Neil Francis Tennant (born 10 July 1954) is an English singer and songwriter. He is the lead singer and lyricist of the synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, which he formed with Chris Lowe in 1981. Before becoming a professional musician, Tennant had a career in publishing, including a stint as an editor at Marvel UK in the mid-1970s. He was a music journalist for Smash Hits and became assistant editor in the early 1980s.
Tennant coined the phrase imperial phase to describe the period in which a musical artist is regarded to be at their commercial and creative peak simultaneously. This observation was initially self-referential, made as the Pet Shop Boys had achieved commercial success with four British number one hits ("West End Girls", "It's a Sin", "Heart", and "Always on My Mind"), had received critical praise for their first three albums and had expanded their creative horizons through innovative collaborations in the visual and performing arts.
Neil Francis Tennant was born in the town of North Shields, approximately 8 miles east of Newcastle upon Tyne, to William W. Tennant (1923–2009) and Sheila M. (Watson) Tennant (1923–2008). His mother was of Irish heritage, and his father's family had Scottish roots. He has an older sister, Susan, and two younger brothers, Simon and Philip. William Tennant was a sales manager for a rubber company. The family moved to Greenfield Road (opposite the corner of South Bend), Brunton Park, Gosforth shortly after Neil was born.
Tennant was raised as a Roman Catholic, and he served as an altar boy. He attended St Oswald's Catholic Primary School in Newcastle, followed by St Cuthbert's Grammar School, an all-boys Catholic secondary school. His songs "This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave" and "It's a Sin" refer to his time at St Cuthbert's and the strict upbringing there.
In 1965, Tennant joined the Young People's Theatre in Newcastle, where he learned about stage performance and became interested in writing music for theatre. As a teenager, he joined the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, which was both a library and a social gathering place.
Tennant taught himself to play guitar at the age of 12, using the tutorials Play in a Day by Bert Weedon and Hold Down a Chord by John Pearse. He started writing his own songs based around the chords he learned. He used his guitar studies to learn how to play the piano in his family home, and he also played cello in school.
In 1970, Tennant started a folk music group named Dust with Christopher Dowell, a friend from the Young People's Theatre. They were heavily influenced by The Incredible String Band. The group, which also featured two female friends, recorded a session of five songs that were broadcast on BBC Radio Newcastle in 1971. Tennant wrote several of their songs including "Can You Hear the Dawn Break?", which he regards as his first "proper" song. The folk group broke up due to creative differences as Tennant became more influenced by the music of David Bowie.
Tennant left Newcastle in 1972 to study history at North London Polytechnic (now part of London Metropolitan University). During the summers of 1973 and 1974, he worked as an assistant in the manuscripts department of the British Museum. He completed an honours degree in 1975 and then worked for two years as the production editor for Marvel UK, an imprint of Marvel Comics. His job entailed compiling American comics into a weekly publication, anglicising the dialogue to suit British readers, and ensuring that risqué characters like Red Sonja were redrawn with more modest clothing to make them suitable for the general audience of the weeklies. He also wrote occasional features for the comics, including interviews with pop stars Marc Bolan and Alex Harvey.
In 1977, Tennant moved to Macdonald Educational publishing, where he edited The Dairy Book of Home Management (1980) and various illustrated books about cookery, playing the guitar and other home interests. He next worked at ITV Books, where he edited TV tie-in books, including one of Mary Berry's cookbooks.
Tennant became acquainted with the staff of Smash Hits when he commissioned the magazine's designer, Steve Bush, to design a book about the 1981 Madness film Take It or Leave It. Smash Hits editor David Hepworth offered Tennant a job editing The Smash Hits Yearbook and also named him news editor of the magazine when he started work there in June 1982. Tennant wrote features and reviews for the teen pop magazine and also edited the yearbook from 1982 to 1985. He set up the American version, Star Hits, in New York in 1983, and he interviewed then up-and-coming singer Madonna. Tennant became assistant editor of Smash Hits, and was offered the position of editor before his departure in 1985.
During this period, Tennant continued to write music in a singer-songwriter style. He auditioned for Rocket Records in 1973, and in 1981 he submitted a demo to other record companies without success. Some of his early songs were later released, including "Nothing Has Been Proved" (1989), performed by Dusty Springfield, and "Nervously" (1990) and "Hey, Headmaster" (1993) by Pet Shop Boys.
Tennant met Chris Lowe in August 1981 and they began their songwriting partnership shortly afterwards. Describing their early sessions, Tennant recalled:
I'm playing acoustic guitar and he's playing these bass lines on a monophonic synthesizer. He's an experienced musician and can play the keyboard very fluently. Remember, at this point I'm 27, 28 years old...bass lines had never even occurred to me. We sort of released something in each other. There was immediately something there.
Tennant was used to singing his own songs but initially had reservations about being a lead singer. He started singing lessons after turning professional in 1985. At Lowe's suggestion, he tried to make his lyrics more "sexy", writing about nightlife in the West End of London where they spent time.
In 1983, an opportunity arose for Tennant to go to New York to interview The Police for Smash Hits. While there, he arranged to meet Bobby Orlando, a producer whom he and Lowe admired. Tennant mentioned he was writing songs in his spare time, and Orlando agreed to record some tracks with him and Lowe at a later date. Orlando produced the Pet Shop Boys' first single, an early version of "West End Girls", in 1984. Pet Shop Boys signed a deal with Parlophone Records in March 1985, and Tennant left Smash Hits the following month as he and Lowe, who was two-thirds of the way through an architecture degree, committed full time to a music career.
Tennant writes the lyrics for the majority of Pet Shop Boys songs. Cultural critic Olivia Laing described the songs as "instantly recognizable for their knack of making oddly formal language flow seamlessly into pop music". In his oration for Tennant's honorary Doctor of Letters at Durham University, Professor Stephen Mumford called his lyrics "Full of literary, political and historical allusions ... layered with multiple meanings that can be read lightly and superficially or deeply and philosophically".
In his book One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem: 1979–2016, Tennant discussed his sources of inspiration. He often uses common expressions such as "Left to My Own Devices" and "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing", as well as literary references like "Can You Forgive Her?" from the work of the same name by Anthony Trollope. He has written songs using different personas, including a kept woman in "Rent", and he has drawn on his own formative experiences, as in "It's a Sin". He wrote a trio of songs about Christopher Dowell, his friend from Newcastle, who died from AIDS in 1989: "It Couldn't Happen Here" alludes to their early complacency about the disease, "Being Boring" is about their friendship, and "Your Funny Uncle" describes his funeral.
Tennant has praised the group The Specials and singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, highlighting "Ghost Town" and "Shipbuilding" as protest songs successfully putting politics into pop music. In his own songs, Tennant says he conveys "political through personal"; for example: ""King's Cross" is a song about Thatcher. I think it's quite a strong song about Thatcher. You don't have to say, "Step down Margaret," though. I don't think many directly political songs work, actually. I think you infiltrate through pop music".