The masculinities of the PSB are inclusive of physical sensuality, rather than traditional masculine stoicism and cerebral transcendence of the corporeal. Male bodies are visually dominant throughout: bodies of sailors, young and old, clothed and bare, virile and aged, robust and dead, powerful and vulnerable. The film is rife with phallic imagery: spyglasses, fishing poles, bullet-shaped missiles cradled at waist level and, most obviously, the recurrent gun turrets where rebelling sailors gather, raising and lowering like erections in the foreground of the frame. During the Odessa Steps sequence, a single-amputee man on crutches is in the crowd and a double amputee is prominent when a mother confronts soldiers with the body of her son they have killed. The body of sailor Vakulinchuk inspires Odessa’s citizens to support Potemkin. As a boat carries Vakulinchuk’s body into Odessa, ‘To the Shore’ (track 6 [2.20])
introduces the primary string motive of the James Bond title theme from You Only Live Twice, originally sung by gay camp icon Nancy Sinatra...
... Physical pleasure and carnality are expressed in the throbbing dance beats underscoring revolution on ship, on the steps and facing the squadron. The very catalyst for the revolt, sailors rejecting spoiled meat, is not solely a rational assertion of nourishment needs but also a demand for sensual pleasure: we deserve something that tastes better. ‘Men and Maggots’, playing over the scenes of infected meat, samples ‘Charade’ (track 2 [0.21]), a sad song of failed love in a theatrical metaphor, written by masters of sentimental popular song, Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. The song is the theme of a film of the same name starring boyish Audrey Hepburn (masculinely nicknamed ‘Reggie’) and urbane and allegedly gay Cary Grant, both of whose counterhegemonic genders resonate with those in PSB’s work. Grant’s role in this film is significant, as his character assumes four different identities, each shown in the film’s final image, over which Hepburn’s character expresses her wish for them to have lots of boys so she can name them after his aliases. The allusion here resonates physical pleasure (taste) with literally the
production and performance of multiple, variant – but not oppositional – masculine identities.
Scott, D. (2013). Intertextuality as “Resonance”: Masculinity and Anticapitalism in Pet Shop Boys’ Score for Battleship Potemkin. Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 7(1), 53–82. doi:10.3828/msmi.2013.3
Philip Dodd: I know it's an odd thing to say but when I've been relistening to [your voice], you know what I've been thinking of, which will either delight you or horrify you, which is David Lean's Brief Encounter. 'Cause actually there's a lot of powerful emotion in your voice...
Neil: Under the surface.
PD: But it's under the surface, it's that clipped, excuse my French, bloody English control.
Neil: Yeah... Again, it's to do with the instrument —a vocal instrument—I have to play with, you know. I don't have that kind of big, emotional voice. But I think you can say a lot with understatement anyway, so I work on the—in the area of understatement.
PD: But that is why Brief Encounter, at least for me, as I was listening made a kind of sense.
Neil: No, no, I love Brief Encounter. I've seen it millions of times. But my voice also has a sort of plaintive quality. So, I mean it's always annoyed Chris and me that we rapidly got sort of stereotyped as camp and ironic, and there are moments... but actually, most of it is very heartfelt. The first album is really heartfelt. I mean most of them are, to be perfectly honest, and I guess the unique selling point wasn't the heartfelt, it was the sort of ironic thing.
PD: You were in the 80s, which loved irony.
Neil: Yes.
PD: I mean, you look back on it now, and you're right, it looks to me like an English understated love, which is often frustrated, which is what English love has historically been about.
Neil: And also with a... with a sort of fascination with the idea of running away from everything, which I've always had in my life.
Night Waves interview by Philip Dodd with Neil aired on December 17, 2013
Аrе you "Luvvies fоr Labour"? The Daily Mail seems to think so.
Joanna, Nottingham.
Neil: I don't think Chris is.
Сhris: Neil is.
Neil: I'm а Luvvie fоr Labour, but of course I don't like it when everything gets reduced to that. It's а category made up by the media about апуопе rеmоtеlу to do with the media оr showbusiness оr anything who аrе known to support the Labour Раrtу. And it's used, typically, to put down the Labour Party. I don't actually think it's very good fоr celebrities to publicly support the Labour Party, because I don't think it does them any good, and I've never done anything publicly. The reason I was iп the paper was because I went to а fundraising dinner at Ken and Barbara Follett's house and there was рrеss outside.
Сhris: It's а Red Wedge for the Nineties, isn't it?
Neil: That's а different thing entirely. I was phoned up the оthеr day by this Labour Раrtу organiser trying to organise а concert. I said “Whу do you want to do that? I'll tell you why you want to do that, because you think politics is boring and you can only get young people interested in it if you've got some sugar to sweeten the pill. Why don't you trу to organise а series of incredibly dynamic and interesting political events? If you manages to do that you might be surprised at the response you get”. I said to him that quite frankly getting celebrities involved with politics puts people off, because if you know that Damon frоm Blur supports the Labour Раrtу, all the people who hate Damon think, “Oh, the Labour Party аrе а bunch of twerps as well”.
Chris: You'rе а paid-up Luvvie fоr
Lаbour, aren't you? It doesn't come cheap.
Neil: I think that's fаir enough. But it's nothing that I would have wanted to make public.
Chris: So you'rе а bit closeted whеп it comes to politics?
Neil: Yes, actually as an artist.
Сhris: I don't think mу political affiliation аrе anybody's business. It varies. You should be allowed to get on with what you want to do without any interference.
Neil: So you're а right-wing libertarian?
Chris: I'm mоrе an anarchist than anything, actually. I've always been the opposite to what the general public thought. That's mу starting point: that everyone else is wrong. If the majority of people think something, they must be wrong.
Neil: Why do they think it? Because they rеаd it in the bloody Daily Express.
Chris: Exactly. Because they're all morons. Тhе public аrе morons.
Neil: Моrе so than they have еver been in history, I think.
Chris: They are stupid. I have nothing but contempt fоr the public and I don't think they should be given the vote. Because they don't know, really, and then you get all those рrаts on Question Тimе, don't you? That's enough to put you off being а thinking man. And all they do is regurgitate what they've read in the рареrs. Тhеrе's not а single оrigiпаl thought in their heads.
To the editors: This letter is addressed to Bill Wyman regarding his review of the Pet Shop Boys concert on April 4th [April 12]. I have rea
Letter to the editor, Chicago Reader, J.P. Ven, May 23, 1991
But, when at least two-thirds of the audience attending were gay men and women (which was obvious if one was out in the lobby at intermission), when everyone of any import involved with the show is gay or at least expressed in the show a very gay sensibility, when the show raged with camp and homoeroticism (no, Chris was not stripping for the female members of the audience) from the first note to the last, then it behooves a reviewer, whether he is straight or gay, to mention these facts. Of course it was “more theater than rock concert.” Of course it was “devoid of . . . false emotion, thrusting hips, and wailing screams.” Of course there was a “luscious, detailed” (and I might add, very witty) program. And of course, Neil and Chris changed costumes dozens of times. They were dead serious about it all and having a wonderful time, too. The show was all the things you mentioned in your review and much more simply because it was gay. You’re not going to see another show much like it anytime soon, either.
“Having mused on clean bodily fluids, HIV and “panic sex,” [The Krokers] suggested: “If, today, there can be such an intense fascination with the fate of the body, might this not be because the body no longer exists?”
They said the body’s functions had been tendered out: computers had taken over the role of memory; test tubes had alienated the womb; the Sony Walkman was a set of “ablated ears”; CGI had replaced perspective; body scanners had taken over from the nervous system.
Maybe Tennant and Lowe don’t see this as a problem.
In the end, the body betrays us, holds us prisoner as it ages and decays. So perhaps ‘Young Offender’ shares the corporeal paranoia we encountered in ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ and ‘To Speak Is A Sin’. “The song, after all, is about an age gap – about whether Tennant can get away with hitting on a twenty year-old. That, rather than any implied heterosexuality, is the reason the boy is inaccessible this time round.”
Excerpt from Chapter 4, ‘Young Offender’ and ‘Liberation’: Technology, Lust and Abstraction. Smile If You Dare: Politics and Pointy Hats with the Pet Shop Boys by Ramzy Alwakeel.
"Maybe the Boys’ sense of humor was too intellectual or refined or just plain British for American audiences; maybe it was their sincere engagement with club culture that was often considered novelty or kitsch by critics and consumers; maybe it was the open embrace of queerness, especially during an era of AIDS and legal oppression. Probably some cocktail of all three—Pet Shop Boys present a challenge to heteronormativity and masculine hegemony, to established industry views about what it means to be a band that makes pop music, and to a culture always moving on to the next idea, as they establish critical links between new trends in music with older, once-populist forms like vaudeville and opera."
Discovery: Live in Rio 1994 Review by Nathan Smith for Pitchfork
"Just How Gay Are The Pet Shop Boys?" by Richard Laermer in The Advocate (May 31, 1991)
This whole interview is incredibly fascinating to me, and understandably frustrating for Neil given the interviewer pretty much trying to get him to come out the entire time, but the final two questions and answers here are incredibly poignant and interesting and sincere from Neil. He pretty matter-of-factly hones in on how his lyrics and their music operates in terms of signs and signifiers and in relation to the world and society. It's a bit unfortunate Chris Heath doesn't really focus in on Neil's answers but Chris' remark right after is hilarious
Hate: Neil Tennant on the power of negative thinking. Select Magazine, October 1992.
Text of the essay below the cut:
If not for hatred, I wouldn’t be doing what I do now. I became a pop star because I hated football at school. I hated that whole attitude of being one of the crowd. Becoming a pop star was my revenge. Revenge for being bad at football. For not being athletic. For being mocked.
That’s the thing about negative energy, about hatred. It can be positive. It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about. Sometimes you can only define yourself by what you hate. Hatred becomes an inspiration; it makes you think, “What I’m doing now I totally believe in, and I don’t care what other people say.” Guided by hatred, you don’t have to follow the herd.
I hate the way people all like the same things at the same time. I’ve never understood it. When people are told about Coke – “It’s the real thing” – they should think, “No, it’s a hideous soft drink that is fantastically unhealthy to drink, full of sugar that turns into glucose that turns into fat.” They should look around America and think, “God, there are so many fat people here! Why? Because they all eat hamburgers and drink cola.” And they should hate the people who represent that. They should hate Michael Jackson for trying to foist Pepsi onto them, to make them fat victims of their own society. They should hate more. Hate Pepsi, hate Coca-Cola, hate Michael Jackson. Hate George Bush. And think about the alternatives. That’s another good thing about hatred. It makes you think about the alternatives.
Of course, these days it’s more fashionable to be positive. I hate positivity. The problem with positivity is that it’s an attitude that’s decidedly about lying back, getting screwed, and accepting it. Happily. It’s totally apolitical. It’s very, very personal and one-on-one. It’s not about changing society, it’s about caring about yourself. In fact, it’s totally about ignoring one’s economic role in society, and so it works in favor of the system. Just look at work years of personal consciousness theories have given us: those icons of the status quo, George Bush and John Major.
Positivity is fundamentally middle-class. It’s about having the time, the space and the money to sort out where your head is at. Therapy is just another side of positivity. It’s a leisure activity, a luxury for people who don’t have any real cares. It’s new age selfishness, the new way of saying that charity begins at home.
And positivity makes the world stay the same. Hatred is the force that moves society along, for better or for worse. People aren’t driven by saying, “Oh wow, I’m at peace with myself.” They’re driven by their hatred of injustice, hatred of unfairness, of how power is used.
That’s as true for pop music as it is for politics. I always feel the reason so much music comes out of Britain is because there’s so much hatred. You see or hear something and grow envious. Whereas if your positive reaction is, “Wow, that’s great,” you just sit back and think how great it is and you don’t do anything. You relax.
Luckily, I’ve never been a very relaxed person. When I look at pop music, I immediately hate things. I look at singers who say they are taking two years off to work for charity when, in fact, they’ll spend two years working on their album, and I hate them. Right now I really hate performers who make a big deal out of playing benefits and donating the proceeds from the sales of their records to charities. They could give plenty of money to charities and not tell anyone, but instead, they cash in on the fact. That’s not charity, it’s marketing. It’s about selling albums under the guise of a moral imperative. They say they’re trying to raise consciousness, as if being a celebrity gives them power and endows them with the answers to the world’s problems. But really they just want to be seen as heroes. I think it’s breathtakingly cynical and I hate it.
Another thing I hate, and another inspiration for what the Pet Shop Boys do, is the way people misunderstand pop culture. It annoys me that after more than twenty-five years, Top of the Pops, Britain’s most important pop-music TV program, changed the rules so that you have to sing live. Why? Because the people in control are the kind of conservatives who think that in the ‘60s, everything was much more talented than they are now. It’s all about Rolling Stone rock culture, which is essentially a fear of the new. Rolling Stone’s idea of a musician is Jerry Garcia, from the 60s. Look at all the ‘new’ artists – Curtis Stigers, Michael Bolton, Lenny Kravitz – all of them living in the past. I think you have to live in the future. Or at least in the present.
The Pet Shop Boys have always hated most of the prevailing attitudes and tried to do the opposite. Our hatred of what other people do has always helped us redefine our actions. To hate a lot of things is tantamount to really caring about others. If you like everything, you deal with nothing. When people hear Chris and me talking, they’re sometimes shocked by how negative we are. We’re constantly critical of everything, including ourselves. But I come from a generation that liked its artists to say what was wrong with our lives. I retain the old-fashioned belief that pop music is meant to be a challenge to society as well as an affirmation of it. And so I consider it my duty to hate things.
Steve Pafford does lunch with the Pet Shop Boys "Is the other half of the group coming?" queries a Cappuccino-consuming Neil Tennant. We are
Interview with PSB, Gay Times, June 2002. By Steve Pafford.
Includes: bitchiness, Chris showing up late, interviewer ponders Neil's shoe size, "going rock", a possibly dwindling fan base, "showbusiness chords", Chris Is Eating, Chris "quite liked the idea of bankrupting him. You could waltz into the Groucho Club and he’d be sitting outside in a cardboard box and you could piss on him", ghastly radio schedules
[I did a twitter thread about this too but why not share it here anyways ajkfl]
Behaviour, Pet Shop Boys’ fourth album, released on October 22, 1990. The word “behaviour” for the album was chosen by Chris and reflects the various themes found in the album’s tracks. Mark Farrow brought the album’s design back to the minimalist style of a white background and focal image that had characterized the designs of both Please (1986) and Actually (1987) that had been broken by the previous album Introspective (1988).
Behaviour’s central image is composed of four photographs taken by Eric Watson: a photo of a standing Neil and seated Chris holding bunches of long-stemmed roses; a close-up of Neil’s face; a close-up of the back of Chris’ head; and a photo of the same composition as the first, this time without Neil or Chris, with only a bunch of roses and Chris’ hat left.
The photographs are muted or grayscale, creating a sense of maturity, melancholy, and memory that is broken by the vibrancy of the roses. The red color of the roses carries over to the solid red inner sleeve of the album and the red font used for the lead single “So Hard”, while the black and white photography carries over to “Being Boring” and “Where the Streets Have No Name (I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You)/How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?”
The main inspiration for the roses came from Neil and Chris visiting Liza Minnelli’s apartment and seeing a photograph of Judy Garland taken by Richard Avedon:
Neil has reflected on the fact that the four photographs could compose a story. The main point of interest in this draws from the inherent juxtaposition of the photographs — Neil and Chris both present then absent and the frontal shot of Neil’s face contrasted to the reverse shot of the back of Chris’ head. A major thematic element of Behaviour is loss and what is left in the space of that absence; the presence of the roses and Chris’ hat in the final photograph symbolize memory and the importance of material mementos: although they are absent, their presence remains in the objects or memories left behind.
There is also a heavy emphasis on contrast between Neil and Chris themselves. They juxtapose themselves both in dress (Neil in black and Chris in white) as well as in their positioning (Neil standing and Chris sitting), which furthers this act of the elements of the photographs playing off of each other.
A juxtaposition is present in the frontal shot of Neil contrasted to Chris. The close-up portrait shot of Neil emphasizes his identity and self-expression present in multiple songs on the album whereas the reverse shot of Chris de-emphasizes his identity, leaving only the iconography of his self behind in an act of rejection of the conventions of both portraiture and self-expression.
Eric Watson’s use of lighting creates sharp highlights and shadows on Neil and Chris’ portraits, emphasizing aspects of their faces/heads in a very stark, realistic, and haunting way that is helped by the use of a grayscale/black and white technique. Additionally, the first photograph of Neil and Chris is expertly framed wherein they adopt a more familiar and professional portraiture style of Victorian and Edwardian photographs that is carried on with the Douglas Brothers with “Being Boring”.
By combining the four photographs into one whole image, Mark Farrow helped set up the shifting “before and after” effect of each of the photographs in relation to one another. The photographs all give a lot but simultaneously very little, leaving just enough to posit an interpretation of the narrative each are an element of, but never suggesting a concrete or clear answer. At the very least, each have a counter to one another in the way of openness met with rejection, and how social behaviors are performed and received.
Ultimately, Behaviour was a reaction to the predominant consensus among journalists in the 80s that they were “ironic” and “insincere”, whether citing Neil’s singing ability, or simply focusing on how to twist their songs into an ironic lens in their critiques. Pet Shop Boys fueled Behaviour to be a sad, sincere, and retro/introspective affair to counter those assertions, and which they themselves would take up head-on and adopt with Very in 1993.
Also, I just love this album a lot, and the cover is probably my favorite of their album covers. Given there’s little about the thought process and motivations for the cover in Catalogue or the Further Listening, I just thought I’d give my own two cents on the effect it has on me for its anniversary!
Interview with Neil, Fantastic Man Magazine, A/W 2021. By Olivia Laing.
Includes: being raised catholic, writing as a youth, influences, delivery and interpretation, Being Boring, AIDS, political through the personal, queer sensibilities, Faber-Castell fountain pens
