Neil Tennant

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2007

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the singer and songwriter Neil Tennant. He is best known as one half of The Pet Shop Boys which, over the past 20 years, has been one of Britain's most successful and popular bands, noted for combining dance music with witty lyrics and delivering them in a uniquely English style. As a teenager growing up in Newcastle upon Tyne, he felt himself to be an outsider at school, but found friends in an amateur theatre company. Yet he always felt his life would be different to theirs and used to tell them that he would become a celebrated pop star.

But Neil was 30 when he finally left his day job as a writer for Smash Hits magazine to pursue the musical interests that had dominated his life since he was a teenager. By that time, he was anxious that he had missed the boat. Now, as well as continuing to release records with The Pet Shop Boys, he has branched out into other forms of composition, writing a live score for the film Battleship Potemkin, a West End musical and being involved in collaborations with Robbie Williams and the Scissor Sisters, among many others.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs].

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.2	The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My castaway this week is the pet shop boy Neil Tenant. He is as untypical a pop star as you're likely to find, having hit
0:35.2	stardom at the relatively late age of 30 and resolutely refusing to succumb to
0:40.0	the populous packaging and promotion of a regular chart topper. West End Girls to the
0:44.2	West End Girls was the mould-breaking single that catapulted the group to world
0:48.4	stardom in the 80s.
0:49.8	It sounded at the time like a classic one-hit wonder. More than 20 years later the duo has
0:54.7	sold tens of millions of records and holds a significant place in pop history.
0:59.2	Since he was a child he says he's always hated being taught what to do and prefers to find out for himself.
1:06.8	It's an independence of spirit that's allowed him to take creative risks and plow his own furrow in an industry famed for its disposable tendencies.
1:15.8	Would it be fair to say, Neil, that you are known in Pet Shop Boys' terms as the tall less grumpy
1:21.2	one? Maybe to the outside world, yes.
1:26.0	I became a singer by accident.
1:28.0	I only was the singer in the Pether Boys because Chris wasn't going to sing.
1:31.0	I remember when we first did the video for Western Girls, we just
1:36.5	did what we normally did, which was I stride ahead and Chris walked slower than me so
1:41.8	and I'm slightly taller than Chris. So that kind of image was fixed by that.
1:45.7	When you were on top of the pops in those early days I certainly remember Chris, Chris Lowe,
1:49.8	this is your partner in the Pet Shop boys on keyboards.
1:53.0	Static.
1:54.0	It appeared he was using only one finger.
	...

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