Gilbert and George object to the term ‘gentrification’ to describe the ongoing overhaul to the east London neighbourhood that has been their home for almost 60 years.

‘We think it’s classist and sexist, because you’d never say ladyfication. Or Jewification. Or blackification. Or Bangladeshification’, they once informed the Guardian, with their signature prankishness. ‘They’ve only got it in for white people. It’s punishing the honkies.’

The artists moved to Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets in 1968 and quickly occupied dilapidated basement rooms in a former Huguenot house on Fournier Street. More than half a century later, they remain at the same address, having bought the entire house in the 1970s. From here they adhere to the routine of work, walking and eating out, established early on, even though they are now in their 80s.

At one end of the road, ‘gentrification’ brings a Gotham City skyline to Liverpool Street; at the other, what survives from an earlier overhaul of the neighbourhood that began when Gilbert and George arrived in these parts, when ‘Bangladeshification’ succeeded the ‘Jewification’ that altered the neighbourhood from the end of the 19th century. The Brick Lane Jamme Masjid at one corner of Fournier Street was a synagogue from 1897, and originally a Huguenot chapel. Nearby Christ Church, the imposing 18th-century Anglican church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, is a relic from an altogether different age. A recent development in the neighbourhood that brings the past, the present and the future together in one building is the Gilbert and George Centre, which opened in 2023 and occupies a former brewery. ‘All the museums now are woke’, they stated in 2021, which is one of the reasons they are funding a venture that will survive when they’ve gone – as a testament to their history on these streets and the works the locale inspired.

The art world continues to suffer from the condition of ‘woke’. As a consequence, the institutions also suffer from low attendance figures and diminishing revenue. Despite being elderly white men, Gilbert and George have not been sidelined, censored or silenced. From October this year until June 2026, London’s Hayward Gallery will exhibit a large selection of their 21st-century pictures.

The scale of the exhibition is a testament to their persistence and relevance (although it’s dwarfed by their major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2007). A recent Times Literary Supplement review of James Birch’s Gilbert and George and the Communists (2025), in which the author relays his experience of accompanying the artists to Russia and China in the 1990s, suggests Gilbert and George have been contemporary ‘for longer than almost anyone else’. It was at the Hayward Gallery in 1972 that they came to prominence, as part of The New Art show. They were as at odds with those who exhibited alongside them as they were with their fellow students at St Martin’s School of Art, where they met in 1967. They were opposed to the conceptualism that was in vogue. They wore suits. They insisted on good manners. ‘Two clean boys’, according to Gilbert, ‘with funny ideas behind the scenes’. They were, and remain, patriots, royalists and conservatives, while being pro-sexual-freedom and anti-religion. They often dismiss other artists as meaningless, and accuse them of not asking questions. ‘We are quite disillusioned with that kind of art ourselves. We want an art that is in your face’, Gilbert said in 2017. ‘We are confrontational.’ As other artists classified themselves as radicals railing against the establishment (which, incidentally, often funded them), Gilbert and George produced work that disturbed those on both the left and the right. ‘We want our art to bring out the bigot from inside the liberal and conversely bring out the liberal from inside the bigot’, they said in 2023.

The poster for the 1972 Hayward Gallery show features them in their staple tweedy suits, emerging from or disappearing into bushy foliage. It could almost be a double LP cover for the time. The work exhibited (‘The Shrubberies’) was a development on The General Jungle pictures that preceded it: floor-to-ceiling charcoal drawings in which the two men are solitary figures in nature’s wilderness. They described themselves as country boys, with George (Passmore) hailing from Devon, England and Gilbert (Proesch) a native of the mountainous Dolomites in northern Italy. It wasn’t until they embraced photography that they became urban artists, simultaneously creating the grid format to frame their montages that they use today. Their photographic works from the early 1970s capture them drunk at a Bethnal Green wine bar, or within the sterility of their home with its panelled walls and bare floorboards. The most enduring pictures focus on the everyday subjects that other artists discarded, whether it was the working-class locals, graffiti, headlines on newspaper stands and sex cards in phone boxes.

Collectively, their work provides a unique social document covering the changing nature of the East End – and London – that’s been described as subversive, shocking, tragic and comic. A common thread running through the work is those ancient East End streets the two young men navigated as odd interlopers, and now wander like disembodied figures or ghosts, forever indifferent to the changes they’ve been privy to for more than half a century.

When they moved there in 1968, swinging London was a rumour rather than a reality on these streets, but change was imminent. That other infamous local double act, the Kray twins, were sentenced to lengthy prison terms that year. A budding entrepreneur established the short-lived retail unit, ‘Cockneyland’, to transform the remnants of the urban, white working-class caricature associated with the area into a tourist attraction, with merchandise to match. The BBC returned East End natives, actress Georgia Brown and composer Lionel Bart, to their Jewish East End roots, in the midst of a modern diaspora, to address the question: ‘Who Are the Cockneys Now?’ It was also the year of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.

The past was being demolished, but the future appeared to have failed before it got off the ground. The new east London tower block, Ronan Point, a glimpse of the housing of tomorrow, was blown apart by a gas explosion, which killed four residents. Still, the slum tenements survived from the Victorian era, which journalists and social anthropologists had reported on a century earlier, as authors Arthur Morrison and Jack London transposed their East End experience into novels that were heavy on Grand Guignol-style horror and gore, and light on the humanity of the inhabitants. These transient missionaries exposed the horrors; the local press overlooked them. As London wrote in The People of the Abyss(1903): ‘Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields to Whitechapel… And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which, filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter with the East End as a living place for men and women.’ A similar approach is relevant now, when the mainstream media report on the East End, and London generally, by rolling out the official mantra on multiculturalism. Purposely ignoring divisions that debunk the myth and worsen the reality, the more this defunct fantasy is perpetuated.

Shortly after their arrival in the East End in 1968, Gilbert and George embarked on their ‘Art For All’ vision. Perched on a table beneath a nearby railway viaduct surrounded by bomb sites, they performed ‘Underneath the Arches’, the song associated with local boy-made-good Bud Flanagan, who died that year. Bemused locals gathered like the small congregational groups that once surrounded preachers, salvationists and socialist orators on those streets, rather than two men in suits with painted silver faces. ‘The Singing Sculpture’ (1969), as the piece was entitled, propelled them into galleries in Europe and New York, making them the exhibit, a move that is central to their art. Recalling those early years, Gilbert has said: ‘This whole idea of making ourselves the centre of our art and trying to leave something behind, that was totally unusual.’

Despite the localised detail, the work has been shown in galleries throughout the globe, throughout the years, with Gilbert and George maintaining they are not indigenously London artists. The London natives among us, familiar with similar streets, along with many of those the couple have walked along, tend to disagree. The territory they document is unique because no other working-class area in east London, or south-east London, had been subjected to the successive waves of immigration, until now. The streets and buildings the artists photographed convey a mood and evoke memories for those whose history and ancestry is in these streets.

Arguably, Gilbert and George are in keeping with that tradition of writers and sociologists from the 19th century who delved into these netherworlds, except they only moved to the East End because they were ‘poor’ and remained because it was ‘romantic’. The duo observed, but rarely commented on, all they were witness to. This annoyed some critics, who accused them of exploitation and voyeurism – and, all too predictably, ‘racism’ and ‘fascism’.

If it’s true that they’ve been contemporary longer than anyone else, it’s perhaps because they held their nerve, and were always ahead of the curve. The culture has caught up with them, and as a consequence they are now attributed national-treasure status. A position that diminishes the impact of the work in the context of the time it was produced.

Some of us arrived at Gilbert and George through pop and fashion, rather than art. We were aware of these men in suits when, back in 1977, they were figures sometimes found at London punk clubs, gay clubs and the Blitz in Holborn, which soon attracted the theatrical new romantic crowd. The couple’s sartorial style pulled us towards art galleries; their work, which moved from monochrome to the vivid palette associated with Mondrian, Disney and stained glass, kept us returning. According to George: ‘When most people see our pictures they think the images are talking about themselves rather than us. They see their own lives in relation to the pictures.’ It was The Dirty Words Pictures (1977) that drew some of us in, with content and titles taken from local graffiti (‘Paki’, ‘Queer’, ‘Cunt’, ‘Scum’). Some of these insults were levelled at Gilbert and George by local natives when they first became Spitalfields residents (‘faggots’, ‘poofs’). Those of us who experienced similar during our formative years remember the culprits as boys we didn’t want to be. Boys we sometimes wanted, but never wanted to become.

Similar figures featured in works of Gilbert and George, who were criticised for essentially elevating these working-class subjects above their social class. Using a line-up of local young men in ‘Patriots’ (1980) led to charges of ‘racism’ from critics who failed to notice a Bangladeshi boy among them. The young white men in ‘Four Knights’ (1980) caused consternation. One particular gallery, exhibiting the picture years later, stated: ‘Its meaning is ambiguous, perhaps contrasting the alienation of modern youth with the heroes of medieval chivalry, but the reason for Gilbert and George’s interest is unclear, should these young men be admired or feared?’

Before national-treasure status beckoned and blurred the controversies of earlier years, those who embrace a cosmetic radicalism and controversy in the arts found Gilbert and George impossible to categorise. They were an antidote to the leftist outlook artists conformed to; they resisted being courted by the gay lobby. It was only when they targeted religion, and particularly Christianity, that liberal critics could truly let out a sigh of relief and comfortably shower them with praise. But perhaps Gilbert and George’s take on Christianity isn’t as simplistic as the views of the critics who welcomed it. Between the back yard of their house on Fournier Street and the studio it connects to, where they produce their pictures, there is an ancient stone fountain inscribed with a quote attributed to Jesus in the book of John: ‘If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.’

In 2006, The Sonofagod Pictures were accompanied by the question, ‘Is Jesus heterosexual?’. No such statement was issued about the Prophet Muhammad in the series, but Gilbert and George have perhaps gone further than most successful artists when using imagery associated with Islam, which has become so prevalent in the East End and beyond. ‘Islam’ from London Pictures (2011) features the disembodied faces of Gilbert and George beneath authentic newspaper headlines (‘London “Islam” school teaches hate’; ‘Islam “insult” Briton faces lash’).

‘Maybe 10 years ago, all non-Muslim houses in the street were kicked in’, George revealed in a 2017 interview. ‘They used to say, “Fuck off out of this, this is a holy place”.’ This is part of a wider local trend that picked up momentum in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and according to Gilbert and George, when the imams moved into the East End. There were, and remain, attempts to make the neighbourhood a ‘no gay’ zone, with even a ‘Muslim patrol’ confronting gay men, anyone with alcohol, and women in vest tops and short skirts. In 2011, a 21-year-old artist friend of theirs, and another St Martin’s alumni, was set upon by a gang in a ‘homophobic’ attack that left him paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. The LGBT activist, Peter Tatchell, organised a march to address this issue. He wrote: ‘Earlier this year, stickers were plastered around East London declaring it a “Gay Free Zone”, warning that Allah’s punishment for homosexuality is severe.’

Art critic Jonathan Jones, who has written at length on Gilbert and George throughout the latter part of their career, maintains that their most truthful works are made when they are drawn to darker subjects. The Dirty Words Pictures were offensive and controversial to those on the left, while The Fundamental Pictures (1996), with titles such as ‘Spunk’ and ‘Piss’, were obscene to the more conservative art aficionado. The Naked Shit Pictures (1995) were comic to some, because two middle-aged male artists, famously forever in tweed suits, were suddenly naked with flaccid penises, parted arses, testicles heading towards the knees, and white y-fronts at ankle level.

But it’s perhaps the later works, particularly London Pictures (2011) and similar, that provide the most truthful account of what London has become – the modern Grand Guignol that has echoes as dark as that discovered by social anthropologists in the Victorian past. It is these that will be remembered as prescient, troubling and tragic.

Originally published in Spiked.

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It’s heartening to meet a public figure who opts for silence, detachment and tact. ‘I distance myself when I speak about things by not going into details about the immediacy of the here and now,’ André Aciman tells me.

In his view writers should not respond rashly to major news events, unless they’re reporters: ‘You have to give these events time to develop a new skin, before you write about them.’ If only other authors and celebrities were as restrained. So many speak out in pursuit of followers on social media, appeasing those who will mobilise and target them if they fail to hold the correct views. ‘I think an entirely intelligent person is always ambivalent,’ he says. ‘You have to be ambivalent because you can always see the two sides of the same thing.’

Throughout his works he refers to ‘vigils’ to describe the return to places from the past that bring a memory to life in the present. ‘This is how I always travel,’…

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The future has often been a focus for David Byrne, even in his formative years when he was fronting Talking Heads.

In one particular lyric from ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ (1988) he envisages it as an idyllic Eden. He laments the passing of 7-Elevens, as flowers and cornfields have replaced shopping malls and parking lots (‘If this is paradise / I wish I had a lawnmower’). Byrne’s futurology, shared by his frequent collaborator, Brian Eno, always pushed him ahead of his contemporaries when it came to creating tomorrow’s music today. This pursuit of innovation persists now, even though Byrne is an elderly man in his seventies. Since quitting Talking Heads in 1991, Byrne has successfully, and sometimes brilliantly, put his name to dance scores, film soundtracks, musicals and books. Byrne’s most recent solo album, American Utopia, was released in 2018 and turned into a Broadway musical in 2019.

It is now five decades on from Talking Heads playing ‘Psycho Killer’ at the CBGB club in New York. And it’s nearly four decades on from Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s acclaimed 1984 film of Talking Heads in concert. This month, the album of the same title inspired by Demme’s film is re-issued; and the film returns to cinemas later this autumn.

Much has changed since Stop Making Sense’s debut. The future Byrne speculated about has arrived. The world has changed – and so has David Byrne. Sadly, contemporary cultural trends have dimmed what made his work so weird and wonderful. And they’ve exacerbated his worst political tendencies.

Byrne has always made politically correct noises in relation to several US presidents over the years. He made perfunctory jibes at Reagan, Bush and Trump. And he expressed the obligatory reverence for Obama. But his political correctness is much more pronounced today. In the concert film version of American Utopia (2020), directed by Spike Lee, he nods to all the post-millennial pastimes that occupy orthodox celebrity radicals, from tackling climate change to dismantling systemic racism. He has always shared the prejudices of, and reached out to, the urban liberal upper-class and art-house crowd that have been part of his fanbase from the off.

Byrne arrived in New York in the early 1970s. He was born in Scotland, raised in Baltimore, and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Maryland Institute College of Art, before dropping out. He then moved to New York and formed Talking Heads with Chris Frantz on drums and Tina Weymouth on bass in 1975 (Jerry Harrison arrived later).

Byrne was the Nostradamus of the new wave, in a band that anticipated post-punk before punk. Even though Talking Heads were dressed like preppie Republicans and sang about the Protestant work ethic, Byrne moved and sounded like no other front man. He had a nervy yelp of a voice that was pitch perfect for the arch, disconnected lyrics that bounced off his lips. He seemed as uncomfortable in the modern world as he was on stage.

In recent years, as band members’ memoirs settled scores and opened old wounds, Byrne has been revealed as an egotistical figure, with an incapacity to make eye contact or acknowledge that colleagues deserved a songwriting credit. The implication was that he was on the ‘spectrum’, before we even talked about the ‘spectrum’. During an interview in 2020, Frantz said of his erstwhile bandmate: ‘His brain is wired in such a way that he doesn’t know where he ends and other people begin. He can’t imagine that anyone else would be important.’ Perhaps that is what has made him so interesting.

Talking Heads were the quintessential New York band, with Byrne an honorary New Yorker. But his relationship with Americans beyond New York has always been more ambiguous. Their homespun lives crop up often in his sometimes obtuse lyrics, full of apple pie, peanut butter, small hopes, big dreams. Coming from relatively humble origins himself, and being an immigrant, Byrne seemingly shared an affinity with and an affection for these figures. But at other times, he could seem sneering and mocking. Whatever their shortcomings, it seems their greatest crime was that they were not native New Yorkers. In ‘The Big Country’ (1978) Byrne observes these tribes and their reservations from the window of a passing plane – the farmlands, the factories, the baseball diamonds. ‘I wouldn’t live there if you paid me’, he sings.

But by and large, Byrne was busy writing like an alien, making a miracle of the mundane, as though he was the man who fell to Earth. In the film, True Stories(1986), he travels through the fictional Virgil, Texas coming upon madcap characters that might belong in a David Lynch script. The kookiness continued into the 2000s when he wrote a popular blog. Discovering IKEA in his middle years, he even described the experience with the forensic detail of an early Nicholson Baker novel. Some wondered if celebrity had taken him so far into the wealthy cocoon of the New York art-house intelligentsia that he’d lost sight of the reality of those outside it. Had this simply become his schtick, some asked?

But this kookiness had always been central to Byrne’s art. By the time Stop Making Sense appeared in the mid-1980s, the twitching limbs and jerky non-dance moves had been exaggerated and honed to become his persona. This, too, was his schtick.

Band members have said the more successful he got, the more distant he appeared. This is clear in the shift in some of the lyrical content, when he writes of sensations and feelings, like a Beckett voice without a home, a name, a future or a past. He was solitary, solipsistic even. ‘There’s a party In my mind / And I hope it never stops’, Byrne sang on ‘Fear Of Music’ in 1979. By 2004, on the solo album, Grown Backwards, he was singing, ‘I’m glad I can’t see beyond myself’. He once even sang that compassion was too time consuming.

His natural oddness went hand in hand with his obsession with the future. ‘It’ll be as easy to hook your computer up to a central television bank as it is to get the week’s groceries’, he predicted in a 1979 interview. In the same interview, he also said that, ‘[people will] be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches’. In 1985, on ‘In The Future’, the predictions were more hit and miss. But he was on the money with this one: ‘In the future, half of us will be “mentally ill”.’ He could have added that many of us would be on the spectrum, and some of us would simply be grifters angling for victim status.

The future trend he didn’t foresee was the desire to deny that any progress has been made on social issues. Particularly on the issue of race. How could he have known? At a time when races were divided musically, Byrne was one of those figures instrumental in creating a common ground. Talking Heads introduced African rhythms into their later records; Byrne introduced rhythms from everywhere else to his solo albums. He did write an essay in 1999 for the New York Times entitled ‘Why I hate World Music’. But in a 2006 interview, he justified the use of musical styles from around the world in the following terms: ‘I would like to think that once something moves you and you have an emotional involvement with it, and you see some relevance in it to your own life, then it’s a little bit harder, maybe, to look at the people that produced it as being just exotic others that don’t have any connection to you or relevance to you.’

It’s hard to see Byrne saying something as genuinely progressive today.

Time has passed, trends have changed, and both Byrne and Talking Heads have since been accused of cultural appropriation by hardline race hustlers. They have also nearly been subject to another trend Byrne failed to anticipate: cancellation. This was a genuine prospect when, in 2020, a promotional film made for Demme’s Stop Making Sense came to public attention and remained there. It was a skit with Byrne interviewing himself by disguising himself as various journalists, one of whom was an African American. Cue a ‘blackface’ scandal. It showed how today, past mistakes and bad choices can return to overshadow the present and bury careers. The party going on in David Byrne’s head was suddenly halted.

He apologised, atoning for his sin in the modern public square that was Twitter (and is now X): ‘It’s like looking in a mirror and seeing someone else – you’re not, or were not, the person you thought you were.’ And there’s more: ‘I’d like to think I am beyond making mistakes like this, but clearly at the time I was not. Like I say at the end of our Broadway show, American Utopia, “I need to change too”… and I believe I have changed since then.’ Former Talking Heads bandmate Frantz was not convinced: ‘It’s true that his public image has changed. But friends of mine assure me that he hasn’t. I think he probably just decided that he could catch more bees with honey.’

But there’s an argument to say that Byrne’s mea culpa wasn’t fake or a schtick, but that it was authentic. It brought out of him that figure that has reared its head throughout his career, and more regularly in recent years. This unique, innovative, talented, stylish, exceptional oddball was becoming The Weedy, Woke, White Bloke. The politically correct one.

After all, this side of him was visible during his blogging years, in the nascent days of the new century. In one post, he recounts venturing beyond his familiar furrow – between his home in Midtown Manhattan and his office in SoHo – and visiting a carnival in Brooklyn. Here Byrne, marvelling at the mundane, was joyful at finding soul-food menus chalked-up on broken wooden pallets. He recalled that he and Brian Eno were mugged at the same festival decades earlier, but argued that the strong police presence at the present festival was now down solely to racism.

Excruciating as this was, it pales beside the moment The Weedy, Woke, White Bloke pops up in Byrne’s musical, American Utopia. Here Byrne delivers his interpretation of Janelle Monáe’s ‘Hell You Talmbout’, in which the suited, barefoot cast list names of black men and women killed by police officers. Stats and facts are overlooked to accommodate a stunt that conveniently confirms the narrative of systemic white racism. ‘Say Their Name!’ he and the cast chorus, as though at a revivalist meeting, in anticipation of a response from the Broadway congregation.

If the motive was authentic, the method felt fake, schmaltzy. It belittled the experience of the families slotted into the film holding images of their dead children. It reduced a serious and complex issue to the level of a show tune with audience participation, raised black fists and white man’s overbite.

Some nights, the routine was met with silence from the stalls. On occasions, a few fans made for the exit. In one interview, Byrne dismissed these dissenters as being at odds with his usual demographic. They were out-of-towners; they weren’t native New Yorkers. They were people like those from the big country beyond the Big Apple. They have a different take on the events that followed the death of George Floyd, and the big moment of the discredited Black Lives Matter movement. They think of the burning buildings, destroyed businesses and ruined livelihoods. Not that those who enjoy the rarefied existence of wealthy New York residents like David Byrne were unaffected by the carnage and chaos. It affected New York, too. It’s just that they chose to ignore it.

Byrne now lives in Chelsea and cycles to his office in SoHo, where he works on his online magazine, Reasons To Be Cheerful. It attempts to find hopeful ways of promoting a happy, cohesive future, free from the division and alienation of the present that’s partly attributable to the technological developments Byrne highlighted all those years ago.

New York City is currently encountering its own major difficulties, similar to the days when David Byrne settled there and Talking Heads played those sets at CBGB. The crime and the homelessness are rumoured to have brought about an exodus of wealthy New Yorkers, art-house intelligentsia and orthodox celebrity radicals. Those out-of-towners, with their apple pie, peanut butter, and the hopes and concerns they share with a majority of similar Americans, must be thinking: ‘I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.’

Originally published in Spiked, September 2023.

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By the time he’d made it on to record and into the charts, Neil Tennant had lived many lives. As had many of those listeners who came on board with the debut album, Please, in 1986 and stayed interested in, if not always loyal to, the Pet Shop Boys canon.

Much of this canon features in the forthcoming Pet Shop Boys collection, Smash, which covers the duo’s career by way of 55 singles recorded between 1985 and 2020. Beginning with ‘West End Girls’, released the month PC Keith Blakelock was savagely murdered during the Broadwater Farm riots, Smash concludes with a song about a boy who won’t leave home, during the peak of the Covid pandemic. If a Pet Shop Boys line wasn’t on our lips or on our minds, it was out there somewhere as the world changed – as our world changed when love, loss and death punctuated the odd party, club night or wake. After friends have gone the way of family members and all flesh, our faculties will desert us, but those lyrics will linger on: ‘This is our last chance for goodbye. Let the music begin.’ The songs turn up in the most unlikely venues: a track from Actually plays pianissimo in the waiting room at a doctor’s surgery; ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’ can be heard in a boisterous Morrisons café at breakfast time.

Neil Tennant, born in 1954, is older than those of us born at the beginning of the 1960s, yet not old enough to be the funny uncle he sang about on the album, Introspective. He’s more the elder sibling, the older brother. My one sibling, my older brother, died in his late thirties in the early 1990s, between the albums, Behaviour and Very. He would now be the same age as Tennant, who turns 70 next year. It’s the age pop stars are never expected to reach. Many of those who accompanied Tennant into adulthood – and his fellow Pet Shop Boy, Chris Lowe, through adolescence – didn’t make it. Marc Bolan was halted by a car crash at 29; David Bowie died days after making 69. Lou Reed reached 71. Bryan Ferry remains with us.

These figures, those fashions, filled us with an aesthetic, an outlook that took us in the direction of the future and the past, the retro and the modern. For some it took them where books had already taken them. The novels of Evelyn Waugh introduced Neil Tennant to another world; one that he wanted to be part of. Before he got to join it, there were other lives to live: a stint with amateur theatre as a teenager; fronting a folk group as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, when the hippy hour was succeeded by glam rock’s big moment.

At 17, Tennant declared, unashamedly, he would one day be a pop star. Amid power cuts, three-day weeks, three television channels and one Top Twenty, pop music enlivened the lives of the young and the dispossessed raised in poor urban postcodes, ports (Tennant, North Shields) or resorts (Lowe, Blackpool). Or at least it did for those who harboured a certain sensibility. It was a private code, rather like the ‘camp’ Susan Sontag defined a decade earlier. But this wasn’t exclusively the preserve of homosexuals, as she believed camp to be. It was a credo observed by those who didn’t want to be pinned down to one tribe.

Still, names were needed. And in a 1976 Harpers & Queen essay, writer Peter York came up with one for these ‘creators of the dominant high-street style aesthetic of the Seventies’: ‘Them’. They made the supreme sacrifice, York wrote, by forgoing looking sexy for looking interesting. But only those in the know could read the references and decipher the code.

Key figures within the group combined a camp aesthetic with an art-school sensibility. It included the filmmaker, Derek Jarman, who would later direct a Pet Shop Boys video. Some came from money or with a pedigree. Some lived in poor homes in posh neighbourhoods. When the big Biba store closed in 1975, Kensington High Street was replaced by King’s Road as the capital of their world. It was where Neil Tennant found a home early on, and where he met Chris Lowe in 1981 and formed the Pet Shop Boys. The young and dispossessed who arrived from the suburbs, the provinces, or simply crossed the river to SW3, were given the title ‘junior grade Them’ by York. His celebrated essay was published as the punk attitude was taking hold. He cites the high season of ‘Them’ as the summer of 1973. This was the moment Neil Tennant, fresh to London (‘I left from the station / With a haversack and some trepidation’) took a job at the British Museum before beginning college. His dyed hair belonged on Bowie; his white Oxford bags belonged on Gatsby; and his women’s platform shoes belonged on every queer outsider who made the leap from glam to Them, and discovered an alternative adult world of polymorphous sexuality, swish androgyny and tacky transvestism, in which they were often a bystander and always a cheerleader.

The Pet Shop Boys covered all the above in the song ‘Requiem in Denim and Leopard Skin’ in 2012: ‘I visualised the flashbacks: school, punk rock, success… Biba’s closing sale… Bryan in a tux… Adam’s in a Jarman film…’ Tennant wrote it as an elegy for a friend, but it drew on his experience of an era that blossomed into the new romanticism and gender-bending. Trends he absorbed and then discarded when he emerged alongside Chris Lowe, phoenix-like, from the embers of this era in the mid-1980s. The Pet Shop Boys were different even then. Suitably dressed and stationary, Tennant declared lyrics and relayed songs rather than performed them. The music made you want to dance; the words made you want to read.

As a thirtysomething, he was old to be making his debut as a pop star, having missed his moments during the movements that passed during his formative years. He was a grown-up: he’d settled into education and settled down to jobs, the last of which had been that of assistant editor at Smash Hits. When he became the pop star he once announced he would be, he didn’t welcome it with relief and gratitude. Instead, when making his debut on Top of the Pops in December 1985, en route to the No1 spot, he appeared haughty and aloof. ‘Don’t look triumphant’, Chris Lowe advised him before the music and the miming began. From that moment, another life had begun for Tennant. One that brings to mind a line from Waugh’s Decline and Fall, the book that started it all: ‘If everyone at 20 realised that half his life was to be lived after 40…’

Now the Pet Shop Boys have passed 40. Neil Tennant is heading to seventy, and Chris Lowe isn’t far behind. It’s 50 years since a roll call of dead pop stars showed us all – Tennant, Lowe, the class of ’73 – that the good life was somewhere out there. It was rumoured to be glamorous, gaudy and a tad fey. Much of what drew us to the margins back then has found its way into the mainstream. All of which has come at a cost. There have been gains; there have been losses.

From the vantage point of the present there is something quaint about David Bowie playing gay for a day, and Lou Reed dating a transsexual. Even the Warhol Factory fodder cast as ‘superstars’ by the artist, and immortalised in Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, appear endearing in their efforts to pay homage to old Hollywood starlets. And they did so despite the hard drugs and harsh drag that determined their lives, and the heroin addiction and hormone treatment that hurried their deaths along.

Once Warhol protégé Candy Darling carried tampons in a translucent handbag to pass himself off as a ‘she’. Now Dylan Mulvaney is promoting Tampax on TikTok, and the inverted commas have disappeared. In place of the anomalous transsexuals and transvestites that made us odd outsiders avert our eyes and prick up our ears, there is now a militant trans lobby which is treated as a protected species. A man can seemingly spend three months in a frock or a fright wig and be classified as female no matter how evident his penis and his five-o-clock shadow. Sam Smith is in nipple pasties, Eddie Izzard is in ‘girl mode’ and anyone who refers to them with the wrong pronouns will incur the wrath of the Twitter mob. I’d rather hoped this is what the Pet Shop Boys meant by ‘Give Stupidity a Chance’ from 2019. But I fear it wasn’t.

Like ‘I’m With Stupid’, the 2006 song about Tony Blair’s relationship with George W Bush, ‘Give Stupidity a Chance’ was another rare excursion into politics. These songs took us beyond the arguments Culture Club proffered when Boy George attempted politics, informing us that ‘war is stupid’ and people are, too. The Pet Shop Boys are too smart for such simplicity; too smooth for those hobbies picked up in student bars, or found on badges, and dragged into middle age by actors and musicians as a form of method activism. Around the time of Pet Shop Boys’ Agenda EP (2019), Neil Tennant rightly suggested that politics needed to get serious again. ‘I can imagine writing a Trump-inspired lyric’, he said. ‘Unfortunately stupidity is a new trend in politics.’

But blaming the drift towards imbecility on Trump’s election or Brexit, as Tennant seemed to be doing, was misleading. The reaction to the Brexit vote from the Remain camp surpassed the ridiculous; and those that dismissed much of the US electorate as ‘deplorables’ contributed to the election of President Trump. Moreover, the radical and the reactionary have been reversed today. As Nick Cave pointed out recently, going to church and being conservative is the modern way of ‘fucking with people’.

This year, the Pet Shop Boys released the Lost EP, containing songs recorded five years earlier. The title refers to a society that appears to be uncertain where it’s heading and shaky about its survival. The old order is rumoured to be crumbling, with ancient, straight white men cast as the fall guys. Posh students deface art and posh pensioners block roads. And race hustlers demand preferential treatment in the present and reparations for the past. Yet those intent on dragging us back to a darker age, or simply eradicating ‘whiteness’, appear more lost than the targets they attack. And they are too clueless to anticipate what might appear in the clearing if they succeed.

The equalities lobby – most notably one-time gay-rights campaigners Stonewall – has perhaps lost its way more than any other pressure group. For it to acknowledge that society has progressed on its pet issues would leave it without an objective, a grievance, or funding.

We have come a long way since Neil Tennant put on girl’s shoes, David Bowie put on make-up and Lou Reed declared: ‘We’re coming out / Out of the closet.’ So far, in fact, that gay men and women are now accused of transphobia for being exclusively attracted to those who are the same sex as them.

Over the course of Tennant’s lifetime, homosexuality became infantilised in order for it to be accommodated and accepted. Activists aligned it with a crass word (‘gay’) and crass phrases (‘coming out’), while rallying round a rainbow flag. Pride marches got the ‘gay’ movement off the starting block; the pink pound took it to the finish line. Coming from an era when queer outsiders didn’t wish to pin themselves down to groups and names, it was no surprise that Tennant was late to the party when it came to confirming his sexuality in the press. ‘What I like about the queer thing is there’s a lot going on under the surface’, he said recently. ‘The gay thing, I always felt, was homosexuality as a sporting activity, doing aerobics to Kylie. As opposed to Cambridge spies and Joe Orton and that whole world of subterfuge. Which instinctively I feel more in common with, rightly or wrongly.’

Now the marginalised have found a platform in the mainstream, any claim to being revolutionary and disenfranchised is tiresome at best, and tragic at worst. The current crop of activists – whatever the battle – have not inherited the mantle of those in the past who put themselves on the line and pushed for change in less enlightened times. They are the privileged products of an affluent consumer society. They freely choose their causes the way they pick their gender and their pronouns. To paraphrase the Pet Shop Boys, ‘They’re S-H-O-P-P-I-N-G. They’re shopping.’

Throughout the changes of the past four decades, the Pet Shop Boys, haughty and aloof in funny hats, have commented on subjects rarely featured in pop songs and absent from dance music. As they put it in the sublime ‘Vocal’ (2013): ‘Everything I want to say out loud can be sung.’ They cite this track, along with ‘Being Boring’ (1990) as the point when they produced something magical. Yet there have been regular flashes of brilliance.

There have been lacklustre moments, too, as you’d expect in a lengthy career. Sometimes the songs weren’t as inspired as the topics and the titles (‘This Used to Be the Future’); sometimes they were too formulaic and the affiliations too faggy (‘Absolutely Fabulous’).

Despite this, and beyond the archness and the irony, a seriousness has always been evident. Death has reared its head as the duo steer closer to it, but it was present in their work from the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic cast a giant shadow. Songs such as ‘It Couldn’t Happen Here’ or ‘King’s Cross’ provided a moving counterpoint to the evangelical extremists sermonising on AIDS, declaring it to be God’s punishment on homosexuality and the society that tolerated it.

Just as offensive as reactionary zealots’ exploitation of AIDS was the response among those artists who claimed it had taken the most brilliant, beautiful and creative among us. As though this were a greater loss than the plumbers, telecom engineers who were our big brothers, taken out by common-or-garden cancer, also buried long before their time. One of the casualties of the epidemic, Derek Jarman, giving stupidity (and ignorance and disrespect) a chance, even compared AIDS to the genocide of the ‘lost generation’ in the First World War. Except that those taken out by AIDS, according to Jarman, were ‘making love not war’.

Before death, comes old age for those that get to live more than half their life beyond 40, as Evelyn Waugh put it. This too, the Pet Shop Boys addressed in the 2012 album Elysium. (‘You’ve been around but you don’t look too rough / And I still love some of your early stuff.’) Pop music itself is in its dotage, and not truly equipped for catering for those close to its age still active in it. While some of their surviving contemporaries from the 1980s reform for reunion tours, or have their legacy covered by a tribute band, the Pet Shop Boys remain current, modern, haughty, aloof and dignified. But for them, too, along with those of us who were part of the class of ’73, the end is closer than the beginning, and it might come sooner rather than later. None of us know when it will be ‘our last chance for goodbye’. As the saying goes, when the ice is breaking beneath your feet you keep dancing. ‘Let the music begin.’

Originally published in Spiked.

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