The Nineties: When Surface was Depth. Michael Bracewell

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СКАЧАТЬ of cumbersome figures accumulate: unironic anorak wearers, plump young men with pudding-basin fringes and bottle-end glasses, dandyfied smoothies reeking of scent, Dadaist-looking spiv types with loudly checked tweed lop-sided motoring caps such as Mr Toad might have worn, a few greying punks wearing old men’s suits … These people may look like potatoes, but they’re the forces of Opposition; like Wyndham Lewis’s Enemy, clan-gathering round the back of Oxford Street, W1.

      Shortly before half-past eleven the whole rag-bag assortment creeps and shuffles, grey and hunched against the frost-whitened streets, where sounds are growing softer, along the shadow of the buildings, to a back mews, and a big black garage door, behind the uppermost panes of which a feeble yellow light is dimly gleaming. The little crowd – fifteen or so, maybe twenty – huddle forward in the silence, as the big black door opens just a few inches and a hand so white and frail as to seem luminescent slides out to greet them with a single beckoning finger. Heads lowered, they all shuffle in …

      The vast auditorium, smelling of brass polish and dust, is barely lit. But you can just make out a couple of … grand pianos … on the stage. To a murmur of exceedingly well-mannered applause, two casually dressed young men seem pretty much to sprint from the darkness of the wings, hurl themselves down on the pair of adjusted piano stools, fling their hands to the keyboard and … play a Morton Feldman minimalist piano duet for the best part of the forty minutes. Welcome to the ‘Wigmore Alternative’, the Anti-Rave! – where the music doesn’t pound in beats per minute, it echoes in beats per hour …

      The enigmatic composer Lawrence Crane (England’s unacknowledged Satie, a joker in the pack) and founder of the Wigmore Alternative – part pastoralist, part humorist, part über-archivist, part punk rocker – would demonstrate, in the twilight of the 1980s, the importance of Organization … The artistic application of the aesthetics of librarianship or proofreading. Cranesque order and neatness was a rout to the sublime.

       Pet Shop Boys

      For a pop duo who had their first Number One hit – ‘West End Girls’ – back in 1985, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, better known as Pet Shop Boys, have a knack of remaining constantly modern. Like the artists Gilbert & George, they have developed a creative partnership that seems to operate beyond the boundaries of fashionability, and yet remains permanently in fashion. From such memorable occasions as Chris Lowe wearing an Issey Miyake inflatable suit when they performed on ‘Saturday Night at the London Palladium’ – and refused to wave at the end of the show with the rest of the acts and Jimmy Tarbuck – to their later collaborations with artist film-makers such as Derek Jarman and Sam Taylor-Wood, they have always managed to mirror the zeitgeist while retaining their cultural independence.

      To some extent, the enduring relevance of the Pet Shop Boys could be due to the fact that they seemed to find their perfect musical identity right at the very beginning of their career. By mixing the sensory rush of luxuriously orchestrated dance music with an image and lyrical style that was almost its direct opposite, foregrounding isolation and social commentary, they achieved an originality and acquired a stance that has simply intensified over the years. With the Pet Shop Boys, there is nearly always a hidden, sharp edge of critique – critique of society, of pop, and of themselves – just beneath the lustrous sheen on the surface of their image. After all, they even managed to cover Village People’s ‘Go West’ with a Russian constructivist spin.

      The Pet Shop Boys are holding a series of interviews in a semi-derelict suite of rooms just beneath the highly ornate, neo-Gothic eaves of the old Saint Pancras Station Hotel. The hotel has been empty for nearly a decade – although the Spice Girls filmed their video for ‘Wannabe’ here – and this interview has been presented as a kind of eerie performance piece with touches of science-fiction. Summoned up the five dusty flights of the abandoned ceremonial staircase, a tape-recording of barking dogs breaks out high above you. So far, so New Romantic.

      Greeted at the top by Dainton, the Pet Shop Boys’ friend and bodyguard, you are then led through a further suite of darkened rooms, at the end of which, booming away, there is a projection of the Pet Shop Boys’ latest video. When you finally get to Tennant and Lowe, they are sitting on an illuminated glass floor inspired by Kubrick’s 2001 – a Space Odyssey, and wearing matching Versace bomber jackets made out of a gold metallic fabric designed to retain every crease and wrinkle. They look like off-duty astronauts.

      ‘If you had this floor in your house,’ announces Tennant, suddenly domestic in the midst of Goth-Futurist ambience, ‘and it was taken away, you’d really miss it. Everything would look really drab, because it gives off a lovely light. It’s actually quite warm and contemplative.’ He looks around the floor again, for all the world like a customer in Habitat on the Conran Shop, choosing interior lighting.

      Tennant and Lowe are there to promote their new single, with its classically Pet Shop Boys title, ‘I Don’t Know What You Want but I Can’t Give It Anymore’. This single is a mesmerically spooky disco stomper, which has a lyric about paranoia, surveillance and infidelity, but a snare-drum and hi-hat back-beat that sounds as though it was lifted off a track by Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra. In fact, it is one of those potent configurations of opposites that the Pet Shop Boys have made their speciality. In addition to this, they have developed a new image for the video you could call ‘Boot Boy Samurai Chic’.

      As a look, this new image just manages to ride that perilously tight back-curve of style that Eddie Izzard identified as connecting ‘fantastically hip’ with ‘totally naff’. What makes it succeed, ultimately, is the fact that the Pet Shop Boys have pushed it to the very limit: scary gold-haired wigs that show the dark roots of dyed hair, heavy black eyebrows of the kind last seen on Siousxie Sioux in about 1981, spider-thin dark glasses that lend an air of complete blankness to the features, and striped culottes that hang like ankle-length skirts. Gothic interiors, men in skirts and synthesizers – it has to be New Romantic.

      ‘I do think that the video’s quite New Romantic,’ says Neil, ‘but New Romanticism worked for such a short period of time, didn’t it? And needless to say David Bowie had the best moment in it by leaping in about two hours after it all started with the video for “Ashes to Ashes”. That really is the ultimate New Romantic video, although there’s probably some good ones by Steve Strange and Visage – “Fade to Grey” perhaps?

      ‘I remember when I used to live in a flat in the Kings Road, just above a Chinese restaurant, and I happened to open the door one day just as Steve Strange walked past. He was wearing “Look Number Three”, which was when he had a beard and sat on cushions. It was his “Cushions Period”, but I always remember it as quite exciting.’

      ‘There’s not enough of all that, these days, is there?’ adds Chris Lowe, as though remarking on the demise of corner shops. ‘The Kings Road used to be fantastic.’

      ‘If I had the nerve,’ Neil confides, ‘I’d walk up and down the Kings Road dressed like we are in our video. Secretly, I’d quite like to do that. But it takes too long to put the wig on …’

      ‘But that was the whole point!’ exclaims Chris. ‘The whole point of New Romanticism was that it took such a long time to get ready. That was what you did – get ready.’

      ‘I have to say that I like the bit in the video with the whole ritual of putting on the costumes. The costumes are a distancing technique – a way of saying that we’re nothing to do with anything else that’s happening in pop,’ says Neil. ‘Pop music, these days, is either cheesily sincere – as in your boy bands – or it’s effectively natural-looking, and we wanted to do something with a level of artifice in it. I always liked pop that has a sense of wonder about it. I mean, would you rather see David Bowie on roller skates – like he was in his “Day In, Day Out” video – or would you rather see David Bowie dressed as a clown, walking СКАЧАТЬ