The Nineties: When Surface was Depth

For a pop duo who had their first Number One hit – ‘West End Girls’ – back in 1985, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, better known as Pet Shop Boys, have a knack of remaining constantly modern. Like the artists Gilbert & George, they have developed a creative partnership that seems to operate beyond the boundaries of fashionability, and yet remains permanently in fashion. From such memorable occasions as Chris Lowe wearing an Issey Miyake inflatable suit when they performed on ‘Saturday Night at the London Palladium’ – and refused to wave at the end of the show with the rest of the acts and Jimmy Tarbuck – to their later collaborations with artist film-makers such as Derek Jarman and Sam Taylor-Wood, they have always managed to mirror the zeitgeist while retaining their cultural independence.

To some extent, the enduring relevance of the Pet Shop Boys could be due to the fact that they seemed to find their perfect musical identity right at the very beginning of their career. By mixing the sensory rush of luxuriously orchestrated dance music with an image and lyrical style that was almost its direct opposite, foregrounding isolation and social commentary, they achieved an originality and acquired a stance that has simply intensified over the years. With the Pet Shop Boys, there is nearly always a hidden, sharp edge of critique – critique of society, of pop, and of themselves – just beneath the lustrous sheen on the surface of their image. After all, they even managed to cover Village People’s ‘Go West’ with a Russian constructivist spin.

The Pet Shop Boys are holding a series of interviews in a semi-derelict suite of rooms just beneath the highly ornate, neo-Gothic eaves of the old Saint Pancras Station Hotel. The hotel has been empty for nearly a decade – although the Spice Girls filmed their video for ‘Wannabe’ here – and this interview has been presented as a kind of eerie performance piece with touches of science-fiction. Summoned up the five dusty flights of the abandoned ceremonial staircase, a tape-recording of barking dogs breaks out high above you. So far, so New Romantic.

Greeted at the top by Dainton, the Pet Shop Boys’ friend and bodyguard, you are then led through a further suite of darkened rooms, at the end of which, booming away, there is a projection of the Pet Shop Boys’ latest video. When you finally get to Tennant and Lowe, they are sitting on an illuminated glass floor inspired by Kubrick’s 2001 – a Space Odyssey, and wearing matching Versace bomber jackets made out of a gold metallic fabric designed to retain every crease and wrinkle. They look like off-duty astronauts.

‘If you had this floor in your house,’ announces Tennant, suddenly domestic in the midst of Goth-Futurist ambience, ‘and it was taken away, you’d really miss it. Everything would look really drab, because it gives off a lovely light. It’s actually quite warm and contemplative.’ He looks around the floor again, for all the world like a customer in Habitat on the Conran Shop, choosing interior lighting.

Tennant and Lowe are there to promote their new single, with its classically Pet Shop Boys title, ‘I Don’t Know What You Want but I Can’t Give It Anymore’. This single is a mesmerically spooky disco stomper, which has a lyric about paranoia, surveillance and infidelity, but a snare-drum and hi-hat back-beat that sounds as though it was lifted off a track by Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra. In fact, it is one of those potent configurations of opposites that the Pet Shop Boys have made their speciality. In addition to this, they have developed a new image for the video you could call ‘Boot Boy Samurai Chic’.

As a look, this new image just manages to ride that perilously tight back-curve of style that Eddie Izzard identified as connecting ‘fantastically hip’ with ‘totally naff’. What makes it succeed, ultimately, is the fact that the Pet Shop Boys have pushed it to the very limit: scary gold-haired wigs that show the dark roots of dyed hair, heavy black eyebrows of the kind last seen on Siousxie Sioux in about 1981, spider-thin dark glasses that lend an air of complete blankness to the features, and striped culottes that hang like ankle-length skirts. Gothic interiors, men in skirts and synthesizers – it has to be New Romantic.

‘I do think that the video’s quite New Romantic,’ says Neil, ‘but New Romanticism worked for such a short period of time, didn’t it? And needless to say David Bowie had the best moment in it by leaping in about two hours after it all started with the video for “Ashes to Ashes”. That really is the ultimate New Romantic video, although there’s probably some good ones by Steve Strange and Visage – “Fade to Grey” perhaps?

‘I remember when I used to live in a flat in the Kings Road, just above a Chinese restaurant, and I happened to open the door one day just as Steve Strange walked past. He was wearing “Look Number Three”, which was when he had a beard and sat on cushions. It was his “Cushions Period”, but I always remember it as quite exciting.’

‘There’s not enough of all that, these days, is there?’ adds Chris Lowe, as though remarking on the demise of corner shops. ‘The Kings Road used to be fantastic.’

‘If I had the nerve,’ Neil confides, ‘I’d walk up and down the Kings Road dressed like we are in our video. Secretly, I’d quite like to do that. But it takes too long to put the wig on …’

‘But that was the whole point!’ exclaims Chris. ‘The whole point of New Romanticism was that it took such a long time to get ready. That was what you did – get ready.’

‘I have to say that I like the bit in the video with the whole ritual of putting on the costumes. The costumes are a distancing technique – a way of saying that we’re nothing to do with anything else that’s happening in pop,’ says Neil. ‘Pop music, these days, is either cheesily sincere – as in your boy bands – or it’s effectively natural-looking, and we wanted to do something with a level of artifice in it. I always liked pop that has a sense of wonder about it. I mean, would you rather see David Bowie on roller skates – like he was in his “Day In, Day Out” video – or would you rather see David Bowie dressed as a clown, walking along the beach at Hastings with a bunch of New Romantics? I imagine you’d rather see him dressed as a clown in Hastings – I know I would.

Also, the Pet Shop Boys have always been obsessed with not being real, because we think that’s more interesting. I have always thought that the idea, for a pop star, is to not be able to believe that they’re real. Which is why I think it was brilliant that Elvis never performed in Britain. Actually, to their credit, the pop gossip columnist of The Sun suggested that all the interviewers should be dressed like we are in the video.’

‘But it can also look grotesque,’ Chris points out.

‘No. It really wasn’t designed for daily wear,’ agrees Neil. ‘It was designed like our “Pointy Hats” look a few years ago, to be seen through an electronic medium. That way you can smooth things out. We did the “Pointy Hats” in real life, just once, when we launched MTV in Russia. When we came out to do the press conference we discovered that the ceiling of the room was too low for the hats, and then when I sat down the collar of my jacket rode up, so I had to kind of bend forward. An English audience would have found this hilarious, and we’d all have had a good laugh. But the Russians just sat there and stared at us, and then asked all the usual questions as though nothing was odd. You’ve got to have a nerve to do this kind of thing, you know. But when you look at our “Pointy Hats” video, it’s a classic video. It’s an attempt to move away from all the supposed naturalism in pop …’

With their new image, record and forthcoming tour, the Pet Shop Boys are presenting, as usual, an entire theatrical package. This time, they have pulled off the considerable coup of collaborating with the visionary architect, Zaha Hadid, some of whose buildings have been considered too radical to be constructed. In the light of this latest collaboration, one can see how the Pet Shop Boys – Lowe is a trained architect himself – are continuing their fascination with presenting artificial environments in which to perform their songs.

‘Actually, the idea came about because Janet Street Porter had been walking with Zaha Hadid for her television programme,’ says Neil. ‘And she said, “Why don’t you get Zaha Hadid to design your new musical?” and we said, “Because she’s an architect and it’s a completely different discipline to designing for the theatre.” But then we were in New York and I was flicking through a book of Zaha’s designs in the Rizzoli bookshop, and I suddenly saw all of her architectural models as stage sets – wonderful shapes to walk across while holding a microphone, wearing a ludicrous costume and having a wind-machine on you maybe.

‘So we approached her, and I have to say that she and her operation have been inspiring to work with. They take all the practicalities of a rock show on board, and they are the only people we have ever worked with who take the budget seriously. They are working on a modular set which can evolve during the show and be adapted to different sizes of venue. Which means that the backing singers are going to be doing some heavy lifting, only they don’t know that yet …’

So what does all this new look mean? Or does it mean anything? To judge from the exterior shots of the video, and the extreme styling of their new image, they are positioning themselves in a vision of the future in which the architectural brutalism of the Seventies has become as weathered as the Victorian neo-Gothicism of Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Saint Pancras Hotel. It is, perhaps, the idea of the future itself appearing antique and old-fashioned, with every adult and child dressed, as revealed at the end of the video, in the extraordinary Samurai chic which we had assumed was a sub-cult gang costume – like the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange – rather than the mark of complete social conformity.

‘There is a comment about conformity,’ says Neil. ‘But I think that if our previous shows were paintings, then they would have been figurative. Whereas this one is definitely abstract. Unlike our other shows, this doesn’t have a narrative, however loose. I think that it is possible for pop music to get over-intellectualized, but on the other hand it probably isn’t intellectualized enough. In the late Seventies and early Eighties pop was definitely intellectualized, and interestingly enough there was a lot of good music around at the same time. These days, you’d get embarrassed to start talking about art or writing in pop because people might think you’re being pretentious, which is a really sad pay-off of the whole laddish thing in the Nineties.’

‘Like Bowie gets ridiculed for wanting to be interested in new things,’ says Chris. ‘But we’re always looking for a new underground …’

But the problem of how to be confrontational would still obsess a new generation of cultural practitioners during the 1990s. How the hell did you catch anyone’s attention, what with the whole more-in-your-face-than-you thing going on? To some pundits, the age would seem obsessed by sex and death, centring on what Professor Eric Northey would define as ‘the nectothon’ of the mass mediation of Diana, Princess of Wales’s death and funeral. Culturally, in many ways, this was a post-modern re-run of the aestheticism and morbidity of the nineteenth-century ‘fin-de-siècle’ – the cartoon decadence of a neo-grunge demi-monde, with yobs and snobs united in the flashlight of high fashion.

And how did you deal with the phenomenon-seeking inverted commas of free-floating irony? That would become another problem.

Irony (as understatement, overstatement, the conflation of opposites and a general fiddling about, in the name of critique, with context and intentionality), within the cultural practice of the early 1990s, would turn out to be the growing pains of the New Authenticity – the phase before the social realism kicked in. But back in the winter of 1988, there was a feeling abroad about irony that was touchingly innocent; it could remind you, in hindsight, of Truman Capote’s wistful recollections, as an alcoholic, of how he used to get drunk: ‘In Harry’s Bar it just seemed such fun,’ he said.

Likewise Irony. Looking back on it now, and seeing the two culture-vulturing city slickers, thinking out ways to sidestep the obvious, outwit the trend-waves, and play a tune on the bleeps and squeaks of the zeitgeist, there is the realization that the fluffy end of the arts and cultural media during the late 1980s and early 1990s (the swift dissolve between Cult Studies and Lifestyle journalism) had become set to being hyper-cynically arch, or ‘arch’.

On the one hand, Irony could be regarded as a means of responding to, and co-existing with, the conversion of all things socio-cultural into a post-modern bombardment of culturally destabilized, aesthetically blurred, ultimately unauthored and free-floating signifiers – the Phenomena of things. Irony, in this respect, was a kind of ‘two can play at that game’, or ‘I’ll be your mirror’ means of critique.

But the Ironists of the early 1990s had also honed the pursuit of Style Watching (the refraction of the post-punk style press through aspirational high bourgeois print media) to such a degree, that their commentaries became increasingly reliant on the instant translation of trends and phenomena into a code of social satire. This was a mixture of wit and anthropology that could end up dissolving in the acid bath of its own chemistry. For there was a faintly psychopathic edge to all of this, in the sense of cold-blooded style watching, however astute, needing to lack almost any kind of empathy – or even emotional awareness – with its subjects, but simply looking for the most precise emblem of their Type. In many ways, this was the point where Naturalism met Marketing – on an island off the coast of Camp.

At the time this seemed like the weaponry of applied dandyism, and wide open to the perils of terminal ennui: where dandies articulate their philosophy of life through Mock Heroic fashion (the world expressed in a tie-pin, for instance), so the culmination of Irony would be a search for the tiniest detail in other people’s dress and behaviour, which would say the most about them. A noble enough enterprise, in keeping with the naturalism of nineteenth-century fiction (cf. Tom Wolfe’s literary and journalistic homage to Balzac and Dickens), but also open to abuse as the reduction of all things to nothing more than a periodic table of status.

Needless to say, by the middle 1990s, the sheer surfeit of Irony in the zeitgeist was like some kind of cultural vitamin imbalance. We were gorged on Irony, sickened and bloated and cramped with snooty cleverness. Irony was our trapped wind. The critic Robert Hughes – somewhat brutally – even described the art of Jeff Koons as ‘the last of the methane in the cow of post-modernism’.

But then a miracle occurred, and Irony turned into the Pursuit of Authenticity. This was partly a cyclical reaction to the trend, but also because a new generation of Ironists had realized that the only way of becoming Irony-proof themselves was to proclaim yourself one hundred per cent Authentic: a no-nonsense, bit-of-a-laugh, see-you-down-the-pub kind of person. Enter the massed armies of Mockney, the Lads, Ladettes and Babes – the football’s coming home, none-of-that-low-fat-malarkey, ‘trainspotting’, fever-pitching, text-messaging, wap-phoning, Girlie Show and two smoking barrels. Enter, Attitude! A breath of fresh air, perhaps, or the fashionable face of anti-intellectualism.

Robert Hughes, needless to say, would now become Newly Marginalized and wheeled out as a Reactionary for his trouble – partly because of his book, The Culture of Complaint – which was held up as a proto-typical, disgusted-of-Manhattan, ‘everything’s dumbing down’, anti-political-correctness kind of book (the same thing would happen to Harold Bloom, with his ‘School of Resentment’ comments about the dangers of politicized – isms to literary criticism, in his massive book, The Western Canon), but also because the top froth of the culture – television, advertising, various chunks of the visual arts, pop and literary worlds – had been hanging on to irony for dear life, even as they were beginning to feel the pull of New Authenticity.

Robert and Harold, therefore, were shut up faster than a pair of dotty old men who had wandered into a rave – they just didn’t get it, did they, and in the neo-Swinging Nineties, if you weren’t hip to the Attitude!, you were … almost definitely … hopelessly … middle-class and toxic.

And this was strange: in a broad-band of culture which was being maintained, administrated, mediated and consumed almost entirely by the middle classes, for an actual cultural practitioner to be regarded in any way as ‘middle-class’ was pretty much the end of the line. It usually implied that you were anti-modern, and, worse, anti-multicultural. Cultural-type people, therefore, were falling over one another to become bourgeois-proof. Regional culture (for example), and dialect in particular, was seized upon to provide the new morality comedies of Authenticity – from Trainspotting to The Full Monty; but at the same time there had seldom been such a pan-media boom in essentially bourgeois lifestyle subjects, from funky cooking to interior design and urban gardening.

‘So why,’ – as Quentin Crisp once remarked – ‘was there such a racket?’

‘The ‘dumbing down’ ticket was a waste of time: a debased and pointless phrase which, along with the equally pointless ‘politically correct’ and ‘Middle England’, simply denoted some vague idea of an armed confrontation between, on the one hand, tweedy intellectuals from the Home Counties with maths-teacher haircuts and a passion for opera, and on the other wantonly extravagant, taxpayer-paid-for, brand-new Faculties of Hip-Hop Studies. It was simply the old High and Low culture debate, but now with added Bitterness.

Rather, the 1990s, perhaps, were acting out their version of the cultural identity crisis that occurred towards the end of most eras, and which the critics of the time can never quite agree upon. And as a fin-de-millennium, as well as fin-de-siècle, the Nineties got a triple whammy of crisis.

With regard to the trend for such crises, writing in 1939 about the 1930s, for instance, Malcolm Muggeridge had stated: ‘The present is always chaos, its prophets always charlatans, its values always false. When it has become the past, and may be looked back on, only then is it possible to detect order underlying the chaos, truth underlying the charlatanry, inexorable justice underlying the false values.’

And here was Blake Morrison, in 1999, beginning a polemical essay for the Independent on Sunday newspaper – headlined: ‘All Plugs and No Shocks: PR Driven, ‘accessible’, bland, ‘self-congratulatory’. That’s today’s art scene’ – with a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘“We can assert with some confidence,” Eliot wrote in 1948, “that our own period is one of decline [and] that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago … I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even have to anticipate a period [of] no culture.”’ Morrison adds: ‘It’s not that we’ve got no culture, but something almost as bad is infecting the patient: Blandness, capital B. Not just the quiet, inoffensive kind. No, something more shrill and happy-clappy. A relentlessly cheerful, end-of-millennium, let’s-make-everyone-feel-comfortable blanket of good taste.’

Such doubt and pessimism about the state of culture, therefore, why It’s All Over or has never been worse, would appear to be a traditional sub-strand of culture itself – a homoeopathic dose of fatalism, to keep the arteries of progress clean. It had occurred in Pope’s ‘Dunciad’, back in 1728, and Theophile de Gautier’s Preface to his novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, at the start of the nineteenth century, through nearly every cultural configuration by way of Wilde, Pound, Auden, Shaw and Orwell, to the disillusionment with the idealism of the 1960s shown by Sixties people like Christopher Booker (The Neophiliacs) and even Jonathan Green (All Dressed Up). And so when the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it is announced, one can only really think, ‘Well, no change there, then.’

But as the shutters came down (the moss-green submarine light in the grey penthouse apartment, the pedal-dampened difficult chords, the snapped violin string) and the culture-vulturing city slickers experienced the gathering loss of sympathy between a particular generation and the times they are living in (pondering Muggeridge and Morrison perhaps), there was suddenly the nagging doubt, ‘What if they’re right?’ … That what was now required, maybe, was the exchange (to judge from the shorter history of disillusionment) of a secular for a spiritual path.

For the 1990s seemed to be a decade of dichotomous thinking, which pointed out more sharply than usual the limits of generational sympathy. Within the culture, there were few gradations of points of view – little anxiety of oscillation between Either and Or. Beyond the increasingly important world of visual art – because visual art, in the 1990s, would become a multi-purpose emblem of modernity and regeneration, rather like London’s Docklands had been in the Eighties – the rest of us would simply become aware of subtle, or not so subtle, massaging shifts in the presentation of things … You just got the feeling that you were usually being sold something, and that, as cultural commodification appeared to be approaching critical mass, most of it simply wasn’t worth the price. ‘So much of everything!’, as Peter York has refined the moment into a four-word statement.

Britain, TV and Art

It was Mike Myers, the American star and creator of the spoof nerd cable TV show, Wayne’s World, who really addressed the recent British obsession with searching for expressions of its national identity in the ironic remodelling of its popular culture. For it was Myers, in an unexpected piece of comic shape-shifting, who discarded the definitively American character of Wayne – all gleaming white teeth and cap-sleeve t-shirt – for the amplified Britishness of Austin Powers: psychedelic secret agent and International Man of Mystery.

The cinema release of Austin Powers coincided with the attempt to revive ‘Swinging London’, as an emblem of Britishness for the late 1990s, heralding the official rise of Cool Britannia. So when the fashionable alliance of New British restaurants, BritCulture and a myriad PR companies was suggesting that a return to the colourful optimism of the mid-1960s was just around the corner, Austin Powers marched round the other corner on our cinema screens, leading a parade of sequence-dancing Beefeaters and hand-springing policemen to a waiting E-type Jaguar painted in the colours of the Union Jack. ‘Hello Mrs Kensington …’ he drooled to the leather-clad agent sitting at the wheel, and the mirror held up to Britain’s latest image of itself as neo-Swinging retro-kitsch was showing a perfect reflection – New Irony and all.

As Britain is described by cult American television, so the affectionate satire of Austin Powers can be seen to have sharpened into downright derision on some of the latest imports to British small screens. In a recent re-run of an episode of Mike Judge’s cult cartoon of teenage nihilism, Beavis and Butthead, the sniggering duo were sitting on their ripped sofa as usual, watching a video by the British band the Verve. ‘Aren’t these dudes from that country where everything sucks?’ remarked Beavis, eventually. Similarly, in the adult cartoon South Park, with its accounts of the goings-on in a small boring town in Colorado, the foul-mouthed children of South Park Elementary would sooner sit next to the red-eyed son of Satan in class, than the British kid Pip – ‘because you’re British, ass-wipe’. Pip, dressed in the cap and jacket of the boy hero of Great Expectations, accepts all abuse with a generous good humour that somehow makes him even more pathetic.

What seems to give these American comments on Britishness their comic edge is the manner in which they identify that strand of cultural self-consciousness that has provided Britain with some of the best, as well as the worst, of its national self-expression. Since Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer wed Pop to absurdism in their ground-breaking television show, ‘Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out’, in the early 1990s, the cultural fetishizing of Britishness by way of ironic nostalgia and post-modern caricature has been approaching critical mass. The inevitable response to the burn-out of irony would be the rise of the post-Prozac public confessional – the New Sincerity, aided by its sidekick of New Sincerity with street-credibility – the New Authenticity.

An attempt at self-defence at a time of cultural insecurity, the cry of ‘Any old irony’ had been echoing around the studios of British television for some years, and would seem to have authorized a situation in which – as W. H. Auden once suggested in his poem about the perils of trying to reach Atlantis – it had become impossible to tell the true from the false in terms of articulate statements about Britishness. What had come into relief was a raised tracery of distinguishing national characteristics, from the archaic comedies of British manners acted out by Harry Enfield or Paul Whitehouse, to the baggy British groups with their trademark nasal whine of post-Oasis BritRock. And these are the enduring traits of Britishness that the cutting edge of American comedy has found so easy to lampoon. In addition to the targeted sarcasm of South Park and Beavis and Butthead, who could forget Frasier’s temporary obsession with a horrible English pub? Or the time that a thinly disguised Mary Poppins came to help out The Simpsons, and wound up on the sofa with her stockings rolled down to her ankles and a fag in her mouth?

As the advertising industry has the most calculated interest in reflecting versions of Britain back to itself on television, so it has taken the trend for ironic retro-kitsch – itself an infantilist reflex of nostalgia for our pop-cultural youth – and applied it to articulations of national identity. The TV advert for Mercury ‘One 2 One’ cellular phones, is a computer-generated montage of Vic Reeves interacting with the great British comedian Terry-Thomas, in scenes from the 1960 classic, School for Scoundrels. Beyond the product message, what emerges from this advertisement is a working definition of the way in which ‘Englishness’, as a contemporary concept, is terminally stylized in order to be culturally rehabilitated from any reputation for nationalism or anti-multiculturalism.

This notion is compounded by the latest television advertisement for Rover cars, in which suppositions of Britishness are visually punned into a new, fashionably acceptable vision of Britishness. To an immaculate early-Seventies soundtrack, sourced from vintage Roxy Music and Sparks, the Rover commercial ‘remakes and re-models’ (to borrow from the title of another early Roxy Music number) a British landscape in which the Edinburgh Tattoo becomes the tattooed arm of a young woman at a rave, and a kid munching fast food on a skateboard becomes an arch reference to Meals on Wheels. With a knowing catchphrase, ‘It’s nice to know that things haven’t changed a bit’, Rover’s heavily pushed advertisement is selling New Britain as a state of mind by effectively suggesting that Old Britain is dead and buried.