It’s 23 November 1990 and on the day Roald Dahl died, fellow bookworm Dean Balaam and I arrange to meet in London’s West End to join the queue to meet the Pet Shop Boys at their first major signing event.
The pop duo are at Oxford Street’s Claude Gill Books (chosen, apparently, as it’s where John Lennon and Yoko Ono signed copies of Grapefruit in 1971 not long before fleeing Britain; and in 2024 terms, the site is now the new Tottenham Court Road station) to promote their Literally tome with Smash Hits scribe Chris Heath (far left).
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had announced her resignation the day before — which Dean described as “depressing” — and, with politics in my DNA and knowing how much Neil Tennant was an unapologetic Champagne socialist I thought I might ask his opinion on the imminent departure of the woman who had ruled us with an iron rod for 11 and a half years. Or was it 900 years? It was a very very long time.
In the end, I asked Neil, who was in schoolmistress mode, looking and acting like a geography teacher from Cheshire, what the next PSB was going to be. Ugh, predictable fan fare I know. Still, the exchange was interesting, and it referenced a mix that would come back to haunt them much later down the line:
“We haven’t made up our minds yet. It might be Jealousy but it’s all a bit in the air at the moment. What do YOU think it should be?”
“I’m not sure, but you have issued an extended mix of This Must be The Place I Waited Years To Leave with Behaviour in Japan…”
“Oh, I’d forgotten we’d done that.”
Having interviewed Neil (and Chris Lowe once or twice, too) several times, I came to realise that it was one of his stock responses when he couldn’t think of an interesting answer. Chris, incidentally, commented on the chart position of this little beauty, Being Boring, which in his laconic assessment, “it‘s not good enough.”
To cut a very long story short, by the time Ver Boys’ were plugging their PopArt collection in 2003, I’d become friendly with Jonathan Ross — a bigger Bowie fan than Neil or I — and who (ahem, with no coaching from moi whatsoever, cough, cough, splutter) after recording the BBC’s Radio 2 special Pet Shop Boys Documentary, secretly kept the microphones on to covertly tape the duo (OK, Neil, really — Chris isn’t interested in other people’s opinions about him or them) ranting, at a full volume tirade, about comments they’d seen about the upcoming hits package online.
“One said ‘If the nine minute mix of This Must Be The Place isn’t on there [PopArt’s third Mix disc] I will be furious.’ Well, prepare to be furious then because there’s no such thing! And if there was it wouldn’t be on there anyway!”
Nerd notes to the birthday boy: The said mix is the exact same one you’d “forgotten” about in 1990 (and has never been released in full outside of Japan), Mr Furious was, of course, me, and lastly, as you told me yourself during the interview where Chris belched excruciatingly loudly, “irony doesn’t come across very well in written form.”
Touché!
Joyeux anniversaire NT
Steve Pafford
