Pet Shop Boys on their Battleship Potemkin score: “Part of trying to entertain people is surprising them”
“One of the great things about being in a successful pop group,” Neil Tennant explained, “is that you get opportunities to do things.”
It was August 2005, and the Pet Shop Boys were about to release a CD of their soundtrack to Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein’s classic silent film about the Russian Revolution.
A year earlier, more than 20,000 people had crowded into a drizzly Trafalgar Square, as the duo performed the new score with the Dresdner Sinfoniker — surely the biggest audience for a silent film in the UK.
I was in that crowd, absorbed both by Eisenstein’s stark visuals and the Pet Shop Boys’ combining of synths, beats and orchestra.
Twelve months on, I was absolutely going to abuse my position, in the newsroom at Classic FM, to get a chance to meet and talk to my musical heroes.
“We’ve always liked to do different things, and this is part of that,” Chris Lowe said, explaining why he was initially the more enthusiastic when approached by the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Tennant was more sceptical. “The ICA had been given Trafalgar Square to stage an event, and decided to show the film, and get someone to produce a new score.”
“I just thought, it’s a lot of work, we’re not going to get paid anything, and Chris wouldn’t want to do it anyway. And then Chris said ‘oh, it sounds great, should we do it then?”
Lowe claimed not to remember that, but admitted he was intrigued “to write music that didn’t have to conform to a standard pop song structure, just react to the visuals that you’re watching.”
“It was such a strange request,” Tennant said. “In the area of music we work in, you don’t really get a chance to write seventy-three minutes of continual music. We were quite interested to see whether we actually could do that.”
“They didn’t want an orchestra,” Lowe recollected, “there was no budget for an orchestra. They said we might be able to get a free choir.”
“When we’d written the first forty minutes of it,” added Tennant, “we thought we’ve got to have strings. I’d heard this piece of music by Torsten Rasch, a song cycle based on the music of the hard rock group Rammstein.”
Rasch came on board as orchestrator, but the collaboration was “very difficult” according to Tennant. “At one point I suggested we sacked the Pet Shop Boys from the project and it just became a Torsten Rasch project.”
“He’s writing against our electronic music, and it was completely impossible. We came up with a very interesting compromise between the two types of music, we left it quite open, maybe just beats and a melody, so he could work within that.”
An hour before the performance was due to start, on 12th September 2004, it started to rain.
“It was very windy as well,” Lowe recalled, “and we were a bit worried that this huge screen wouldn’t be safe.”
“We had no idea how many people would turn up,” Tennant said, “because with a free concert you might go, you might not go. You might even set off and then go to the pub on the way instead. Someone I know did.”
The wind and rain didn’t stop a crowd somewhere between 20 and 25,000 turning out in Trafalgar Square.
“From the stage, it looked amazing.” Tennant stood under the screen, with Lowe and the orchestra. “You could see all these heads looking up at the film, and then this drizzle and the light. It had a very powerful sense of occasion. It was really quite a moving thing to watch the people watching it. And meanwhile the buses were going past.”
The Square itself was part of the show, then ICA director Philip Dodd pointing out to Tennant that “Trafalgar Square was a political space in the centre of London. There’ve been endless political meetings and demonstrations from the Chartists through CND up to the anti-war demonstrations before the war in Iraq.”
The performance came 18 months after the start of that war, with Tony Blair’s publicly stated reasons for invading well on the way to falling apart. That seemed to influence “After All,” the song that accompanied Battleship Potemkin’s most famous sequence, the Odessa Steps.
On screen, the Cossack army marches on the revolutionary citizens, slaughtering them as Tennant sings “If you didn’t really understand the cause, if you didn’t even pause for thought, how come we went to war?”
“It’s a juxtaposition of the present with the past,” he explains. “You’re seeing the reality of war on the screen while there’s these questions being asked in the song.”
“Actually, it’s one of my favourite songs we’ve ever written. I think it works as a pop song and as an orchestral piece of music.”
Battleship Potemkin was not the first time the Pet Shop Boys had moved beyond pop music. They’d already hired people from the English National Opera to design a world tour, worked with the peerless Derek Jarman on their first concerts, and staged a original West End musical without threading a paper-thin story around their biggest hits.
“When we came into pop music,” Tennant said, “we wanted to bring things from outside pop music into it.”
“It’s just to do entertaining things, to be honest. You know, part of trying to entertain people is surprising them. And it keeps it sort of fresh.”
“We’ve always done things that are outside the world of pop,” Lowe agreed, “just to vary things and keep it interesting.”
“I sometimes worry,” Tennant admitted, “that we alienate people because they think we’re too pretentious or something. And really what we’re trying to do normally is to do something that’s very entertaining, and trying to explore different ways of doing that.”
This was twenty years ago — before the days of camera phones and obligatory selfies. I did get my copy of “West End girls” signed though.
The Pet Shop Boys, meanwhile, moved on to a kind of national treasure status, receiving lifetime achievement and “godlike genius” awards, spending much of the 2020s on a global greatest hits tour that celebrated their vast catalogue, and the impact they’d had on so many lives.
But they have never stopped looking outside the world of pop, staging a ballet at Sadler’s Wells, turning Alan Turing’s life story into a piece performed at the BBC Proms in 2014.
Their most recent album, Nonetheless, includes a song (“Why am I dancing”) initially written for a musical adaptation of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Almost forty years after their first hit slowly weaved its way to number one, the Pet Shop Boys are still merging pop and art, still finding ways to keep it interesting.
To mark its centenary, Battleship Potemkin has been re-released by the BFI on Blu-Ray with the Pet Shop Boys’ remastered score. Click here to find out more
