Pet Shop Boys, are an English electronic dance music duo, consisting of Neil Tennant, who provides main vocals, keyboards and occasionally guitar and Chris Lowe on keyboards and occasionally on vocals.
At the 2009 BRIT Awards, The Pet Shop Boys received an award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. Pet Shop Boys have sold more than 50 million records worldwide. Since 1986, they have had 39 Top 30 singles and 22 Top 10 hits in the UK, including four Number Ones: "West End Girls," "It's a Sin," "Always on My Mind," and "Heart." The duo's latest album, entitled Yes, was released on 23 March 2009. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe met in an electronics shop on Kings Road in Chelsea, London in August 1981. Recognising a mutual interest in dance music, they began to work on material together, first in Tennant's flat in Chelsea and from 1982, in a small studio, in Camden Town. It was during these early years that several songs that would later appear on future albums were created, including "It's a Sin," "West End Girls," "Rent," and "Jealousy." Starting out, the two called themselves West End, because of their love of London's West End, but later they came up with the name Pet Shop Boys, which derived from some friends who worked in a pet shop, in Ealing. They said that the new name "sounded like an English rap group." Their big break came in August 1983, when Tennant was assigned by Smash Hits to interview The Police in New York. The duo were obsessed with a stream of Hi-NRG records, made by New York producer Bobby Orlando, simply known as Bobby 'O'. According to Tennant: "I thought: well, if I've got to go & see The Police play, then I'm also going to have lunch with Bobby 'O'." They shared a cheeseburger and carrot cake, at a restaurant called the Apple Jack, on 19 August (two years to the day since Tennant and Lowe had met) and Orlando suggested making a record with Pet Shop Boys, after hearing a demo tape that Tennant had taken with him. In April 1984, the Orlando-produced "West End Girls" was released, becoming a club hit in Los Angeles and San Francisco. On 2 November it was voted "Screamer of the Week" by listeners of Long Island, New York radio station WLIR. Though the track did not do well in the UK, it was a minor hit in France and Belgium.
Musical style
Band dynamic
The dynamic of Pet Shop Boys' image lies in the duo's public personalities Tennant is perceived as an erudite intellectual, articulate and verbose in speech; while Lowe, now almost always seen in his trademark attire of hat and sunglasses (since as early as 1985), appears as guarded and terse, but nevertheless behaves as casual, flippant and fun-loving. They have maintained a consistent pattern for interviews, in which Tennant is the primary speaker, answering questions at length, while occasionally being interrupted by brief, generally humorous interjections from Lowe (which is comparable to the concept of a comedic double act). They have also been seen as wilfully contrary, defying expectations of record labels and the music industry in terms of commercial image, self-promotion and the nature of their own music. In their early years, Pet Shop Boys seemed to be mostly defined by the things they refused to do. A 1986 quotation by Lowe, taken from an Entertainment Tonight clip and subsequently sampled in their own song "Paninaro," is often cited as the prime example of this:
“I don't like country and western. I don't like rock music, I don't like rockabilly or rock and roll particularly. I don't like much, really, do I? But what I do like, I love passionately.”
This also formed the foundation of the band's early reputation as being anti-rock music and more properly aligned with disco and dance music culture. Eventually, however, these differences were reconciled a process that symbolically culminated with Pet Shop Boys' performance at the 2000 Glastonbury Festival, which was the surprise highlight of the three-day event. Tennant expressed his gratitude to the crowd by thanking them for "being kind to us," and that they were "Glastonbury virgins."
Sexuality
Neil Tennant, who neither denied nor confirmed gay rumours throughout the 1980s, "came out," in a 1994 interview for Attitude, a UK gay lifestyle magazine. Lowe, meanwhile, has not disclosed his own orientation, although he has opined (in a 1996 BBC radio documentary) that there is, basically, but one sexuality, which suggests that he may consider the terms "gay" or "straight" to be constricting labels. The duo are sometimes incorrectly assumed to be a couple (in the 1990 biography Pet Shop Boys, Literally, Tennant recalls that even their ex-manager, Tom Watkins, was under this impression for a time, which inadvertently fueled even more rumours about their orientations). Pet Shop Boys are seen as significant figures in gay culture for such songs as "Can You Forgive Her?," "It's a Sin" (for which gay director Derek Jarman produced the video), "New York City Boy," and their cover of Village People's "Go West." They have written a song about a young male fan spending a night with a rapper, based on Eminem, called "The night I fell in love," and a song about coming out, "Metamorphosis." Their 1990s single "Being boring" dealt with the gay experience and the devastation wrought by the AIDS crisis; the song (and its supporting video, filmed by Bruce Weber), though being one of their lowest-charting singles, remains one of their most popular. However, Neil Tennant has stated many times that his lyrics are not specifically gay. Many of their songs are written from an ambiguous view point, that can be taken any way the listener perceives it and this goes some way to explain why a large segment of their die-hard fans are heterosexual. Pet Shop Boys have performed and worked with many artists considered to be gay and bisexual icons, such as Dusty Springfield, David Bowie, Elton John, Liza Minnelli, Boy George, Kylie Minogue, Madonna and Pete Burns. Pet Shop Boys attempted to organise and perform in a planned 2001 tour of out gay musicians, entitled Wotapalava. However, the plans were later put on hold and the idea seems to have been discarded.
Grammy nominations
* 1995: Grammy Award — Best Recording Package for Very Relentless (Nominated)
* 2003: Grammy Award — Best Recording Package for Release (Nominated)
* 2007: Grammy Award — Best Dance Recording for "I'm with Stupid" (Nominated)
* 2007: Grammy Award — Best Electronic/Dance Album for Fundamental (Nominated)
Discography
As of 2009, Pet Shop Boys have released fifty-six singles and ten "proper" studio albums (one of which, Introspective, is in fact a long playing mini-album, featuring six originally extended tracks), as well as twenty-two among various types of compilations, remix albums and EPs, including one live album and two soundtrack and score albums.
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