Let’s say you make it.
Everything that can hurt you is sealed into the north of England with you on the outside. You drag a battered suitcase off the train and inhale a lifetime’s worth of smoke from what must be the ghosts of factories because there are only banks now. It pours onto the platform like the air is on fire. It stains you before you’ve even gone five steps.
Outside King’s Cross the air is black. The only sounds are screams: sirens, brakes, memories, filtered through metres of concrete. There is an air of stifled violence. Wilting bill posters, inches thick as they peel off the brickwork, advertise boxing matches no one can go to because they have no location, no date. You don’t seem to be able to escape the station.
Six years and three miles later, you can still see it in your peripheral vision – or rather you can see the event horizon that surrounds it, sucking up dreams and colour. But here you’re living the high life. Every time you look up the sky is glowing, though the street seems locked in perpetual twilight. You’re a performer, or you might as well be since you can’t remember your name. The documents you travelled with aren’t yours. There are no mirrors but when it rains you see a face in the pavement.
And every night they come striding by.
You’ve heard about these people – patrons of the arts who dress like they’re visiting from a different century, except you’re sure you recognise some of them from the newspaper stands. They seem to bring the music with them. You’d think they might catch your eye once in a while, but it’s like they’re actors, too, pretending they can’t see you even though they must have spotted your hats from miles away.
It’s a circus down here. Someone in a different doorway is juggling digital eggs without touching them. Another man, his eye glued to a telescope, straddles the pavement on a stepladder, making the more superstitious politicians wince as they pass underneath.
Shut your eyes and it sounds like a collapsing film set, like bubbles rising to the surface as you sink deeper and deeper and deeper.
Actually, released in 1987, was the Pet Shop Boy’s second London-centric album in as many years. After a whistle-stop tour of back streets, night clubs and Parliament, it closed with ‘King’s Cross’, a song that characterised the station as a terminus of more than just trains.
‘King’s Cross’ cast its namesake as a place of dashed dreams where people arrived from the north and discovered the streets paved with anything but gold. Its lyrics told of the backs of queues, fights lit by streetlamps, indefinite waits with no reward, walking in circles and, above all, Margaret Thatcher, though her name was never used.
Six years have now passed and the Pet Shop Boys haven’t mentioned the capital once. Perhaps they felt they’d said all they could, displaced northerners who had wiped enough grime off the windows to find fortune after all but knew most hadn’t.
‘The Theatre’, halfway through Very, breaks the silence.
This time it’s the capital’s chronic homelessness problem that lurks beneath the dramatic production. The people who arrived in King’s Cross in 1987, dodging the fire by a couple of months, have ended up on the streets – but at least they’ve made it off the Pentonville Road and into the West End.
The song’s combative chorus paraphrases a notorious remark attributed to John Major’s housing minister that rough sleepers – who number about 350 in central London at this point 98 – are “what you step over when you come out of the opera.” 99 In ‘The Theatre’, the homeless know what George Young is saying about them, and his words echo in their mouths as the wind blows them down the Strand.
We won’t meet these characters again, but their story is by no means out of place on Very: its opposing forces are desperation, the desire for escape, the perils of dreaming.
Tennant seems to have painted himself into the picture twice: both the rough sleeper and the politician have his eyes and expression.
Twenty-one years after fleeing the north-east for London, he’s made it. As he walks through the West End, well-dressed with cash in his pocket, he undoubtedly does see rough sleepers, and maybe he worries about what they think of him. Perhaps he chides himself for not paying them enough attention.
Conversely, as an approximately working-class boy from Newcastle he has been singing songs about running away to London, or at least about how romantic it would be, ever since ‘Two Divided By Zero’, the first song on the Pet Shop Boys’ debut Please.
That’s what his characters have done in this new song – only to find they’ve been tricked. Maybe Tennant returns someone’s stare and sees in it his own life gone wrong. He will say as much shortly after Very’s release, linking the homeless “kids” in the Strand with his own escapist childhood dream:
Quite often I’d walk up the Strand [. . .] past these Scottish kids sleeping outside one of the Australian government houses, and I was always struck by how cheerful they were. [. . .] The song is rather a romantic idea: what I was a kid I always had a fantastic romantic idea of coming to London, and I still think of London as a romantic place; the streets being paved with gold, Dick Whittington and all the rest of it. And then there’s the reality when you’re homeless, and people ignoring you and pretending they haven’t seen you.100
And here’s the sting in the tail of songs like ‘Liberation’ and ‘Go West’: escapism and escape are different things, which is to say that the grass isn’t always greener and sometimes turns out to be the colour of asphalt.
So this is a song about the gulf between what London promises and what it delivers. The capital itself is a theatre and these rough sleepers are in the spotlight – curiously on display beneath shop fronts, an unwanted extra act played out before the socialites who escort their mistresses into waiting cabs.
They’re the audience, too – tempted down from the north by the bright lights and big smiles only to wind up sat in the (very) cheap seats watching the performers’ feet. The players refuse to break the fourth wall even when asked for a cigarette.
‘King’s Cross’ had depicted the government as an unknowable, Kafkaesque aggressor whose invisible hand held back the working, or workless, man while hired goons laid into him.
By comparison, ‘The Theatre’ seems almost inappropriately chipper. There’s no obvious mention of anything institutional, no hint that the odds are stacked against the narrator, no lament for a life out of control – on the contrary, our hero seems to have a Cockney’s optimism, confident if he could get “a bit of cash” from the strangers rushing past he’d be on his way too.
But look again at the extras in this scene. Isn’t that. . .?
The theatre events [the song] mentions – Pavarotti in the Park, the Phantom of the Opera – are real bourgeois social events. John Major and Lady Di went to Pavarotti in the Park.101
So it’s the Prime Minister himself, arm-in-arm with George Young, who can’t bring himself to look at our beggar.
Major’s record on homelessness is less than sparkling. Three years earlier, he had made Westminster City Council leader Shirley Porter a Dame 102 for her work on a programme that saw more than a hundred homeless families relocated to decrepit, asbestos-filled temporary accommodation.103
That scandal, dubbed “homes for votes,” is the reason Porter’s career now lies in tatters. For the sake of poetry let’s say she, too, walks down the Strand on this particular evening; in years to come she will tread these same pavements on her way to the Royal Courts of Justice.
Fearing a future defeat after the party’s narrow success in the 1986 council elections, Porter had waved through spurious policies to move “risky” voters out of marginal seats and flood the electoral register with new homeowners and other people likely to vote Conservative.
Building Stable Communities, as it was called, saw eight West-minster wards – those most at risk of being lost to Labour, or where Labour had claimed a narrow victory – largely repopulated with Tory supporters. It’s a miracle our hero has managed to stay in the Strand at all: St James’s was one of the wards Porter targeted.
This woman’s attitude toward rough sleepers, that they are a problem to be physically cleared away rather than people to be helped, is one shared by her constituents. Soon after Very’s release, homelessness charity Crisis will discover nearly two in five rough sleepers in London have been physically attacked by passers-by,104 while many more endure regular verbal abuse. That same year Major will describe beggars as “offensive and unnecessary,” an “eyesore” that “could drive tourists and shoppers away from cities.” 105
“The comments made to beggars [are] expressions of superiority, of contempt and of disgust,” writes the charity’s Alison Murdoch. “People who are begging often seem to bring out anger in the passer-by.” 106
Like many of the emotional transactions on Very, this is all about whether two people can bring themselves to make eye contact. It’s an awkwardness shared by the drinkers in ‘To Speak Is a Sin’; the older man and the gamer in ‘Young Offender’; the homosexual lying to his girlfriend night after night in ‘Can You Forgive Her?’.
Most people who are begging present the passerby with a stark picture of visible destitution which might otherwise be hidden away. It is a personal confrontation that you can’t avoid. The person begging before you is ultimately a human being, just the same as yourself. We all try to avoid the eye contact with him or her which affirms this.107
Elsewhere on Very, the alienation tends to be less systemic and more interpersonal: detachment from one’s lover, say (‘A Different Point of View’, ‘One and One Make Five’), or from one’s own body and sexuality (‘Dreaming of the Queen’, ‘To Speak Is a Sin’). But inasmuch as our hero is being denied the human (eye) contact he both desires and needs, ‘The Theatre’ falls neatly into line with the rest of the album. Recalling how we have been spurned before, we keep our hands, eyes, hearts and small change to ourselves.
Like most of Very, ‘The Theatre’ is set in 1993. But this is a song about Conservative London, and so – inevitably – Thatcher and the Eighties are wound up inside its nucleus.
The homeless haven’t appeared overnight. During a debate about “homes for votes” in January 1994, Bethnal Green and Stepney MP Peter Shore will tell the House of Commons:
In London we have suffered for years now, in particular during the past seven or eight years, from the scandal and shame of cardboard city and homeless people lying in the doorways up and down the Strand, only a few hundred yards away.108
Crisis is inclined to agree, discovering that most beggars in central London are in for the long haul: the majority have been there more than a year, while a fifth have been homeless for two decades. 109 Like the men at the bar in ‘To Speak Is a Sin’, the Strand’s rough sleepers have been “around forever.” They haven’t just found themselves temporarily out of luck; they were displaced when the Iron Lady took power.
And just as Porter, Major and Young won’t meet the homeless man’s gaze, a succession of City workers pass him by, happy to blow thousands on champagne but unwilling to hand over the price of a cup of tea. ‘The Theatre’ presents London as a land of rampant inequality, its shots cutting between operas and cardboard boxes, between shop windows and the pavement outside.
This is pretty much how Saskia Sassen had characterised it in The Global City. Writing in 1991, Sassen had contrasted “high-priced locations for firms and residences” with “concentrated poverty and extreme physical decay in the inner cities.” 110
By 1993 it’s nearly a generation since Thatcher was elected but the minimum wage is still a speck on the horizon. Finance workers’ pay packets continue to balloon even after two recessions,111 driving them further and further not only from the people they step over on the way out of the opera, but also from their own staff.
Chris Hamnett will discover that between 1979 and 1995, weekly earnings in London have risen
from £404 to £708 for managers, an increase of 75 per cent compared with 30 per cent for cleaners (£221 to £288). [. . .] Although these labels are crude and overschematic, the differences between the sectors are very clear.112
One reason for the widening gap is, of course, the Tories’ economic legacy. And this isn’t brand new territory for the Pet Shop Boys. Tennant satirised privatisation in ‘Shopping’, the third track on Actually, observing drily that Thatcher’s supposedly laissez-faire government was giving people a leg-up after all – but that it was the City, not the poor, getting the care packages.
Conservative policy to [. . .] deregulate the City of London in 1986 clearly set the framework for the expansion of the City in the mid-to-late Eighties to take place.113
‘Shopping’ depicted a London of unchecked, cancerous “growth,” swallowing up national resources with the inside help and blind eye of the government. Although it was written from the point of view of a City boss, it left us in little doubt that Tennant wasn’t on his side.
‘The Theatre’, by contrast, is more ambiguous, more complicated, both in what it says and in how it sounds. In trying to be a love letter to London at the same time as it laments the city’s inequality, it doesn’t have the same focus or anger as ‘Shopping’.
Does that mean Tennant has taken his finger off the pulse? Owen Hatherley will argue as much in 2013, saying the Pet Shop Boys’ political nous has been gradually disintegrating ever since their sophomore LP dragged us through “a London of endemic poverty and conspicuous consumption, bankers stepping over the homeless.” 114
After [Actually], the anger drains out of Tennant’s lyrics somewhat, and when they do touch on politics and history it’s in a post-’89, end of history fashion, as if the optimism of that year, and the deposing of Thatcher in 1990, defanged him.115
Hatherley’s timeline isn’t wholly convincing. To pick up Actually’s thread we need to fast-forward rather than rewind – thirteen years beyond Very to the release of Fundamental in 2006. That album will deliver a more sustained and more sophisticated attack on the British government even than Actually, which has at most three songs about policy.
But one thing that does seem to dissipate after 1987 is the band’s class consciousness. Fundamental isn’t really about London: its politics are more concerned with the rights of the individual than the fate of the masses. Actually, when it nails its colours to the mast as on ‘Shopping’, is more palpably socialist.
There are other signs the Pet Shop Boys’ perspective has shifted. Consider this, delivered by Tennant during a conversation with Heath between shows on the 1989 world tour:
I don’t really admire pride in class. I don’t admire people who say “I’m working-class and proud of it”. [. . .] I kind of think it’s a fantasy [. . .] I think it’s like saying black people have got a fantastic sense of rhythm to say working-class people are all [. . .] sexier and more vigorous and earthier and less pretentious.116
Maybe not his finest hour: a self-identified middle-class aesthete denying the possibility or value of working-class identity by suggesting it’s about nothing more than heartiness and sex.
For consistency it’s tempting to believe he’s taking aim at other musicians – this time people who appropriate working-class artefacts for commercial ends. He might, for instance, be talking about Mick Jagger, who is said to have affected a working-class accent to gain rock credibility.117
But this isn’t the only point on the 1989 tour where Tennant too quickly dismisses the issue of class. Occasionally he talks as though being working-class would somehow mean being less clever or mature:
I’ve always tried to write about adult concerns in pop music. It’s a middle-class analytical way of looking at things, an unrebellious, unsexy way of writing, if you like.118
Promoting Very four years later, Lowe doles out a similar line, telling Heath the Pet Shop Boys are “not about poverty” 119 after complaining that everyone around them is being “‘real’ and ‘poor’.” 120
Again, it’s easy to interpret this as part of the Pet Shop Boys’ war on the cult of the “real,” but it’s a careless choice of words – and Lowe makes no effort to clarify what he means. The use of poverty’s images by pop stars is hardly the same thing as poverty itself, but Lowe’s words make it sound like destitution is little more than an aesthetic.
We’ve explored the Pet Shop Boys’ distrust of identity, their reluctance to ally themselves too closely with any single group of people. Something of this hesitation is shown when Tennant tells Attitude he’s gay, insisting at the same time he hasn’t been writing songs just for gay people. So maybe “we’re not about poverty” is a clumsy way of saying again that the Pet Shop Boys are universalists, that they aren’t anyone’s to claim ideologically. And surely they wouldn’t write a song about homelessness if they genuinely weren’t interested in class?
In fact, ‘The Theatre’ tells us little if anything about the home-less themselves, even though we learn plenty about the opera-goers. In particular, there’s no mention of their background, or of the factors that might have led them onto the streets.
The song’s root lies in ‘West End Girls’, which made deprivation sound alluring more than a year before Actually was released. But that song has lower stakes: ‘West End Girls’ is a poetic, impersonal study of a desolate city, so it’s reasonable for Tennant to blur the line between grim and sexy. ‘The Theatre’, on the other hand, is about real victims, so it’s troubling for him to claim it presents “a romantic view of homelessness.” 121
What’s more, ‘West End Girls’ is still basically a song about class: about the daughters of Kensington solicitors tiptoeing out to meet the sons of Mile End council tenants in seedy bars. ‘The Theatre’ is strangely devoid of class imagery.
And yet class is relevant to any conversation about home-lessness. By the early Nineties, the battle between different economic groups for space in London is all too visible – council houses are being sold off and luxury flats built; docks are becoming waterfronts. Sassen claims the race to gentrify the inner city is reflected in the increasing numbers of rough sleepers on its doorstep.122
Most of the homeless Londoners Crisis will interview in 1994 come from a low-wage background, more than half from construction or manual labour.123 57% have left school with no qualifications.124 Some of these may be people who lack the money to move to the suburbs but can no longer afford to live in the East End. Yet if anything, the homeless man in ‘The Theatre’ sounds positively middle-class, referencing West End shows and Pavarotti.
This of course isn’t to say working-class people can’t or shouldn’t appreciate opera; even Tennant was once a union man.125 But ‘The Theatre’ would seem to omit half the discussion; there’s a reason the West End girls aren’t joining the Scots and northerners in those boxes on the Strand, yet to listen to the song you’d think people from all walks of life were equally at risk of finding themselves on the streets. In fact, middle-class home-lessness is virtually non-existent in early-Nineties London; not until eighteen years later will Crisis warn it could be imminent.126
No – the only way ‘The Theatre’ draws attention to the class division between politicians and the homeless is by putting jarring bourgeois phrases into the characters’ mouths. But choosing to highlight the plight of a marginalised group by further silencing their voices is a strange technique in isolation.
Still, there is one indication the song knows it is treading on egg-shells.
The Pet Shop Boys, it has been said before, are masters of a peculiar duality between words and music in which one is never quite what you’d expect from the other: forlorn, reserved poetry is delivered in a whisper while ecstatic hi-NRG rhythms shower sparks over the audience; the logic of the dancefloor is rewritten by the language of the library, the therapist’s chair, the empty streets.
Well, listen to the end of ‘The Theatre’ and the city seems to be swirling downwards. If any part of the song is authentically bleak it’s this: fractured vocal sounds that could be laughing or weeping or coughing cycling around an unresolved chord like a tornado.
The track has threatened to collapse into this for fully five minutes, even at its most elaborate and sparkling. Arranger Anne Dudley piles on the layers just like the narrator piles on the bluster, but there’s no way to cover up his empty heart when night falls.
Now, with Tennant’s performance over and his character’s resolve a vague memory, our hero is overwhelmed by the full force of Very’s darkest moment. The theatre-goers head home and this bedraggled specimen is left alone to battle his demons under the stars, lost in a forest, frozen in a borrowed sleeping bag.
Most of Very’s songs have cold endings; ‘The Theatre’ is one of the few that fades, peters out into uncertain silence that lingers for a moment too long before ‘One and One Make Five’ begins.
And it leaves a curious taste. The lack of a curtain call gives the unsettling impression that this fitful nightmare goes on forever, during all the other songs that follow, even and especially when you can’t hear it – an appropriate metaphor for the largely invisible phenomenon the song briefly documents. At best, we smile, drop a few coins in the cup, mutter an apology and walk on. Twenty seconds later, the exchange is forgotten.