Neil Tennant Quotations

For a while we were chasing a book by Graham Greene to do Brighton Rock as a musical. We didn't get the rights, so we decided to create something from scratch, with Jonathan. By that time we were big fans of his work.

When we did concerts, we wanted them to be theatrical events - collaborations with designers, choreographers, and directors - because we thought traditional rock concerts were boring.

There's also a subplot about a guy who manages pop groups. Dave is a very ambitious boy, and he gets offered an audition but only wants to do it on his terms and conditions. He wants to maintain his integrity.

It was most exciting when people first came up on the stage and then when they came back for the encore. We wanted to make a show that kept on developing, that was interesting, so we tried to do that with our live shows.

We decided we didn't want to do a musical for TV because the idea of writing a musical that would be seen on television once seems insane.

Since we started, Chris and I had theatrical ambitions.

He comes to London and gets a job in a nightclub, a gay club, where he's known as Straight Dave by the bar staff - and no one believes he's as straight as he claims to be. He meets the daughter of the club manager, and he has an affair with her.

She's been a smack addict, she's had big success in Europe in the '70s, and she's lost everything. She's been rediscovered in the '80s, and as we meet her she's just about to sign a new recording contract.

Because some people have sex with people of the same sex, an entire culture has been created, broadly speaking, out of oppression. Which in a rational world would not be an issue.

A lot of what used to be known as gay culture - broadly speaking, homoeroticism and being camp - has been brought into mainstream culture. I think we should be moving to an era where it's just sex.