Interviste

Oh si infatti sono superfelice!!!!! E ha parlato anche di un secondo musical.... mamma mia MAMMA MIA!!!!

Ecco una interessante intervista a Neil:

metro weekly

Intervista molto interessante! Grazie Vivi!!

Pet Shop Boys are still “teenagers” at heart

Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe say they still feel like “teenagers” at heart.

The veteran British dance-pop duo, who are hitting Miami, Florida, next week as part of their Pandemonium Tour, have clocked up almost three decades in the music business.

Lowe will soon turn 50 and his longtime bandmate is five years older.

But the two say they still feel thrilled to be writing songs and putting on vibrant tours, gaining inspiration from the likes of pop phenomenon Lady GaGa and the Killers.

“We’re lucky enough to still be doing it at our age,” Lowe told the Miami Herald. We’re still in our hearts sort of teenagers.”

He also revealed that penning one of the group’s best-known tracks ‘West End Girls’ – which sparked their big break in 1985 – initially left them feeling “slightly embarrassed”.

“We made West End Girls in New York, and brought it back [to London], but we didn’t play it to our friends, because we were slightly embarrassed by it,” said Lowe.

“But eventually we played it for them, and they said, ‘Oh, wow – this is really good’.

“And even though we made a great record, and we were really happy with it, we never saw how it could become a hit.

Of their new album ‘Yes’ Lowe says: “It’s a very shiny, exuberant, euphoric pop album.”

ed è per questo che vi amiamo ragazzi!

Intervista telefonica a Chris:

HERALD: When you first broke through, there was a feeling that your sound might prove to be ephemeral. Now Pet Shop Boys seem timeless. Any idea why?

LOWE: (Laughs) Maybe people just love us. We like to think that it’s the songs. What we’ve always tried to do is write interesting songs that say things that don’t normally appear in pop music, put them to contemporary dance beats and have an emotional content as well. And we set things to chord progressions that we like. We’ve never lost our fascination with pop, in all its forms - the arts, clothes, music, fashion. We still go clubbing, even though we’re old. We never retired. We never went to a country and switched off. We always stayed in the center of things. We both live in London still. We’re still fascinated by life.

You’ve created your own musical universe over the past quarter-century.

From the very beginning we wanted to create our own world. We didn’t want to exist in anyone else’s. We’re obviously influenced heavily by electronic disco music of the ’80s. I remember hearing Donna Summer in a club and I was completely knocked out. It was so new, so exciting. But that’s only an element of Pet Shop Boys. With the songwriting, we’ve always stayed away from cliches and tried to present ourselves uniquely. One thing we love about pop is it changes. It’s not about the past. It’s about the next thing.

You use synthesizers and computers, while shunning traditional rock instrumentation. On your 1992 tour, your backing musicians were hidden offstage.

We’d been told that to tour America you have to have a drummer. So our answer to that was, “Right, if that’s the case, we’re not going to have any musicians (onstage).” If someone tells us to do something, we’ll do the opposite. All the music was generated offstage and we put on a totally operatic performance. I don’t think anyone had actually done that. A lot of rock musicians can’t get their head around modern technology. Unless they can see someone playing guitar, they don’t know how it’s being made. There’s the whole thing about authenticity as well, that it’s not authentic unless someone’s standing in front of an amp with a guitar and there’s a drummer banging away. We didn’t make records with a drummer. So, it wouldn’t be authentic for the Pet Shop Boys to have a drummer. We were actually being authentic. Also, we wanted to put on a visually stunning show. We lost a fortune doing it. We got a review in New York saying the theater (we played) should be fumigated. I think they found the show quite offensive.

For this tour, any musicians?

No. Well, I’m playing. It’s almost like a DJ stand, if you like. We realized no one can actually see what I’m doing, so I might as well not be doing anything, but I am actually playing. Offstage, we have our musical director and the usual computers. I think people would be disappointed to come to the Pet Shop Boys and not hear synthesizers and electronics. You don’t want an acoustic set from the Pet Shop Boys.

I don’t know anyone who mixes desperation and hope, melancholy and uplift, so well. “Yes” is mostly a positive album, but you do close with “Legacy,” where there are melting glaciers, failing governments and bawling hurricanes.

Well, you can’t have it be happy all the way. I think we straddle optimism and pessimism. We always expect the worst, but we are optimistic as well. Although we like to say we do euphoric pop, it’s always tinged with sadness. And I think reality is the combination of those two. We like banging beats and rhythms, but we like to put minor chords on top of it and that’s where the tension comes. There’s a realism in what we do.

You get called post-modern ironists a lot.

Oh, that’s one thing, actually, that does bug us - the irony tag. We have done ironic things, but you can’t dismiss everything we’ve done as ironic. There’s a lot more to it than that. Going back to “Legacy,” there’s no irony. There’s no irony in “Love, etc.” Sometimes people confuse winks with irony. The payoff line in “Love, etc.” is: “You don’t have to be beautiful - but it helps.” And it’s also true.

You were one of the first bands to address gay life in song.


Well, we’ve never hidden anything. There was never any pretense in what we do. We covered “Go West” by the Village People. We’ve never actually thought there was the need to be explicit about anything. We don’t like to be political and we don’t make political statements. Everything is in the music and you can get it if you want it. We’re just awkward bastards, really.

PETA recently requested you change your name to the Rescue Shelter Boys, because of the “cramped, filthy conditions” that breeders keep animals in before selling them to pet stores.

We don’t know how serious that was. We still don’t know. But I think it was good because it drew attention to pet shops. That’s why we highlighted it on our Web site. We thought it was a point worth making. I’d never really given a thought to the welfare of the animals in pet shops. It’d be a good pseudonym to work with, for the more underground end of what we do.

Articolo sullo show di Atlantic City

Pet Shop Boys a feast for eyes and ears in A.C.
By Dan DeLuca

Inquirer Music Critic

The penultimate song Neil Tennant sang during the Pet Shop Boys' dazzlingly staged, entirely fabulous show at the House of Blues in Atlantic City on Sunday was "Being Boring."

The 1990 hit single with the Zelda Fitzgerald-inspired lyric served as both a heart-wrenching tribute to lost youth and those lost to AIDS ("All the people I was kissing, some are here, some are missing") and a matter-of-fact boast from the enduring British synth-pop duo of Tennant and his silent computer and keyboard-playing partner Chris Lowe.

As the song goes, "I would never find myself feeling bored, because we were never being boring." Indeed, there was never a dull moment throughout the Pets' ingeniously theatrical 90-minute set, during which they were accompanied by four dancers usually wearing cubes on their heads, in sync with the Piet Mondrian-meets-Rubik's Cube-while-climbing-Pink-Floyd's-The-Wall stage design.

And that's to say nothing of the video backdrops that accompanied the set, which mixed a smattering of the band's 2009 return-to-form album Yes with back-catalog rarities such as "Two Divided By Zero" and erudite and aerobic disco hits "West End Girls" and "Left to My Own Devices."

The big screen might be showing giant pixelated, Chuck Close-style portraits of Tennant and Lowe one moment; at another, their faces were inside yellow Pac Man characters, gobbling up dollar signs and hearts in "Love, Etc.," as Tennant dryly sang that to achieve bliss in these troubled times, one doesn't "have to be beautiful, but it helps."

And one montage during the grandly melancholy cover of Willie Nelson's "Always on My Mind" showed black-and-white footage of London during the Blitz, interspersed with images of roller coasters and a "Pleasure Palace" from the English seaside resort of Blackpool. By coincidence, it was perfectly apropos for the group's debut performance along the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.

OK, enough about how the show looked. How did it sound? Pretty great. Other than Lowe, there were no musicians on stage, though there was one number when the multicolored cube-headed dancers - two of whom turned out to be Gwen Stefani-lookalike identical twins, Polly and Sophie Duniam - pretended to play trumpets.

But while it's always been a challenge to figure out what the mostly immobile Lowe is doing to trigger the cascading synths and momentum-gathering beats at a Pet Shop Boys show, the elegant simplicity of two-decade-old hits such as "Suburbia" sounds perfectly contemporary at the end of the '00s as all forms of '80s electro-pop have come back in fashion.

Tennant is more of a talker than a singer, but he delivers his own lyrics - which typically examine the inherently transactional relationship between love and money with more acuity than anybody in the history of pop - with a droll distance that allows room for irony and real feeling. And along with the originals, the Pets remain master of the expertly chosen cover.

On Sunday, they not only delivered winningly reworked versions of well-known takes on "Always on My Mind" and the Village People's "Go West," but also revealed a soaring mash-up of their own "Domino Dancing" with Coldplay's "Viva La Vida," as Tennant reminisced about the days "when I ruled the world" while dressed as Richard III wearing a golden crown.

He needn't have used the past tense: As their House of Blues performance demonstrated, 25 years after they got going, the Pet Shop Boys still rule.

Due Interessanti Interviste!
http://www.acedmagazine.com/interviews-mai...like-rock-music
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/ar.../709209974/1007

Interessantissima Intervista a Chris!







Questa è stata invece a Neil in previsione dell'uscita Natalizia dei remix
INTERVISTA NEIL

Pet Shop Boys on their influences and idols

“When we started,” chuckles the composer/keyboard merchant Chris Lowe, “neither of us ever dreamed that we’d be still out here doing it almost 30 years on. We never thought that anyone would want to buy anything we did.” Indeed, not only are Pet Shop Boys still at it, their recordings still sell by the truckload. “People always ask how or why are we still going,” says the singer-songwriter Neil Tennant. “But would you ask Somerset Maugham why he continued to write books into his eighties or question why Picasso carried on painting? This is what we do.” One of the stalwarts of British pop, they formed in 1981; Lowe, an architectural student, and Tennant, a top pop journalist, found common ground that floated between American Hi N-R-G and hip-hop. In 1985 West End Girls hit No 1 and the rest is pop history. “There is an assumption that if you’ve been around for a long time you must have become shit,” chides Tennant. “But our latest record is a really great record. In Britain if you hang around long enough people will soon appreciate you.”

...influences

Neil Tennant:

Afrika Bambaataa We both loved Planet Rock and Looking for the Perfect Beat. In fact, we loved all the Arthur Baker productions of that time that fused the likes of Kraftwerk with black dance music.

Bobby Orlando He’s known for producing Hi N-R-G records, which is a form that was greatly misunderstood, but had this really hard electronic beat. He developed what was a simple musical idea into something very special. When I worked at Smash Hits they had this box of records that no one wanted and his was in there. I took one home and loved it. He then produced West End Girls.

...idols

Neil Tennant:

David Bowie I was watching The Old Grey Whistle Test and on he came and did Five Years. I went to see him at Newcastle City Hall in 1972 and it was half empty. Before that I hated progressive rock but seeing Bowie in his full Ziggy regalia completely blew me away.

Kraftwerk Amazingly, their album Autobahn was released in 1974. They really reinvented the way you could do things. Even now it is an amazingly sparse record. But the album that I really got hooked on is The Man-Machine. The Model is an incredible song that was huge during the New Romantic era.

Roxy Music I adore the first three albums — for me the second [For Your Pleasure] is a masterpiece. I love their weird stuff, such as In Every Dream Home... and The Bogus Man.

...Eighties nightclubs

Chris Lowe:

The Funhouse This was a night in the early 1980s when New York was really something else. Jellybean Benitez [who gave Madonna her leg-up] was the DJ and it was incredible. You could never replicate the atmosphere.

Paradise Garage Another New York club. The DJ was Larry Levan and it was the first club I went to that had a metal detector as you went in. Inside it was full of these guys dressed in hardly anything and there was no alcohol, and they played horror films in the back behind the dance floor.

The Wag Club This was just so London. I used to feel so excited going to all of those Soho clubs in the Eighties. The Wag is an Irish pub now and people still queue to get in. Imagine that: queuing for a pint of Guinness. Must be good!

...film score composers

Chris Lowe:

Ennio Morricone When we started we wanted to sound like film music. If you listen to West End Girls you hear the girls walking down the street in the beginning, we wanted that soundtrack feel. We wrote a song with Morricone called It Couldn’t Happen Here, but he didn’t want to do the strings, so we got Angelo Badalamenti, who had just done the music for Twin Peaks, to finish them off.

...favourite PSB tracks

Neil Tennant:

What Have I Done to Deserve This? We did this with Dusty Springfield. Everyone said she was finished, but she was incredible. This record was No 2 in America and she got a deal again. I feel really proud that, without even realising it, we sort of rescued Dusty.

West End Girls It was us trying to do hip-hop and was completely inspired by The Message by Grandmaster Flash.

Always on My Mind We were asked to do a cover of an Elvis song so we did this. Amazingly, it was more successful than his version.

Bella questa intervista!!!!!
Neil ha dei gusti in musica davvero splendidi!!!!
Ciò che ascolta Chris non mi suonano nuovi. Non li conosco ma so che fanno molta musica dance!!!!!
E poi non sapevo che avessero contattato Morricone per il film!!!!!

Ma pensa te!