Meet Gordon’s Pet Shop persecutors

Mary Wakefield meets the successful pop duo the Pet Shop Boys, and finds them eloquent critics of New Labour, staunch defenders of civil liberties — and fans of Vince Cable

Through the woods, the trees
And further on the sea
We lived in the shadow of the war
Sand in the sandwiches
Wasps in the tea
It was a free country







In a West End town in a dead end world — OK, no: in a nice Georgian townhouse in central London, on the top floor where once boot boys bedded down, the Pet Shop Boys are revisiting their past. ‘The Britain of my childhood?’ Neil Tennant, the singing half of the most successful pop duo of all time reclines on a chaise longue and thinks his way back to North Shields (near Newcastle) in the late Fifties. ‘Well, as it says in our song, “Building the Wall”, we lived in the shadow of the war. On a Sunday afternoon we’d all watch 633 Squadron or The Dambusters.