Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant reveals the “worst moment” of his life at Glastonbury
Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant has said that the duo’s performance at Glastonbury in 2022 was the “worst moment” of his life.
The electronic duo’s performance on The Other Stage on the Sunday of the festival was marred by technical difficulties which saw Tennant have to perform solo for six songs.
Although they also delighted fans by bringing out Olly Alexander to perform ‘It’s A Sin’, Tennant has now reflected on how difficult that moment was in a new interview.
“In our show there’s a screen and the screen goes up briefly, Chris and I appear and walk forward,” he told BBC Breakfast. “Glastonbury of course is live on television, we were headlining the Other Stage on the Sunday night, there’s 70,000 people there.
“And the screen rose by about 10 inches and stopped and we just looked at each other and we couldn’t talk because you have the music in your headphones then.
“So we both made a dash for it and ran around the front, Chris couldn’t get to his front keyboard in time so he went to a second keyboard positioned at the back and suddenly I run around and I think “I’m here by myself on live on television”.’
He continued: “I didn’t know what had gone wrong, no one tells you and I had to do the first six songs by myself with an empty keyboard next to me.”
“There’s was a real adrenaline rush off that. The first six songs – it was really an awful moment.”
Tennant made headlines earlier this week when he admitted that he finds Taylor Swift‘s music “disappointing” following the release of her new album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’.
“What is Taylor Swift’s ‘Billie Jean’?” he asked. “‘Shake It Off’? I listened to that the other day and it is not ‘Billie Jean’, is it?”
Meanwhile, in a new interview with NME, Pet Shop Boys described their new album ‘Nonetheless’ as their “queer album” and Tennant, who came out as gay in 1994, discussed how things have changed for the queer community in pop culture since then.
“What I think now is that what you might call gay culture has become mainstream,” Tennant said. Several years ago, I went to see Jake Shears in Kinky Boots on Broadway. It was an essentially straight audience, and when the drag queens came on, they all went ballistic. I thought: ‘Wow, this whole thing’s just gone totally mainstream’ – and I think it’s ‘cause of RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
“It’s like with the It’s a Sin TV series,” he continued, referencing the 2021 Olly Alexander-starring Channel 4 drama that cribbed its name from the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 chart-topper. “You feel the straight community finally faced up to the AIDS crisis.”
In a four-star review of the album, NME wrote: ‘Nonetheless’ unfolds like a 10-song short story collection, peppered with richly-drawn characters, and esoteric cultural references. The woozily romantic ‘Feel’ – originally earmarked for a Brandon Flowers solo album – paints a picture of somebody counting down the days until they can visit their lover in prison and aches with longing. The electroclash ‘Bullet for Narcissus’, meanwhile, combines New Order guitars with the inner-monologue of a bodyguard tasked with protecting a Trump-like tyrant who’s “so banal he’s made of mainstream”
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Emma Wilkes
NME
