Pet Shop Boys’ Chris Lowe at 66: six of the best PSB tracks by ‘the other one’

If I can paraphrase his taller, older singing partner, you don’t get the mix, he’s gone 66…

As is the case with the best partnerships in music and beyond, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe (always in that order, like Lennon and McCartney or Richard and Judy) are two very different but complementary personalities who combine to create a third: Tennant/Lowe. 

And sometimes it’s Blackpool boy Lowe with his daft head gear and his giant complicated coats — not to mention his almost heroic refusal to smile in photographs — who seems like the guardian of the essential Pet Shopness of the Pet Shop Boys. This former architecture student who once, unfathomably, designed a staircase in the town I grew up in*, and who happens to have turned sixty-six. Get the mix.

Lowe’s refusal to join in, to play the game, to participate in pop’s fake joviality from 1980s Top Of The Pops to modern talent show ubiquity, is as much part of the duo’s enduring appeal as their impressive catalogue of songs.

You may not know all the following half-dozen, because one of the seminal synthmeister’s incontrovertible, indelible red lines is that he won’t vocalise any tracks on a PSB album proper, but here’s six of the best Lowe turns, one for each decade this “some kind of wizard” (thank you, Brandon Flowers) has been making noises. And how. All hail the mid-sexagenarian Northerner!

Paninaro (1986) & Paninaro ’95 (1995, obviously)

“I don’t like country and western. I don’t like rock music, I don’t like rockabilly or rock and roll particularly. I don’t like much really, do I? But what I do like, I love passionately.” Lowe’s infamous off-the-cuff manifesto from a 1986 US TV interview was quickly transplanted onto Paninaro, a song about Italian pop kids from the days when B-sides could become almost as famous as A-sides, in this case the urban transatlantic sprawl of Suburbia. 

A lovely latin-infused rejig even saw the song flipped to single status nine years later, to help plug what was — until a later Oasis compy, at least — the UK’s best-selling B-sides album, Alternative. 

One Of The Crowd (1989)

The often painfully shy Lowe has often stated that he feels little or no need for recognition and, in fact, would prefer to blend in with everyone else, hence the title of this B-side to the duo’s cover of Sterling Void’s house anthem It’s Alright. The hats and dark glasses that he usually wears in PSB photos and on stage are essentially his ‘public costume’ allowing him to be relatively unrecognisable when he goes out without them. 

Furthermore, he claims to have little use for the frequent perks and platitudes of wealth and fame: “I don’t want to meet the Royal Family just ’cause I’ve paid my tax.” Chris sings-speaks his lyrics in a highly distorted vocodered manner, hiding his real voice in much the same way that he so often hides his eyes. Of special interest is his opening sexual metaphor: “When I go fishing with my rod….” Meanwhile, as with Paninaro, Neil is left apparently with little to do but sing nothing but the title in the chorus.

We All Feel Better In The Dark (1990)

As the other one later explained, this was inspired in part by a tape Chris bought at a health food store located near the studio where he and Neil were working at the time. The cassette was titled The Secrets Of Sexual Attraction. 

And on this frisky and fabulous flipside to the sublime Being Boring, Chris wants the world to know he’s feeling really horny.” So lustful in fact that he performed an elaborate dance routine to the track during Performance, the PSB’s celebrated theatrical extravaganza of 1991, live in his underpants. The sexiest Pet Shop Boys song ever made. 

Lies (1999)

Originally paired with You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk (the boys’ first 21st Century single) once again, Lowe demonstrates his mastery of upbeat club bangers, creating vast sonic landscapes made for dancing, and on which the Blackpool one actually sings rather than speaks in a voice that hasn’t been hugely distorted. The lyrics, which were provided by Chris (a rarity for Pet Shop Boys tracks), emerged from what he describes in the booklet to Format, the duo’s second collection of flipsides, as “a true story.” 

As Neil readily admits, Chris was “in a very, very angry mood.” In short, he’s a teensy-teensy bit annoyed at somebody for being deceitful. But rather than wallow in self-pity, he strikes a defiant pose, à la I Will Survive. In the words of PSB author Wayne Studer he is basically saying, “If you think you’re gonna get away with this, think again and take a hike.”

This Used To Be The Future (2009)

The opening gambit on Yes etc., a limited edition bonus disc that came with their Xenomania-produced album that closed out the noughties, This is noteworthy on several counts. First of all, it’s This unsettlingly electronic epic that features lead vocals offered in turn by Neil, Chris (yes, singing, actually!), and guest singer Phil Oakey of the Human League. 

With current horrors such as Trump, Brexit and Islamic terrorism enough to make most of us sympathise with such nihilistic lines as “Now all we have to look forward to is a sort of suicide pact.” In a thinly disguised reference to the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, the powerhouse trio point out that “religion and nuclear energy have united” — a dystopian situation that many would agree is a scarily real and looming threat.

Decide (2019)

Another hidden gem like so many in the PSB’s career, Decide has the distinction of being found on what the duo later termed, somewhat dismissively, a non-single: ie Hotspot’s Burning The Heather was issued on various formats but not CD, therefore not quite ‘canon’, despite boasting a lyric video and a physical release on seven-inch. Ho hum. 

Decide is classic flipside fare, though — Chris Lowe on vocoderized vocals over a deliciously dark, slightly sleazy techno-tinged dance track that starts simply then builds and builds into a dramatic monster, with the line “Oh, what have we done?” interpreted as acting as a thinly veiled commentary on Brits voting for Brexit (CL: “It’s about the end of a relationship. But then Brexit’s also about the end of a relationship.”) and echoing the wistful turn-back-the-clocks nostalgia of Bowie’s Love Is Lost, from six years prior. A bonus blissful CYA remix is fairly faithful to the original and almost feels like a PSB extended mix in all but name. Fishing!

Steve Pafford

My sincere thanks to Wayne Studer, Scott and Catherine Walters, and Mike Hunt 

*OK, it’s called Milton Keynes, and talking of staircases and Lowe’s sterling effort. I have absolutely no idea who the skinny guy sitting on it is. No, really.

BONUS BEATS

Subculture (2011)

Not a PSB track so relegated to the below the credits section, when Finnish DJs Jori Hulkkonen and Alex Nieminen joined forces in 2011 under the production moniker Stop Modernists (“with a knowing head-nod to late 80s New York/Chicago deephouse scene”) they decided to remake New Order’s minimal electro classic from 1985’s Low-Life. It’s a track adjudged “criminally underrated” by PSB themselves, and which features none other than Chris Lowe on voice duties, with Neil nowhere to be seen or heard for a change.

While preserving much of the sense of melancholy of Bernard Sumner’s original vocal, there’s little if any of the studio treatment that Chris has so often given his own vocals in the past: no vocoder, no distortion, no computerised stand-in. He’s been forthright, however, in asserting that he did have a little technological assistance. As he noted in a 2011 issue of the Boys’ fan club magazine Literally, he (with long-term programmer Pete Gleadall’s help) used some Autotune-ish computer software called Melodyne to fine-tune his vocal — “to put the note exactly in tune and get rid of all the wobble.” Yet the effect is so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable. As he offhandedly describes it, “You won’t even notice that you are alone.” Yet, despite his forlorn resignation, he can’t help but admit, again with devastating understatement, “It’s got to hurt a little bit.” Oh oh oh.