Pet Shop Boys Talk "West End Girls," 'Nonetheless' and Beyond

One of the greatest pop songs of the last 50 years was recorded in about 30 minutes. Well, that’s what Neil Tennant claims at least. When Tennant and Chris Lowe decamped to Unique Recording Studio just off Times Square with Bobby Orlando in 1983, it was their first time in any kind of space like that. “It was all new,” Tennant says. “Everything was new experiences.” When the tape started rolling, Tennant played the string pad, while Lowe was on the bass and Orlando manned the drums. What came out of them was a tune called “West End Girls,” which was released as a single on April 9th, 1984 but flopped across the world—stalling out at #133 on the UK chart and #81 on the Canada chart—despite getting minimal radio play.

Tennant had met Orlando just a month before they recorded together in New York. He was in the city interviewing Sting for Smash Hits and, after some demos were shared, the producer wanted to work with Tennant and Lowe. “I left my job and Chris didn’t stop being an architect,” Tennant says. Two years later, “West End Girls” would explode after getting a re-release on Pet Shop Boys’ Platinum-certified debut album, Please—reaching the Top 5 in Australia, Austria, Canada, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, the United States and West Germany. It went #1 in six markets, topping the British and American charts simultaneously.

So it would only make sense then that, 40 years after releasing their first-ever single, Pet Shop Boys have returned with their best record in more than a decade. Nonetheless was produced by James Ford, an Englishman who’s put together a recent resumé that features Beth Gibbons, the Last Dinner Party, Blur, Geese and Depeche Mode, the latter of which have been peers with Pet Shop Boys for as long as Tennant and Lowe have been a duo. “Depeche Mode have got five more years to their career than we do,” Tennant laughs. Tennant and Lowe wrote and demoed all of the Nonetheless songs prior to getting into the studio with Ford. They’d just made three albums—Electric, Super and Hotspot—with Stuart Price, who guided their sound away from where Trevor Horn had taken it, which was a far more orchestral and guitar-driven mode, and were itching to return to it. “For the first time in our career, we were electric purists,” Tennant motions. “With [Nonetheless], we thought we might have an orchestra again.”

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Ford has been digging his heels into electronic music slowly, and Depeche Mode’s 2023 album Memento Mori was well-regarded as a return to form for Dave Gahan and Martin Gore. But Pet Shop Boys didn’t want to work with Ford because he’d saved Depeche Mode’s career, or something like that. In fact, they didn’t want to make a Depeche Mode record at all. “That was a negative for us,” Tennant admits, “because we don’t like to do what our electronic peers are doing.” He and Lowe liked Memento Mori very much, but it was the Last Shadow Puppets and Simian Mobile Disco that convinced them that Ford was the man for the job. Pet Shop Boys resonated with his efforts on both Last Shadow Puppets albums, and were interested in exploring the ornate, ‘60s-inspired pop music Alex Turner and his, as Tennant puts it, “chum” put together on Everything You’ve Come to Expect in 2016.“We knew his dance music,” Tennant continues. So, the three musicians arranged a meeting.

But there were doubts that Ford would even take the gig. “He’s a hot producer, let’s face it,” Tennant says. “He does dance music with Jessie Ware.” (Funnily enough, Jessie Ware’s last album, That! Feels Good!, was produced by both Ford and Stuart Price.) Ford liked the songs and invited Tennant and Lowe to his East London studio. “Then, we realized we were doing the album with James Ford, so we were quite surprised. We were delighted, actually!” Tennant continues. “And the album was very easy to make.”

Pet Shop Boys are notorious for making detailed demos, so finding a producer who will make those muscular sketches even better is a tall order even for the most brilliant boardsmen. Ford went into the recordings and replaced soft synths with analog synths and played drums. He had Tennant record all of his vocals and sneakily added string arrangements to all 10 songs. “He’s written beautiful orchestral arrangements, I think, because it didn’t really occur to me, personally, that there was an orchestra on every track until the album was finished,” Tennant says. “I didn’t remember making that decision. But it’s not about an orchestra, though. They’re filling out the sound and bringing out the emotions in songs.” Pet Shop Boys contend that working with Ford was a straight-forward, enjoyable and relaxing experience.

A standout track on Nonetheless is “Dancing Star,” the record’s midpoint. It sounds like a confluence of all things Pet Shop Boys—glitchy, bass-driven electronics, sensual, robotic spoken-word that contours into falsetto harmonies. When Lowe sent Tennant the demo, it had a summery energy to it, which is why the track opens with the sounds of crashing waves and gulls circling a beach. Lowe and Tennant’s storytelling is as good as ever, as they riff on the life of Rudolf Nureyev, a Soviet ballet dancer who was tailed by the KGB in the ‘60s and became an international sensation after defecting during the Cold War (he was the first Soviet artist to do so). Tennant had watched a documentary on Nureyev and became “fascinated” with him. “He goes from the Soviet Union to London in the swinging ‘60s,” Tennant notes. “It’s an incredible contrast.”

Tennant sings about Nureyev being “the brightest star in town” and “always a scandal and a real heart-breaker.” “Boys and girls both threw themselves at you” is the thesis statement, emphasized by Tennant’s desire to write a song that is, ultimately, about freedom and Pet Shop Boys’ desire to have their cake and eat it, too. “[Nureyev becomes this global superstar and actually dies of AIDS,” he adds. “But he just did what he wanted to do, and that’s the sort of cultural figure that we would look up to—because that’s what we always wanted to do, just follow our own path and be guided by our own integrity more than anything else.”

“Dancing Star” sounds as good as anything Pet Shops Boys have made, harkening back to the Please and Actually era with whimsical ease. “You can imagine Madonna singing it,” Lowe says. “The first time I heard it, I thought it was by Madonna,” Tennant chimes in. The duo never deliberately refer back to their past, but they are well-aware of how “Dancing Star” captures the energy of the electronic world they caught momentum in. “It was the golden era for electronic music,” Lowe continues. “The clubs were great, everything seemed very fresh and very new—because it was, really, wasn’t it? You were hearing everything for the first time, whereas now, if it’s referenced, it’s a reference back.”

While Tennant has written about past historical figures like Hitler to Queen Elizabeth to Debussy, Pet Shop Boys’ pop-adorned oeuvre is always tilted toward the future. Ford steps in on Nonetheless and ignites a contemporary symphonic flavor accentuated by the minimalism of Please colliding head-on with the baroque complexities of Behaviour. There’s a reason why Nonetheless is Pet Shop Boys’ highest-charting album since their compilation LP Alternative hit #2 in the UK in 1995: It does a great, pleasing service to longtime fans and greener newcomers. “New London Boy” is pithy, affectionate and arresting to the core. As a synth program pillows Tennant’s voice, he ruminates on being closeted while glam rock was raging on in Europe. “Skinheads will mock you, call you a fag,” he sings. “Last laugh is yours, there’s a brick in your bag. Follow the style, plastic and showy. Everyone’s dancing to Roxy and Bowie, people want Deco and Hollywood stars, the glamorous life, vintage cars.” Like “Dancing Star,” “New London Boy” is a measurement of freedom. “Are they girls or boys? Is everyone gay? Am I just kidding myself?” Tennant questions, before closing the song with a particularly emotional conclusion: “I remember wondering.”

Nonetheless was written during COVID-19 lockdown and, at the encouragement of Lowe, Tennant learned how to program so he could track his vocals in isolation. He calls it his “old dog learning a new trick” moment, and it helped the Pet Shop Boys enter into their most productive period of writing in decades. They wrote so many songs that, today, they’ve put out an EP of new and remixed material called Feel and even composed a theater piece that hasn’t been performed yet. Tennant likens the last three years to Stevie Wonder’s mid-1970s run of records. “He used to churn out an album every year,” he says. “Innervisions followed by Fulfillingness’ First Finale and Songs in the Key of Life. You can tell the music is flowing out of him, and I felt that about Nonetheless. The music just sounds very fluid, and doing an album never, at any point, feels like a chore [for us].”

Only Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe can tackle nostalgia with a timelessness like “Why Am I Dancing?” or “The Schlager Hit Parade.” These guys practically rewrote the book on catchiness. If the successes of “It’s a Sin” 30+ years ago emphasized a niche of synth-pop draped by the shadows of melancholic delivery and bravado, then Nonetheless galvanizes the cyclical nature of such a style—that if you crawl through your own pitch-black history, you may just enter a future glowing like, as Tennant dreams of on Nonetheless, a new bohemia. “When you’re a songwriter, you have your own inherent musicality and that’s never changed,” Tennant says. “Maybe it develops within you, as you get older. Maybe you get more sophisticated. Ultimately, there’s a wellspring of melody and rhythm and chords that goes back to your childhood—and that hasn’t dried up.”

Nonetheless is a marvelous, vulnerable and gracious capsule of forward-thinking, full-bodied synth bliss and patient, thoughtful and curious fables raptured by congruous, vibrant truths. If you look back on the Pet Shop Boys’ catalog, connecting the dots from their Dusty Springfield-assisted “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” to their career-defining cover of “Always on My Mind” to that five-album run from Please through Very, it’s obvious that Tennant and Lowe have left a legible, unmistakable mark on the pop canon. Few songwriter duos have, really, ever been as in-sync as them either, a truth written in ink all across Nonetheless.

As our call comes to a close, Lowe asks me where I’m from. “Northeast Ohio, near Cleveland,” I tell them. Tennant mentions that he went there to interview Big Country for Smash Hits in 1983—around the same time “In a Big Country” was skyrocketing up the charts and around the same time he and Lowe retreated to New York with Orlando to make the single that would, soon enough, turn the Pet Shop Boys into international superstars. But even after the four decades of popularity, Tennant and Lowe refuse to be imitators. That’s why they asked James Ford to help them make a Pet Shop Boys album. That’s why Nonetheless works so well, because it’s an illustration of two originators watching the flames of their own torch grow taller. And that’s why, after the guys bring up the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Lowe asks out loud: “Are we ever going to get inducted?”

“Do we want to be?” Tennant replies.

“I want to be offered it and then—” Lowe says, before he and Tennant say “turn it down” in unison.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

Knocking Down Tables With Pet Shop Boys

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe talk about “West End Girls” and how the wellspring of their songwriting is still fertile on their 15th studio album, the James Ford-produced Nonetheless, and remains as such.