Neil Tennant

Neil Francis Tennant (North Tyneside, July 10, 1954), known as Neil Tennant, is a British singer-songwriter, member, since 1981, of the duo by synth pop Pet Shop Boys, with Chris Lowe.

Biography

Childhood and adolescence

Neil was the second child of four born to William W. Tennant (1923–2009), a business agent, and Sheila M. Watson (1923–2008). He has an older sister, Susan, and two brothers younger than him, Simon and Philip. It was a British Catholic family whose sense of humanity, according to the singer, has been reflected in his work. His relationship with him will not be the same, however. official Catholicism. ^{[citation required]}

At the age of eight, he was an altar boy at his parish and was part of the choir, which sang in Latin. For secondary education, his parents enrolled him in St. Cuthbert's Grammar School, a Catholic boys' school from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (where he also studied Sting). There he met what would be his best friend, and with whom, together with two girls, he formed his first musical group (Dust), which was a folk group inspired by the Incredible String Band. They were then 16 years old, and Neil had learned to play the guitar and the cello. Years later, in 1986, his friend would be diagnosed with AIDS, and Neil would write the song "It Couldn't Happen Here" ( Actually , 1987) recalling the relationship that united them during the adolescence. Later he would dedicate two other songs to him: “Being Boring” (Behaviour, 1990), which is the description of a party they were at, and “Your Funny Uncle” (side B of the single It's Alright, 1988), about his funeral.

As for his education at St. Cuthbert's Grammar School, it didn't leave a good taste in his mouth. The songs "This must be the place I waited years to leave" (trans. “This must be the place I've waited so long to leave”; Behaviour, 1990) and "It's a Sin" (trans. "It's a sin"; Actually , 1987) refer to her stay at this school. This last song contains a vehement criticism of the religious education received there: “When I look back on my life / it is always with a feeling of shame / (…) everything I did / everything I do / (…) is sin. / In school they taught me to be / So pure in thought, word and deed / They didn't succeed." However, Neil dismisses the matter: "People took it very seriously. I wrote it in 15 minutes, it was no more than a “camp joke”, it wasn't something I consciously did seriously. (…) The Newcastle parish priest gave a sermon on it, reflecting on how the Church had changed from the threat of a terrible hell to the message of love.

Although Neil started writing songs at the age of 14, it won't be until he was 32 when he released his first album with Chris Lowe, an architecture student whom he met in a music technology store.

Professional beginnings

In 1975, after studying history at North London Polytechnic, Neil worked for a brief period as an editor at the UK arm of Marvel Comics. His task was to adapt the dialogues from the Marvel catalog for British readers, as well as pointing out where the overly exuberant women needed to be redrawed to make them more decent for British editions. In 1977, he left this job for another at Macdonald Educational Publishing, later renamed ITV Books. In 1982, he joined the teen pop magazine Smash Hits, where he rose to the position of assistant editor. In this way, he worked a total of 10 years in the publishing world.

Pet Shop Boys

In the early 1980s, Neil meets Chris Lowe, who was finishing his architecture studies at the time. Despite the differences in personality and tastes between the two, they conceived the possibility of starting to compose together. Neil, who was still working for Smash Hits, had the opportunity to travel to New York and interview The Police. While there, he met Bobby Orlando, a very successful dance music producer at the time (Divine, Roni Griffith, The Flirts, The New York Models, Waterfront Home, etc.), whom both he and Lowe admired. Tennant told him that he wrote songs in his spare time and, later, Orlando agreed to record some of those songs. Neil began working with Chris, and in early 1984, Orlando produced the Pet Shop Boys' first single, 'West End Girls'. The theme was partially successful (Belgium, France, and the American West Coast). In the UK it only got number 121 on the singles list. But the duo was already determined to break into the world of music: Neil quit his job as a publisher and Chris would never finish architecture.

In 1986 they released their first album, Please, which contained 11 tracks, some of which are still poorly produced, and a few months later they released an album that included six remixes (four tracks from Please and two previously unpublished ones). Neil started producing some of the songs. Success will come in 1987 with Actually.

The Pet Shop Boys were making records, but they did not consider the idea of holding concerts. At the end of the 80s, the record company achieved a budget to implement their idea for live concerts, they conceived the idea of developing sophisticated and theatrical staging, in which they changed outfits, characterized by the extravagance and abundance of dancers. The first tour will wait until 1989.

In 1988 they had released an album that included six remixes, and from which they released four studio singles —characterized by greater orchestration, the introduction of Latin rhythms and impeccable production— that will become "classics" from the band's repertoire: "Left to My Own devices", "Domino Dancing", "It's All Right" and "Always on My Mind" (version of one of the classics that made Elvis Presley famous). Two years later they released Behaviour (1990), a more personal and "atmospheric" in which they experiment with new rhythms and sounds. Despite its quality and being one of the favorites of its followers (going to influence artists like Axl Rose), it did not achieve the expected commercial success. In 1993 they returned to the forefront of the music industry with Very (1993), an album that included a bombastic reinterpretation of the Village People song "Go West", a song that in its original version had gone largely unnoticed.

Since then, the Pet Shop Boys have continued to release regular studio albums, several remixes, two live albums, and have offered multiple concerts.

Currently

To this day, Tennant and Lowe continue to perform as the Pet Shop Boys. Although they haven't had a number one hit since the April 1988 single 'Heart', their singles continue to chart in the UK Top 20, making them the most successful duo of all time on that chart. country.

In 2016, the duo's 13th album, Super, produced by Stuart Price, was released, as was the case with their previous album, Electric.

In 2020 they released their 14th studio album Hotspot, with its opening single "Monkey Business", in which as an innovation they brought back to life some arrangements with their old synthesizers from the 80s.

Other jobs outside of Pet Shop Boys

• Worked on the first album of the group Electronicscomposed of Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr. In his song "Getting Away with It", Tennant did the choirs, and in "Disappointed", his greatest commercial success to date, he was the main singer.

• He was part of the song "Joseph better you than me" next to The Killers and Elton John, being one of his best songs accompanied by someone outside the band.

Personal life

Family

Neil feels indebted to his family's upbringing. In an interview, Andrew Sullivan told him that even though some of his songs were critical of Roman Catholicism, there was an underlying sense of love and humanity in many of his lyrics that sounded Catholic. "I think I probably owe it to my parents," Neil said. When Neil went public with his sexual identity in The Sunday Times, his parents "undertook an incredible trip where they liked the fact that, after all, I was gay".

Beliefs

Neil gradually drifted away from the Catholicism in which he was raised. Currently, he defines himself as a non-religious person: "Really, I've become less religious as I've gotten older." Even when I wrote "It's a Sin," a part of me was probably still Catholic. But what I always liked about Catholicism was disappearing: I liked the Latin and the incense and the type of music and the choir".

Other information

Neil is gay, but he stayed away from the "gay world" Because he seemed somewhat artificial to him, he finally stated it publicly in an interview in Attitud magazine in 1994.

"I used to say I wouldn't leave the closet because doing so would automatically turn me into Neil-Tennant-la-star-pop-gay. And when I got out of it that's exactly what happened. It has always bothered me when I am considered a gay artist, that the things I say are interpreted as a pronouncement on homosexuality. I'm just an artist who turns out he's gay."