his clothes means quite literally removing his protection against HIV. Perhaps he blames himself, feeling that, had he kept his trousers on, he wouldn’t be waking up sweating.
The Pet Shop Boys by now know well enough the dangers of letting go. All the same, ‘To Speak Is a Sin’ – track nine on Very – drags the sombre party from the coffee table to the club.
Our protagonist finds himself in a gay bar with some friends, but even there he’s racked by anxiety and insecurity.
The title echoes the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 number one ‘It’s a Sin’, a song about how pretty much everything Tennant wanted to do with his life and his evenings was profane.
That’s the situation our man finds himself in now, but with an important difference. Where ‘It’s a Sin’ was a defiant “fuck you” to the Catholic school that had filled him with self-doubt, ‘To Speak Is a Sin’ is the sound of a man reminding himself to be good.
Tennant will tell Heath shortly after the album’s release that ‘To Speak Is a Sin’ is “rather a sad song about people in gay bars sitting round, eyeing each other up [but] not saying anything; it’s all done by looks and gestures.” 73
The fact it was written back in 198374 – that is, before Tennant’s friends started dying – suggests the main reason for this reticence is straightforward: in a homophobic world, the men are shy and embarrassed, afraid to voice their desires for fear of making them real.
But the choice to release ‘To Speak Is a Sin’ in 1993, on the same album as ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ and ‘Go West’, adds a context it’s hard to ignore. Like the club in ‘Hit Music’, this gay bar has been desexualised by the fear that picking anyone up could genuinely lead to the man’s death. It’s almost as though the narrator is pleading with himself to keep quiet, to have a few drinks and then go home alone – even though he knows he’ll be back the next night, and the next, and the next.
Something in the mood – perhaps it’s the synthesised saxo-phone solo that opens the song – suggests it’s late, tells us the bar we’re in is small and dark. The music could almost be diegetic. Very still has three songs to go, but this is music for the end of the night. After all, as the narrator puts it, he has been “around forever.”
“It’s about people going out, no matter how ghastly the weather is, on the off chance they’re going to pick someone up,” Tennant tells Heath, “and about the desperation, and the hopeful optimism, of that.” 75
Years later, after the turn of the millennium, he will add curiously: “It’s not really like that anymore, now that everyone’s out.”
Chris Lowe’s response: “Everyone’s too flaming happy now. Obviously it’s great that people are happy, but a whole culture has kind of disappeared.”
Then the parting shot from Tennant: “We always used to like tragic gay bars. They’re hard to find now.” 76
Flip ‘To Speak Is a Sin’ over and there’s a message scratched into the back: in spite of all the trauma, it’s exciting to be an outlaw.
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker suggested in 1987 that sex – indeed life itself – had become so hazardous that a kind of blank hedonism had replaced fear. Society’s hyper-awareness of hiv had metamorphosed into a bacchanalian sense that we might as well enjoy ourselves because the world would shortly end anyway.
They recalled Ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ account of the plague that hit Athens in the 5th century.
A panic scene of human psychology at the end of the world emerge[d]: a carnivalesque mood of bitter hysteria at already living on borrowed time after the catastrophe, with nothing to lose because one is certain to be cheated of life anyway.77
This was not so different from the scenario in the late Eighties, they suggested.
The psychological mood of postmodern America is similar [. . .] Here, the invasion of the body by invisible antigens, the origins of which are unknown, the circulation of which is as unpredictable as it is haphazard, generated a pervasive mood of living, once again, at the end of the world. [. . .] Between a melancholy sense of fatalism and a triumphant, but unrealistic, sense of immunity from viral contamination, these are the psychological poles of panic sex at the fin-de-millennium.78
I’m not saying Tennant writes any of Very with the Krokers in mind, but there does seem to be a hint of this excitement in the rather seedy ‘To Speak Is a Sin’. Why does its narrator keep returning to the same bar if not, on some level, because he already feels like a dead man walking?
This attitude – in a nutshell, live like you’ll die tomorrow (or tonight) – pops up in a different guise on two earlier tracks as well.
True, Tennant’s new relationship is probably the main reason for the inclusion of a pair of carefree/careless love songs early in the album: ‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing’ and ‘ Liberation’, which refer to seizing the moment and forgetting the future.
But it’s certainly interesting to have two distinctly romantic songs rubbing shoulders with tracks like ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ and ‘To Speak Is a Sin’, where physical love represents a mortal threat.
Neither ‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing’ nor ‘Liberation’ is exactly raunchy, but they do both refer implicitly to a physical relationship. And the “liberation” described in the latter could be interpreted as a release from the sexless, look-but-don’t-touch code of conduct Aids had imposed on Tennant’s life.
In that song, it is the presence of a sleeping lover’s head on his shoulder that shatters his physical isolation and convinces him he is in love. And in ‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing’ he admits he sometimes just wants to get naked and dance. In short, he is reclaiming his own body from the fear of Aids.
Yet the words “right now” appear in both songs – repeatedly in ‘Liberation’. It seems their narrator knows his relationship won’t last.
Most likely this is because he is fickle or insecure. But with a little imagination we can interpret his reluctance to look beyond the present as a sign our narrator is increasingly aware of his own mortality – or even nihilistically excited by it.
Compare this with the altogether more frustrated tone of ‘Hit Music’, which pointedly and ironically enthuses about Tennant’s desexualised experience of mid-Eighties clubbing.
“Tragic” or not, the gay bar in ‘To Speak Is a Sin’ is magical, somehow, and that shines through the track like a neon sign cutting through clouds of cigarette smoke. Our hero wants to stay even as he knows he should leave.
The room is packed but silent. A bell rings: last orders. And as you stand up to leave you just about catch someone’s eye.
It’s an extremely familiar shade of blue. Zooming out, you take in the rest of the man’s face – younger than you remember, but there’s no mistaking who you’re staring at, though you’ve never seen him without using a mirror until now.
Head swimming, scarcely daring to exhale, you sit back down and shut your eyes.
How many have you had? Why don’t you feel drunk?
How many hours – days, weeks, years – have you been sat there?
Why isn’t anyone talking?
There’s a final layer of sexual anxiety here – and it relates to something slower but far more inevitable than the onset of HIV.
I suspect that even in 1993 the bars Tennant had written about a decade earlier are disappearing. ‘To Speak Is a Sin’ as it appears on Very is the sound of someone reminiscing about being young and gay in the early Eighties.
The Pet Shop Boys’ euphoria has always been always tempered with sadness. But this transitional, transcendent album more than any other really does sound like a eulogy for the spaces in which the nighttimes of Tennant and Lowe’s youth played out.
When they wrote it, Tennant and Lowe themselves were probably the young men being eyed up in ‘To Speak Is a Sin’ – but by the time Very comes out they might well have become the ones doing the eyeing, “sad old lonely homosexuals not daring to talk to anyone attractive,” as Lowe will delicately put it later.79
The fact is, Very is pretty much the last Pet Shop Boys record that feels as though its authors spend their evenings lost in darkness and basslines.
Their 1999 album Nightlife and 2001 musical Closer to Heaven would both be set in London’s clubland, but they won’t feel like they’re about the Pet Shop Boys’ own experiences.
By contrast, songs like ‘I Want a Lover’ (1986), ‘We All Feel Better in the Dark’ (1990) and ‘Forever in Love’ (1993) – all sweat, muscle and ecstasy – really do give that impression. True, in ‘Vocal’ (2013) Tennant and Lowe would finally record another love song to clubbing, but even that would be a tribute to the rave scene of their youth, not a hymn to any 21st-century dancefloor.
As I get older I find I think about dying more and more. I’m thirty-nine, so it’s statistically most likely that well over half my life has been lived. So actually I am frightened of it.80
As Tennant approaches forty, maybe ‘ To Speak Is a Sin’ is the sound of a man wondering whether it is time to drink up and go home, as seductive – and intimidating – as the bar and the company are.
With the benefit of hindsight, we know what he chooses.
The question of whether to pay up and cut his losses is one Tennant will keep returning to as the years drag on. ‘To Step Aside’ (1996), ‘The Samurai in Autumn’ (2002), ‘Your Early Stuff’ (2012) – each of these muddles through the same problem and comes to the same conclusion: not tonight.
So our hero stays out and drifts home and sleeps and wakes and goes out and repeats. And maybe one night his voice returns and the gentleman across the room returns his gaze and the clock spins in reverse and it really is 1983 again. Until then, he counts his blessings on one hand and holds his trousers up with the other.
