To celebrate Pet Shop Boys’ hot new single, ‘Dreamland’, a duet with Years & Years no less, as well as news of their first Greatest Hits Tour and even a new album on the way, Loverboy is going to transport you back to 2010 when we spoke with Neil and Chris about all things pop. Literally PSB have a career spanning thirty-eight years and yet we happily spent our hour being schooled by them as they explained how Fischerspooner ‘re-kickstarted modern pop’, the differences between writing for Madonna and Kylie and how ‘if you are going to comment on Rachel Stevens you should know DARE by The Human League.’ Never has a truer word been said. Where do we send our apology?

Neil Tennant. Chris Lowe. How the devil are you both?
Neil: Very well, thank you.
Chris: Busy. Although we’ve just had a really nice lunch with wine
N: It was your idea!
C: It was my idea and I don’t normally suggest a glass of wine but I thought, ‘You know what?’ It’s the credit crunch, it’s a good time to drink at lunchtime, isn’t it?’

Why did you decide to get back in the studio?
N: It’s a natural cycle or something. I mean our last album was three years ago. We were on tour for pretty much a year and a half. We write anyway. In the middle of the tour we were writing. In fact we were asked to write some songs for Kylie Minogue.
C: Not just us. I think everyone that’s a songwriter.
N: We were touring and both of our male backing singers had submitted songs for Kylie. None of us got one on. We were also asked to write songs for Madonna.
C: No, we were asked if we had anything lying around.

For Hard Candy?
C: Well, that was before she had decided she was going in an R&B direction.
N: Madonna’s operation is very polite.
C: So, the implication being that Kylie’s operation isn’t.
N: We didn’t hear anything back!
C: I don’t know if ANYONE heard anything back from Kylie.
N: But as much as we like Kylie personally, I’m sure it’s not her fault. But Madonna’s operation, before we’d even had chance to see if there was anything lying around, said, ‘Actually, sorry, she’s decided to do an R&B record, so there’s no point.’ So we said, ‘Fine.’ We’d already written something but it’s alright it’s gone in the ballet. But we write songs once a year anyway or maybe once a year because we enjoy doing it.

Does Yes have any key themes? In one interview you said it would discuss religion.
N: Oh, we just say silly things.
C: Did we say that? Oh we talk a lot of rubbish then, don’t we? Particularly in interviews.
N: There are no themes as such, deliberately on this album. On the last album, Fundamental, we had an idea for the whole album –  a war on terror, on surveillance, that kind of thing. This album is just a collection of songs. As I said we wrote some songs for Kylie and one of those songs is on the album – ‘Pandemonium’. So we knew we were going to record that because we really liked that. We actually had a couple of other songs for Kylie, that we really liked and we thought would be on it, but they’re not.

What are you going to do with these songs?
N: [To Chris] I’ve just thought of a song for that girl. The Nashville girl. We’re developing a relationship with our music publishers in Nashville! It’s the only place we seem to have a relationship with them. There’s something really exotic about that. Sorry what was the question…

You said you had written a couple of others for Kylie, what will happen to them?
N: Dunno. There’s actually five we wrote. Six. Seven. Eight! We always have a load of songs lying around. We’ve got contemporaries of ‘It’s a Sin’ we haven’t recorded yet. There’s a great one called, ‘I can always rely on you to let me down.’
C: That sounds like a country song, doesn’t it? That’s such a country song title.
N: So, sometimes they finally reappear. What we learned from Xenomania is if you have things in a song you don’t like, get rid of them, write something new over the backing track. We write songs more or less like John Lennon and Paul McCartney whereas Xenomania get backing tracks, write stuff over it, then they write more stuff over it, then they ‘lyric’ them and see what sounds best. It’s actually a very disciplined way of writing. It’s why they have such unusual song structures. We ended up writing four songs with Xenomania, one of which was ‘The Loving Kind.’

What are your favourite Xenomania-helmed songs?
C: ‘Call the Shots’
N: ‘Biology’

Both Girls Aloud tracks.
N: Well, I do like, Sugababes’ ‘Round Round’.
C: Did they write that?
N: Miranda I believe.
C: Well, that is quite amazing then isn’t it? I wasn’t sure whether that was one of those mash-up things.
N: No, no.

They also wrote Cher’s ‘Believe.’
N: Brian wrote that as a ‘Stone Roses-type thing.’ Imagine that! It was written in the early 90s and took ages to get recorded. ‘Do you believe in life after love?’ Just think of it as being Manc. It’s totally imaginable.

I love Rachel Stevens’ second album. The Times gave it six out of five.
N: I remember thinking the production was quite good. But when you just run through those song titles, ‘Negotiate With Love’…would The Human League have sung that? I don’t think so. I think that’s what you’re up against. You think of DARE by The Human League. Do you know that album?

I know of it.
N: Well, if you are going to comment on Rachel Stevens you should know Dare by The Human League because it’s really one of the albums where the whole thing comes from. It’s an amazingly good album and it hasn’t even dated. But it was much more adventurous and open lyrically. It wasn’t about 1950s song clichés. A lot of modern pop music is like that. You could have sung ‘Negotiate With Love’ in 1957. We expect things to move on, don’t we? Pop is supposed to say something new.

Who do you listen to now?
N: MGMT I suppose is the loadstone of modern pop. Fischerspooner were always quite underrated, although there was a lot of hype around THE single. In many ways Fischerspooner really re-kickstarted modern pop. That sort of sound. Slightly minimal, electronic, it was very much a pop sound. It went into the pop mainstream.

Where do you hear new music?
C: Actually I’ll tell you where I get a lot of music from is Soccer AM. I watch it in bed on a Saturday from 9-12. They always tell you what record is playing. I often sit there with my phone downloading songs during the programme.
N: You go on Shazam.
C: Oh, yes. I am often in Selfridges mens’ department and I am Shazaming away while I’m looking at the Dsquared2 collection.

My Shazam pulled up The Pussycat Dolls the other day. I wasn’t so happy about that.
N: Lady Gaga writes for The Pussycat Dolls.

I know. Style-wise I absolutely love Lady Gaga but musically I am a bit unsure.
N: Why?

I thought it would be more Roisin Murphy-esque.
N: Stop right there. She is not Roisin Murphy. So you thought that. That’s your issue. It’s not Lady Gaga’s issue. Do you know what I mean? It’s like when we did ‘Love Etc.’ someone said, ‘Oh I thought it would be a be a bit ‘Call the Shots’ meets ‘Delusions of Grandeur’ by The Pet Shop Boys.’ I turned around and said, ‘Yeah, you thought that, you weren’t making the record.’ People tend to try and do something different, with the aim of trying not to repeat yourself.

Is she not just treading somewhere between Pussycat Dolls’ music with Britney?
N: Has Britney made a record like ‘Just Dance’? You could hear that song anywhere in the world right now. That takes real talent. She has the image and behind that she is a songwriter. She is so switched on. She knew everything about us. How?! When we asked her to join us at The BRITS, I thought she’d say, ‘No’. She put that outfit together, the teapot thing. It was brilliant.
C: You know it was actually made of porcelain. She designed it and had it made and it’s made of porcelain and it actually looks like an English teapot.
N: I was thinking, ‘I can’t believe we’ve got Brandon and Lady Gaga doing this with us.’ I felt really quite chuffed. Also in pop terms, they are such different creatures yet they were working out their backing vocals together. It was a fascinating experience.

Where do you hear your influence in music today?
N: I don’t really care about all that. The reason we asked Brandon Flowers to do all this is because of ‘Human’. In practically every interview they did we were mentioned. I don’t think it sounds that much like us but I’m aware that we are a reference that is made. If you do synth-pop with beautiful string sounds and a melody which is not aggressively Amercian, people will probably say it sounds like The Pet Shop Boys.

Lastly, you were discussing Dusty Springfield earlier….
N: Dusty Springfield is actually the best woman singer to have come out of this country, ever. In terms of pop music. When she died, I agreed to do some interviews about her, the first question was, ‘Why was Dusty such a gay icon?’ That’s it. That’s the whole of Dusty’s career reduced to two words. Gay. Icon. Is that what you’d say about Ella Fitzgerald? Janis Joplin? No, it’s what you say about Dusty because you’ve heard she was gay. You know what? To be marginalised as you can tell makes me angry.
C: Seething. You’ve gone red.
N: I feel there needs to be a debate or a convention about what it is to be gay nowadays. I always used to say that if gays and straights have real equality, the issue of where you put your dick should just be personal. It is only your sex life. There endeth the sermon.

‘Dreamland’ with Years and Years is out now.
The tour, Dreamland: The Greatest Hits Live, kicks off next year.
www.petshopboys.co.uk