With time to spare, he also re-recorded some of the folk songs he’d written as a teenager.
“It’s amazing you could remember them,” Lowe marvels. “Hadn’t you ever put them onto a tape recorder?”
“Yes, but I don’t have the cassettes any more,” Tennant replies. “I just think, if the songs are any good, you can remember them.”
There are “no plans” to release those nascent tunes, he adds, indicating he’d rather keep them as personal mementoes.
Nonetheless, Nonetheless contains several flourishes of acoustic guitar – and one song that specifically references lockdown (Why Am I Dancing?, which finds Tennant shuffling around the kitchen, alone but happy, as the music swells around him).
Elsewhere, he writes about whatever takes his fancy. There’s a ballad about Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nuryev “jumping the barrier at Orly Airport” to claim asylum; and a song written from the perspective of Donald Trump’s reluctant bodyguard.
“If my number’s up, I’ll take a bullet for Narcissus.”
A recent study suggests, external pop lyrics have become simpler and more self-obsessed since the Pet Shop Boys’ 1980s imperial phase.
Tennant, whose songs are often doused in social commentary (Integral, external deals with ID cards, Shopping, external is a critique of consumerism), isn’t impressed.
“One of our beliefs is that you can write a song about anything, literally anything, as long as it’s interesting,” he says.
We happen to be talking in the same week that pop’s diarist-in-chief, Taylor Swift, releases her latest album.
So what do The Pet Shop Boys make of her ouevre?
