Neil Tennant newspaper article from 1987

[Panbaams]

I'd never seen this before so I thought it might be of interest ... I found it on the newspaper database at work.

It's from The Sunday Times supplement Look, dated 9 August 1987.

Dusting off a legend

Sixties soul meets modern man. Pet Shop Boy NEIL TENNANT worked with Dusty Springfield and heard a voice from the past

Just before Christimas 1984, Chris Lowe and I (otherwise known as the Pet Shop Boys) spent a couple of days writing and then recording a demo of a new song – a duet called 'What Have I Done To Deserve This?' (Look columnist Philip Norman will be relieved to learn that this process involved sustained concentration, considerable hard work and much fun. According to his feature of three weeks ago, he is under the impression that pop songs nowadays are written by computers.) Working with us was an American songwriter called Allee Willis – a successful one, with hits to her credit such as 'Boogie Wonderland' for Earth, Wind and Fire.

A year later, 'West End Girls' had given us our first hit, and we were beginning to record our debut LP with producer Stephen Hague. We planned to include 'What Have I Done ...?' but it presented us with a problem. Who would we get to sing the other half of the duet for the real thing?

Various notable female contemporaries were suggested, but none sounded right. We wanted a woman with a voice suggesting both experience and vulnerability, warmth but also a tough take-it-or-leave-it atitude. The song is neither teenage romance nor nostalgia, but a dialogue about the end of an affair between two adults. Nikki, our manager's assistant, had a bright idea.

'What about Dusty Springfield? I thought she was your favourite singer ...'

In interviews, I had occasionally mentioned Dusty In Memphis, a 1968 album, as my favourite LP. It's the album which best captures her heart-breaking voice withing a soul context (Jerry Wexler, Aretha Franklin's producer, supervised the sessions), and it established Dusty as the only authentic white female soul singer of the era. Before this album, she'd had a string of pop hits – 'I Only Want To Be With You', 'I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself', 'You Don't Have To Say You Love Me', 'I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten'. Her breathy, glamorous voice was always thrilling, even when the '60s pop industry tried to cram her into a conventional show-business, cabaret career, alongside Cilla Black, Lulu and Anita Harris. And, like every great pop singer, she had more than a great voice; she had a look - the blonde bouffant hair-do, the black eye make-up ... acres of it.

Since Dusty In Memphis and its hit single, 'Son Of A Preacher Man', her career seemed to tail off. She made a few albums in the '70s and moved to America. She wasn't forgotten, of course. Elton John still eulogised about her; so did Elvis Costello. But her latest album wasn't even released in Britain (although it included an Elvis Costello song). An abortive contract a couple of years ago with Peter Stringfellow's Hippodrome label produced just one disappointing single, 'Sometimes Like Butterflies'. By 1985 Dusty Springfield was merely a legend. Rumour had it that she was a recluse in Los Angeles, surrounded by cats, impossible to work with.

'She'll never agree to do it' was our first reaction to Nikki's suggestion. 'But let's try anyway.'

A tape of the song was dispatched to her manager in the States. The answer came back weeks later: no, she's not interested. The song was not included on our first LP.

Then, several months later, her manager phoned our manager. She wants to do it. Do they still want her to do it? Yes, we did. Then? Eventually, just before Christmas last year, Dusty Springfield flew from Los Angeles to London to record with the Pet Shop Boys.

'Jerry Wexler said she was without doubt the most difficult singer he's ever worked with,' a journalist friend informed me helpfully. 'Of course, her voice isn't what it was,' another friend declared authoritiatively.

She arrived at the studio on time, in a black leather designer jacket and high-heeled boots, with blonde hair and black eye make-up, clutching the lyric-sheet of the song, annotated and underlined. Chris Lowe, Stephen Hague and I began to consult with the legend about how to sing our song and she was very nice, surprisingly a little lacking an self-confidence. As if by telepathy, a Dusty fan appeared on the studio doorstep and was invited in to listen. Dusty's English secretary arrived bearing a new compilation cassette. 'They keep repackaging the old songs,' the legend marvelled. Then she went through to sing.

Her voice was the same as ever. When she sang her solo part – 'Since you went away ... ' – everyone in the control room smiled. She sounded just like she used to. Breathy, war, thrilling. Like Dusty Springfield.

'Is that the sort of thing you want?' she asked.

Later, we chatted in the studio about how she loves all the recording technology (if only they'd had all that years ago when you couldn't get the sounds you wanted); about how she had laryngitis throughout the recording of Dusty In Memphis, and that's why she sounded the way she did. She chuckled, then said she was jet-lagged and went back to her hotel.

'No one's interested in her any more,' someone at our record company had complained when we first announced our intention of recording with Dusty. But in the restaurant where Chris and I had dinner that night, they were playing a cassette of A Girl Called Dusty, her first LP from 1964. Twenty-three years later, people are still listening.

'What Have I Done To Deserve This?' is released tomorrow on Parlophone EMI

I can put up the Philip Norman article he mentions too, if you like. (It suggests that "It's a sin" is a rip-off of "Wild Wood".) Or how about a "Pet Shop Boys Scrapbook" thread for old articles ...?

[dVTB]

Edited.

[Parkol]

'What Have I Done To Deserve This?' is released tomorrow on Parlophone EMI[quote][/quote]
If it was I would be very glad.

[Mega Man]

Great, please post the Norman article. Though I thought it was Jonathan King who said it originally.

[Pet Shop Girl]

Ah what a great article!

[TheGardner]

archived

[Panbaams]

Great, please post the Norman article. Though I thought it was Jonathan King who said it originally.

OK, here you go ... again, it's from The Sunday Times, dated 12 July 1987. The article's not specifically about the Pet Shop Boys but talks about them (not very kindly) as part of a grumpy old man "modern music is rubbish" thing.

I have no idea whether Jonathan King's allegations were made before or after this article was published – does anyone know the specific date that he made the allegation in his Sun column? (The database at work doesn't go back that far for The Sun.)

Selling pap on top of the pops

Philip Norman

A lament for the time when musicians, not electronic artifice, composed songs

I've just been watching that hot new group The Pet Shop Boys perform their single, 'It's A Sin', on Top of the Pops. They are skull-explodingly pretentious, especially the singer in his floor-length Edwardian motorist's coat. I haven't seen such misty-eyed narcissism directed at a TV camera since Mrs Thatcher's last party election broadcast.

This record they've taken to number one is the most astounding piece of deja entendu. As far as my ear can detect, its main riff is almost note-for-note the Cat Stevens song 'Wild World'. The only significant change of pace occurs when it suddenly takes to sounding like Procol Harum's 'Conquistador'.

Don't think I'm suggesting for one second that The Pet Shop Boys have deliberately ripped off one of the better-known pop singles this past 20 years. I'm quite sure that, adrift on their clouds of ego and electronic artifice, they simply never realised. At least one can say the name Pet Shop Boys now assumes some meaning, since I can't think that the record-buying public has ever been sold a bigger pup.

That any tune at all can be found in a Top 10 hit is, of course, pretty remarkable. Computers no longer merely record and provide backing to pop songs; they also now seem to write them. Whether the session be for Pepsi and Shirlie or Mel and Kim, for Five Star, Atlantic Star or Starship, the same couple of hackneyed chords and robot phrases apparently emerge from the central cliche-bank. The present British charts are about as exalting as a chorus of Amstrads.

Indeed, the least requirement of any popular music today is that it should contain noticeable melody. In the most gigantically successful stage musicals in recorded time, Andrew Lloyd Webber has settled down to providing, on average, three-quarters of a memorable tune per show. Compare that with old-fashioned musicals like Oklahoma! or Annie Get Your Gun, whose entire scores are whistled and hummed in perpetuity. (And, while we're at it, compare Hammerstein or Hart with Tim Rice, a lyricist whose limping banality makes Pam Ayres look like Pascal.)

Our eyes have been palsied by what one might call the Chariots of Fire syndrome. Current taste is for what that movie, scarcely less than Lloyd Webber, invented – huge empty meringues of sound, thunderous with symphonic insinuation that Britain is Great again and all's well in the Thatcher millennium. During Wimbledon fortnight BBC-TV used just such as heroic theme to usher in the heroism on the courts. One took it at first for an undiscovered Planet by Holst. Closer listening revealed it to be a ludicrously Lloyd Webberised version of The Beatles' 'Get Back'.

In the mid-70s, punk rock blew some realism through a music scene one had supposed could not become more atrophied by sloth and megalomania. Those were days when a rock band's performance contract would stipulate their backstage refreshments must include 1805 Napoleon brandy. If by some ill chance only 1806 Napoleon brandy could be provided, the brand would refuse to go on stage.

Ten years after the punk revolution, what do we find? Musical illiterates still talking to cringing DJs about their singles and albums like Shakespeare folios, and 'going into the studio' as if at work on War and Peace. Witless hype, the earth moving force it ever was – from Frankie Goes To Hollywood through Sigue Sigue Sputnik to the Beastie Boys.

Along with all the waves of new teenage poseurs, many of the same old sweats carry on churning it out. Can it really be that the late Eighties' biggest male vocal sound is Phil Collins, still singing in the English grammar school Blues voice of 1969? If that weren't bad enough, Genesis also are still around, metamorphosed from Glam Rock tinsel to turquoise and candy-pink incarnations of Next.

Black music, pop's great dynamo, is blander and more boring even than in the awful days of Barry White – parroted by girls like Whitney Houston or ghetto-blasted by all those indistinguishable fat bores in shades and leather hats. Like the man said, do you spell Rap with a big or small c?

For me, the most gruesome recent trend has been pop stars turning into social climbers, jockeying to sit beside Princess Diana at charity galas and, perhaps, murmur some Geldofish pleasantry into her uncritical ear.

Naturally, there are exceptions – bands with too much humour to be pretentious, like Level 42, or too much sheer talent, like Fine Young Cannibals and Simply Red. A healthy antidote exists in the number of young bands falling back on blues and jazz idioms, even standard show tunes, rather than accepting the dross the computer-songsmiths dish out. Simply Red's Mick Hucknall does a version of 'Every Time We Say Goodbye' that can stand comparison with Ella Fitzgerald's. Why is there no new Cole Porter writing for a voice like that?

I won't go on about the Sixties, an era I concede to be grossly overrated in nearly every way. But in the Sixties there was one thing you did know. Every day of the week, someone somewhere was writing a song you knew you'd never heard before. Take it from me, it was a terrific feeling.

[Posh Boy]

I love it, it's so... what shall I say... cantankerous!

[Panbaams]

I'm intrigued by the idea that Level 42 have (had?) too much humour to be pretentious.

[Lorena]

Thank you for sharing

[Panbaams]

I've just noticed something.

Breathy, war, thrilling.

That should clearly be warm. There were a few typos in the article and I must have missed that one.

[psb-freak]

I have access to some old articles. But there aren´t that old ones. Thanks for the article.