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Pet Shop Boys: The night our ‘foolish idea' brought London to a standstill
It was, on the face of it, a somewhat improbable idea. One of Britain's most successful pop groups, Pet Shop Boys, would write a new 73-minute score for Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent movie Battleship Potemkin, about a revolt against the Russian ruling classes. They would then perform this score, as the film played on a giant screen, one summer Sunday night in the middle of Trafalgar Square.
The proposal had come from Philip Dodd, the director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, who approached the two Pet Shop Boys — Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe — in April 2003. There were good reasons to expect that Tennant, in particular, would be receptive to the plan. He had a longstanding fascination with Russian and Soviet history — an interest that has seeped into Pet Shop Boys songs and videos such as Go West and London.
Still, Tennant's first instinct was to say no. 'I didn't really want to do it, to be honest, at the beginning,' he says. 'I thought, it's a lot of work and we won't get paid anything.' He laughs. 'And it was, and we didn't.' He also presumed that Lowe wouldn't be enthusiastic, but he was wrong.
'It was something different,' Lowe explains. 'What was appealing was it was for a silent film — a piece of music to go with the visuals. And you weren't dealing with a Hollywood system where they could say, 'Oh, we don't like it — we're going to get John Williams instead.''
So the Pet Shop Boys agreed. As a first step they watched a Battleship Potemkin DVD together twice, muting its soundtrack of Shostakovich pieces, collated from various symphonies, so that it wouldn't influence them. Then they began to strategise. 'It was a challenge to see if we could write a long piece of music,' Tennant says.
About half the score was written in the late summer of 2003; the second half was completed in the spring of 2004. As the work progressed their thoughts turned to how this music should be orchestrated. They decided to approach the German composer Torsten Rasch, because they'd liked his album Mein Herz brennt, based on the music of the death metal band Rammstein.
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Tennant simply sent him an email: My name is Neil Tennant. I am half of the British pop duo the Pet Shop Boys. I would like to get in touch with Torsten Rasch to see if he would be interested in collaborating with us on a project mixing electronic and orchestral music.
Rasch agreed, although at first the collaboration stuttered a little. 'He thought our music was very repetitive,' Tennant says. And Lowe and Tennant found Rasch's initial orchestrations far too dissonant. But over time they found a productive middle ground. Then, after several delays and crises as sponsorship fell through, a date for the Trafalgar Square performance was set: September 12, 2004.
On the afternoon of the premiere, the Pet Shop Boys prepared to soundcheck. They took their places next to the orchestra, behind a light mesh screen: thin enough to be seen through but thick enough to catch the light of the film projection at night.
Afterwards they walked to a nearby hotel — 'How did we end up doing this?' Lowe muttered — where, in a typical Pet Shop Boys divergence, Tennant walked up the hotel stairs while Lowe took the lift.
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Soon it was time for a press conference. What did this project mean to the Pet Shop Boys, compared with their other work, someone asked. 'Well, it represents a big challenge for us,' Tennant began. 'The film itself is quite romantic and hard-hitting, and with the music we've tried to bring out those aspects, and also to bring out the emotion of it — the excitement, the horror, the freedom.'
'Good answer,' Lowe said. 'Gold star.'
They retired to separate rooms to rest and get dressed. At the allotted time Lowe appeared in Tennant's room, full of cheery fatalism. 'Oh, we might as well go out in style,' he declared. 'It was always a very foolish idea.'
About 25,000 people had gathered in Trafalgar Square. Tennant would later quote someone's observation that 'it must have been the biggest audience there's ever been for silent film in Britain'. It had been difficult to imagine quite how it was going to work — a huge crowd watching a silent Russian film in one of the busiest parts of London while music pulsed and cascaded over them. The reality was just as difficult to describe, except to say that people seemed captivated.
'It was really a very moving occasion to be standing on the stage,' Tennant recalls. 'We were under the screen with the orchestra, and you could see all these heads looking up at the film, and this drizzle, and the light. There was a very powerful sense of occasion — and meanwhile the buses were going past.'
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Back at their hotel, Lowe opened a half bottle of Moët & Chandon from the minibar to share and declared: 'Well, we got through it! That was exhausting.'
'Even doing nothing most of the time,' Tennant agreed, 'is exhausting.'
They flew to Ibiza the next morning, but it was far from the end of the story, paving the way for other collaborations. In 2011 their ballet based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, The Most Incredible Thing, premiered at Sadler's Wells. In 2014 they unveiled A Man from the Future, an eight-part composition about the life of the computer pioneer and code-breaker Alan Turing, at the Royal Albert Hall. 'It got us into the idea of writing long-form, primarily instrumental pieces,' Tennant says.
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As for the score itself, and that premiere, the band's quiet sense of satisfaction remains.
'I always remember reading a review which was very blasé about it,' Tennant says. 'As though it was the most normal thing in the world for Pet Shop Boys to perform a brand-new soundtrack to a classic silent film in Trafalgar Square with a symphony orchestra. With 25,000 people watching. As though it happened every day of the week. Whereas I think it's the only time it has ever happened.' Battleship Potemkin with soundtrack by Pet Shop Boys is in cinemas from Fri and released on Blu-ray/CD and vinyl on Sep 5. This is an edited version of an essay accompanying the release
