YouSaid · the spoken record

Neil Tennant

lines on the record

53

first

2007-02-04

most recent

2007-02-04

sittings or episodes

1

sources

podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “My luxury is going to be DVD projector and a huge box of DVDs, so I can sit on my desert island with her tyrant sheet up to a pair of trees and sit there at night watching fabulous movies.”

   2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Well, it's going to be this one book, really, but it's in many volumes. It's the human comedy, the Come to Humane by Balz Which is actually, I can't remember books, it's about 25 books, I think. You know, it's a fantastic picture of France in the Napoleonic period up to the mid-19th century. And it's the sort of thing you need a lot of time, but it's a lot of different, fascinating stories. I note once you got to the end of it, you could just start again”

   2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “My next record throughout my life I've been always being interested in Russian history and in Russian music. When I was a kid, I got given a book about the Russian Revolution. And there's something about the country and the people and the history and the culture that is completely fascinating. This is one of my favourite pieces of Shostakovich, and it's the symphony number five in D minor. And this is from the opening movement.”

   2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I probably have ruled it out to know. I used to think about it quite a lot one time. Yeah, no, it won't happen now, I don't think.”

   2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Yes, I think the big difference and you've just hit on it there with your married mother of toothing is not having children. I think not having children gives you different way of life. I think that is, I've thought about it a lot and I've realized my friends who are gay and straight the ones I have a lot in common with probably don't have children.”

   2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “It wasn't a big deal for me that I mean when we were first pop stars I actually liked the fact that people would speculate about you. I've spent all my whole life trying not to be a stereotype, but people will think of you as gay, it's the first thing that you might think of about the pet shop boys gay'cause if someone is heterosexual, the first thing you think is oh he's heterosexual it's not is it You just assume their sexuality no”

   2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “I hate the phrase gay icon I don't really believe in it. I don't really believe that people's musical taste is totally rooted in their sexuality, that's why. And also the gay icon thing always implies that to be gay is something tragic about it until you like tragic music.”

   2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “She was in Los Angeles when we actually met Dusty, she was living in a pay by day Hollywood Motel. She was really at Rock Bottom. And it was just a sublime moment hearing Dusty Springfield, seeing our music”

   2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Yet funny is not how we thought of her,'cause Dusty was to us and to a lot of people probably a legend, and when she came into the studio they finally tracked her down. Where are you?”

   2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Your next piece of music. The next piece of music is by probably my favorite singer of all time, who we were very lucky enough to work with, Dusty Springfield. It's a great song called I Don't Want to Hear It Anmore.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “In my real life I have invited a very nice house in London and have a house in the country in the northeast. I buy paintings.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Yeah, but we've also spent a lot on our career, you know, on tours, making videos. You invest a lot of it back in the career.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “No, when I left Smash Hits to be in a pop group at the age of thirty, actually almost thirty one, in fact, I felt myself as something slightly embarrassing about it, that it was a sort of ridiculous thing to do. But at the same time I had a confidence in us, and I thought at the very least I'll get the gap here I've never had. And they wrote a funny sort of obituary about me in Smashitz saying he'll be back in a year, you know. And I sort of think that was a joke, but also it was sort of serious as well. That was pretty much how I felt about it.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “It's a funny feeling because it's a slightly insecure feeling. Because one thing that happened is that suddenly we became performers and I had very little performing experience of music. And so it was a funny feeling of insecurity and self-consciousness. At the same time, excitement. I remember when Western goals were number one, we were on top of the pop since the camera was panning over to us, Chris hissed at me Don't look triumphant. Because the 80s was a triumphalist kind of time and we didn't want to be part of that and so I didn't look triumphant. I don't know if I was going to anyway, but I certainly didn't after that”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “I think your rocker company maybe thought we'd be one hit wonder. And obviously a difficult record to follow up because it's very unusual. But of course what Chris and I knew was that we had up our sleeve all these other songs like It's a Sin and what have you. And once you've had a big and then another big hint and then you have another big hit which next represents it's a scene you're sort of you feel slightly more secure though you can never feel secure in pop music.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Well, I was at my cousin's house one night, and we'd watched some old James Cagney gangster moving, and as I got into men turned the light off this line came into my head, and I sometimes be better off dead as a gun in your hands that's pointing. And I thought that's quite good. So I got it and wrote it down and then I carried it on and wrote this whole rat piece which I then recited to Chris. And then Chris and I wrote this other instrumental piece of music one day, very big rich string chords and this dum dum dum bass line. And I realized when I got home that I could say the rap over it, but then when music changed, you would sing the NOS ten town bit and I thought that's good, isn't it? So it's a funny, it's a record that wasn't deliberately written. It's a song that came together.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “My next record is a totally different side of music. I think my favourite singers tend to be women. And in the early seventies we had in our flat in Tottenham we had a record called Billy Holliday The Lady Sings the Blues and it was somebody knocked together a compilation of Billy Holliday to tie in with the film. And we used to play this record back to back with Ziggy Stardust and transformed by Lou Reed and Billy Holliday has this power to take a melody and a lyric and to totally make into it sounds like an organic production of her. It's difficult to think that someone actually sat down and wrote the song. And it's also like a voice that you can't pin down. It's like smoke or something. And it's the kind of music that enthralls me to this day. And it's good morning heartache.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Yes, I thought I would be able to we would be able to make music that was more relevant, that was different. And yes, I did feel that I had a second chance now with this, and Sir Chris and I for years eighty two, eighty three, eighty four, would go into the studio two or three nights a week, and we'd write a song. And in a period being nineteen eighty three, we wrote Western Girls It's a sin rents, love comes quickly, other stuff. We were really getting somewhere.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Yes, Chris Lo it turned out was studying architecture. He was working in architecture practice in Chelsea, just off the King's Road, and I lived in this little studio flat on the King's Road. So I went to the electrical store in the King's Road in Chelsea, and Chrysler walked in, and we started talking about music, and I thought he was very funny, and he lived round the corner, and I told him I wrote songs and I gave my phone up. And by a week later he phoned me up. And we met in the pub of the road. And we started writing songs. Literally immediately.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “In the eighties I was sent by Smashitz to America to launch the American version of Smashheads, which was called Star Hits. And this record is by Shannon, and it's just typical of the sound of the time. And what I really like about it is it has the inherent drama I've always liked music, but it's got this hard street New York sound, and it's got this keyboard line of ding ding ding ding ding ding, which also became pretty much a staple of the early petrochet boy's hand.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “They said, I mean, this is when I was a student, actually, still, they said that you've got something, but I think it's not quite developed yet. And actually they were right, because it would have been a catastrophe, actually, if I'd made released a record in nineteen seventy four that would have done nothing by the singer songwriter called Neil Tennant, a rather wistful album of piano ballads. It would have been a catastrophe because it would have it would have just killed me off probably creatively.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Yes, when I came to London in nineteen seventy two, I used to visit music publishers, and it sort of seemed impossible to mention this now because people just wouldn't let you do this anymore. But I would go with my guitar and I would sit in front of their desk and play them three songs and then play one on the piano in the office. I went to see rocket records when Elton John founded that in the early seventies.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Yes, I this point of was living a little flat on the king's road, and I was still writing songs, and I played them to friends throughout the seventies I was doing that. And I was doing it for pleasure, but I thought I'd missed the boat, really.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “They were like one size too small for me. So you were suffering fashion. I was suffering and I had my hair dyed red as a sort of David Bowie tribute.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Well, when that rucket came out I was at school, but that year I left school and moved down to London to go to college. And I remember I got a summer job. So I went for an interview at the British Museum and I was dressed head to foot in white. I had white Oxford bike trousers which we wore in 1973 and a white shirt and a white tank top and on my feet I was wearing Sort of multicolored shoes yellow and blue shoes with wedge heels which are actually women's shoes, they were very thick soles.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “The next piece of music is by David Bowie. There was a terrible period at the end of the sixties beginning the seventies where the most popular music was progressive rock and I really hated that period. And then the Dark Ages ended at the beginning of 1972 when we were watching the old grey whistle test. And David Bowie came on, and he was so charismatic, and I just found him completely entrancing. But he was an amazing performer, and there was something very, very thrilling. And we used to go to the main record shop in Newcastle, and they had these stereo booths. You could listen to classical music in. And we used to go after school and then say, go to classical bit and say, oh, yes.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Yeah, when I was at school I was a bit snooty. But that was the protection device, I think. And also I wasn't really that bothered about being liked. All my friends, I had a very tight group of friends from all around Newcastle and we met, we used to go to the People's Theatre, which is this very big amateur theatre company, and that's where I formed my first group, which is a folk group called Dust. By that point I was writing songs really quite seriously from the age of sixteen, I would say I was quite a serious songwriter at that point.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “I always used to tell people when I was about sixteen seventeen that I was going to become a pop star, and I would be really famous.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “No, I wasn't. I always had a couple of good friends. I liked the feeling of not belonging. It consolidated that feeling in me that I wasn't like the rest of them, and that I was going to do something special with my life. And I would do whatever I wanted, and I would have no fear about it.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Yes, I was sort of relatively bright. The school I went to was a difficult school for me to wake as it was a very sort of sporty kind of school. You know, Newcastle is a great football place. I wasn't really interested in football.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “No way we did music the first three years and then you dropped it, you know. But I learned the cello. I played the cello for three years at school. One of the reasons I liked playing the cello is because you could go in the music room in the lunch break and I used to go and play the piano actually in the music rooms. I didn't use the practice of the cello really.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “The next record, I mean I listened to classical music in my adult life, I've listened to classical music as much as pop music. And the first classical music I can really remember affecting me was when I was at school, St. Cuthbert's grammar school in Newcastle. One day we used to have the music lesson for some reason in the big hall where the assembly was held, and he said he was going to play this music and it was Vaughn Williams fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, which is a very English piece of music. Put it on, and I just felt I never heard anything like this before the richness of the harmony and with his plaintiff melody really hit me sort of physically and I was just really, really moved by it.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “I don't know if they were riled, I wouldn't mind if I had, but I was just surprised that actually there was a sort of minor debate about it. We were on the cover of the Salvation Armies magazine The War Cry, who thought was wonderful that we brought Sin back into the public agenda.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “I mean, it's the sin was also an early example of the Pet-Up boys trying to bring a different kind of subject matter into public.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Yes, I guess it was just came from my subconscious that when we were at school you always seemed to be taught that everything was a sin, everything you wanted to do was a sin. And so I put that in a song.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Yes, it is when I was writing the lyrics I sort of meant it something like a joke. I didn't really take it very seriously anyway.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “I always be interested in religion and religions and systems of belief. But I think when I was a teenager, you know, you start to question all of that.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Yes, it was very secure, you know, it was just the way the world was, and we were Catholic and I was an altar boy. For I don't know from about the age of nine, I was about 15 or 14 or 15, I think. I used to go when I was at primary school. I used to go and serve at eight o'clock mass. So at the age of nine I could me and the priest would do the whole Latin mass in about in less than twenty minutes, and I like that because you didn't have to go to school assembly when you got, they would take your breakfast in a little Tupperware box and while they were having assembly, I'd be having this little breakfast my mother would have made for me.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “My father was a sales rep, and we used to like that because in the summer holidays we used to travel with him, so he'd be going down to Darlington from Newcastle, and my brother Simon and I would sit in the back of the car and get driven to Darlington and wander around Darlington. We used to go out to a transport cafe or something for what I would now call lunch. What would you have called it? I don't know. I must have called it dinner then, I think.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Yes, I remember we were allowed to stay up and watch them on Sunday night London Palladium, and on the television you could hear on the street outside the London Palladium we could hear crowds screaming It was like the London Padium under siege from Beatles fans. It's when Beatlemania was the day Beetlemania started and it was live on the television.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “My second record is for me the first pop record that really really made me an obsessive pop fan. I mean at the time this record was so famous it was like a nursery rhyme you hear children just sing it in the street and she loves you.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Yes, there was always music from both sides of my family, and I was the end of that generation that grew up with the light program where you would have this mad combination of music playing so you'd be used to hearing Frank Chaxfield in his orchestra playing Moon River or something and it would be followed by Jerry and the Pacemakers or Cliff Richard or whatever. So there was that weird thing of easy listening and newpop music being played together.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Yes, I was born in North Shields, which was a sort of fishing port, still is a fishing port. And then when I was, I don't know, six or seven, we moved to Gosset, which is a suburb of Newcastle.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “How did it Rex Harrisony? I can't really remember the words now. It was sort of anyone seen my cat, the one with the long tail. I can't remember it went after that. There was only one performance in her back garden about two people came to see it and they got a bit bored halfway through, but we carried on and finished it. Did you feel the thrill of performance as you were up there? No, I felt a slight disappointment that it wasn't quite good enough. So you were born in the...”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Yes, I think it did. It's a very hazy memory now. Can you remember any of the words? All I can remember is the first song was called Has Anyone Seen My Cat?”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Yes, but we made up the songs in our heads me and a girl at primary school decided we were going to do a musical. I mean this would have been like 1963. Musicals were very hot in those days and so we wrote this musical called The Girl Who Pulled Tails about a girl, a naughty girl who used to pull the tails of cats and how she got into trouble doing this.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “I was no, I wasn't the sort of boy that wrote poetry. I wrote songs. I got a guitar when I was twelve years old, and I taught myself the guitar chords. And then I worked out how to wear the guitar chords on the piano we had at home. And so I learned a lot about chord changes from playing the Beatles music. And that's really, and so after a while I couldn't be bothered to play those songs. So I'd learn a new chord and I would write a song around it. This is when I was like 13, 14.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Yes, and the wait it was choosing that record to play today made me it never occurred to me before that this sort of influence has just seeped into my brain from listening to something like that.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “There's huge things Yes, because in those days record players were furniture, you know. And we just had a little portable record player at that point. And the big, you know, at the time this period, everyone's parents had the soundtrack of the musical My Fair Lady. And I love the way that Rex Harrison talked and sung sort of simultaneously. And also I like the wits. It's a very, very witty musicalness. And the lyrics are really, really clever. And this is his first song, Why Can't the English teach their children how to speak?”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “My first record is one of my first experiences of music is we used to go on Sunday afternoons to my mother's father's house, my grandfather, and he was very into what you would now call hi-fi, then you called hi-fi, and he had this big record player in a sort of mahogany case.”

    2007-02-04 · Desert Island Discs · Neil Tennant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source