— Chris Heath
At the conclusion of a lengthy piece in the Smash Hits Yearbook 1989, Neil Tennant is asked how they foresee the future of the Pet Shop Boys when they finally wind up going down the dumper:
"Everyone thinks it's a joke but it's serious. The Pet Shop Boys will carry on, but we'll stop being the front men. Instead we'll change the line-up every year or so — suddenly there will be four sixteen year old boys as the Pet Shop Boys and the next thing you know they'll be replaced by two thirty-five year old Elaine Page types. We'll be fed up with it all by then so we'll just write the music. We'll be able to spend our time doing nice things like going to bed early. We won't have to have our photograph taken or be asked why we're called the Pet Shop Boys. We can just make the records. And make lots of money."
It has now been nearly a third of a century since this article was published and the Pet Shop Boys of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe remains. The Pet Shop Boy Band has yet to materialise and neither have the Pet Shopettes. If they didn't quite crash into the dumper, then they certainly witnessed their popularity begin to tail off over the course of the nineties though their aging fanbase remains loyal enough that their great-to-indifferent albums still sell well and they're a strong concert attraction. (Not bad for a group that once described themselves as "not a live band, really" while on tour) Their back catalog is one of the most admired in British pop. They've even written a musical together.
Yet, composing for others has always garnered more mixed results for the Pet Shop Boys. They've written for Dusty Springfield, Liza Minnelli, Tina Turner and Kylie Minogue albeit in rather forgettable fashion and they have wisely saved their best material for themselves. The relatively trivial "Heart" had originally been earmarked for Hazel Dean and, later, Madonna but in the end it wound up on their second album Please with a remix of it giving them their fourth UK number one hit. "One in a Million", a deep cut from 1993's Very and theme tune to long-running South Korean sketch comedy show Gag Concert, had an eye on rising boy band Pet Shop Boys Take That. Even those tracks they gave away to others were generally better when done in one form or another by the pair themselves.
"Nothing Has Been Proved" is a special case for the Pet Shop Boys because it hadn't been composed with anyone in particular in mind and wasn't even initially intended to be used in a film. Tennant wrote it on a guitar in the seventies when he was a struggling young musician and the song languished as his prospects began to take off after meeting Lowe and then hooking up with Bobby O. The group became interested in film soundtracks and had even been approached with the possibility of doing a Bond theme. While Norwegian pop group A-ha would go on to do the theme to The Living Daylights, they remained interested in doing film work. (Disappointingly, they didn't bother recording any fresh music for the soundtrack to their own cinematic project It Couldn't Happen Here) Producer Stephen Wooley then requested a song from them for the film Scandal about the Profumo affair of the early sixties. How serendipitous that Tennant already had such a song.
(Critics frequently cite Tennant as one of pop's great purveyors of irony but few give him credit for his historiography, perhaps in part due to the relative obscurity of these numbers of his. "Nothing Has Been Proved" is a rare case of one of his historical songs receiving the prominence of a single; "Jack the Lad" and "Don Juan" were both B-sides while "My October Symphony" and "Dreaming of the Queen" were deep cuts. All, however, remain firm fan favourites)
In an age when politicians will not step down from their positions under any circumstances (at a time, ironically, of supposedly rampant cancel culture) it's hard to believe that the Profumo affair was such a big deal. Conservative member of parliament John Profumo had been engaged in an extra-martial tryst with nineteen-year-old Christine Keeler. The Tory Secretary of State for War was asked about it and he denied any involvement on his part. His lie was exposed and it ended up bringing down the government of prime minister Harold MacMillan. All of this happened but it isn't what "Nothing Has Been Proved" is about; what we have, instead, is individuals on the periphery whose names weren't in the papers as much — if at all — and aren't remembered but who were affected by this scandal all the same. At least one took much more of a fall than the names that were on everyone's lips.
In a way, "Nothing Has Been Proved" is Tennant's equivalent of The Smiths' "Suffer Little Children" from the group's 1984 debut album. Both songs recount shocking events from the sixties, one a political scandal, the other a series horrific child killings. Tennant and Morrissey were just kids themselves when news of these events broke and it's natural to assume that they didn't really understand what was going on. Whispers, rumours, stuff they each heard on the playgrounds of their schools. Obviously its impossible to compete with the sorrowful content of "Suffer Little Children", in which Morrissey identifies with the innocent victims, but "Nothing Has Been Proved" has pathos in its own right. While Moz quotes Myra Hindley's infamous line "whatever he has done, I have done", Tennant doesn't bother repeating the famous words of Keeler's friend Mandy Rice-Davies, "well he would, wouldn't he?" and opts for quoting from Stephen Ward's suicide note instead ("I'm guilty till proved innocent in the public eye and press"). Most importantly, the two songs give a voice to those who aren't able to speak for themselves but who we should be trying to remember.
Chris Heath alludes to the song's peculiar nature of name-dropping people that hardly anyone knows but it's one of its most beguiling elements. I've never seen Scandal but I know a bit about the affair and so I have a vague idea who 'Christine', 'Mandy' and 'Stephen' are; as for 'Vicki' and 'Johnny', I haven't the faintest idea, though I guess the latter was played by Roland Gift of the Fine Young Cannibals (there's a clip of him shooting at someone or something in the video just as Dusty utters the line "Johnny's got a gun" so I think it's a safe assumption). But, again, these aren't celebrities, they're ordinary people caught up in something extraordinary. Profumo would end up getting hounded out of political life but he would live long enough to witness his rehabilitation. Keeler and Rice-Davies would be tabloid fodder for years but they both lived to their seventies and had families. Ward ended up committing suicide on the eve of being sentenced for the crime of "living off immoral earnings". (Profumo and others paid those "immoral earnings" but they all somehow got off scot free) By using their Christian names, Dusty Springfield is passing rumours about them on to those of us listening, making all of us culpable.
One part of the song that has always stood out for me is the repeated reference to The Beatles, a line that either captures the mood of the times or intrudes upon the narrative, depending on how I'm feeling. "Please Please Me's number one": it is said to be about the Fab Four's debut album which had been dominating the LP charts but I'm convinced it's really about the single of the same name. Not technically a number one, it had nevertheless topped several unofficial charts and would have been widely accepted as a number one regardless of singles chart rules. More importantly, it was rumoured to be about fellatio, with John Lennon supposedly promising a fair and equitable exchange of head. Buttoned-down, gentlemanly English society was being rocked by a pair of beautiful call girls and a quartet of Scouse lads, all of whom were from humble backgrounds. All of this is appropriate to consider within the context of the song but it is used twice which feels a bit lazy and what's it even doing there among all these references to 'Mandy' and 'Johnny' and 'Stephen in his dressing gown' anyway?
So, I've gone this far without mentioning Dusty Springfield which is simply unforgivable. She was pushing fifty by this time (Heath notes that she was "quite a lot older than Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan put together") but her voice still oozes that same mix of lust, melancholy and wisdom. There are cracks here and there and she's even more nasal that ever but no one listens to Dusty expecting a technically flawless performance. It's her limits as a singer that make her one of the all-time greats. I don't know how much of an effect her living through early-sixties' Britain has on her performance here but certainly her years of being in the public eye, of stardom and a faltering career, lends itself to the subject matter of the song. She experienced rumours surrounding her private life and faced deep depression of her own. This isn't the story of her life by any means but it's one she understood all too well.
"Nothing Has Been Proved" is yet another masterful Pet Shop Boys' work and hints that the Tennant-Lowe songwriting team had a future composing for others full time. This has yet to happen as they continue to focus on their own recordings. With both of them being in their sixites, it seems unlikely that they'll ever choose to farm out the duties of being pop stars to anyone else at this point. It's no great loss: Dusty aside, they never found anyone to compose for who could match or exceed Tennant's role as vocalist (although the guest performances by Frances Barber, Rufus Wainwright and Robbie Williams on the wonderful live album Concrete suggest that there are vocalists out there who are able to do Pet Shop's songs justice). If finding replacement Pet Shop Boys wasn't a joke, it definitely should have been.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Bananarama/Lananeeneenoonoo: "Help!"
Heath tips it to be Bananarama's first number one but it came up just short, even though this humble blogger did his part by buying a copy of the 7". The umpteenth cover version the Bananas had done but "Help!" is quite easily the best source material for a reinterpretation. There's none of Lennon's vocal power but they're as faithful to The Beatles as one would expect for something cut in 1989. It's still quite funny even now probably because Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Kathy Burke ham up the backing vocals but don't bulldoze their comedy chops all over the recording. The video spoofs all those cheesy Bananarama promos of the time and makes fun of Help, The Beatles' very pointless, very boring film. I like to think that had he survived, Lennon would have adopted the Lananeeneenoonoo backing vocals ("down-down-down!", "dow-ow-ow-own") when playing live. He was perverse enough to have been into it.
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