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Pet Shop Boys are the most successful British music duo of all time and four decades on from the release of number one debut single West End Girls, they are back with new album Nonetheless.

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe sat down with 麻豆约拍 Radio 4’s Front Row to talk about their career, their collaborators and the beauty, beats and melancholy of their 15th album. Here are just some of the things we learned…

1. New album Nonetheless was written during ‘the dreaded lockdown’.

Despite being “almost boring” to talk about now, lockdown was actually “a very creative time” for Pet Shop Boys.

“Because of being separate, Chris would send me music and I would write lyrics to it, or I would send Chris lyrics and he would set it to music,” Neil told Front Row’s Samira Ahmed.

“The album is quite poetic in a way. The word Nonetheless suggested one: we've been through all of this, but nonetheless there's a new album. And also, it's got a sort of poetry to the sound of the word.”

2. They’ve got a habit of making music that’s sad and uplifting.

How would they describe new single Loneliness? “A euphoric dance track with depressing lyrics” just about sums it up for Chris. “Which is kind of what we do in a way, really.”

“Our sometime stage designer Es Devlin would call that section of the show, ‘tears in the toilet’,” adds Neil.

“When you're in a club, sometimes girls go to the loo together, don't they? And commiserate with what's going on. That's the ‘tears in the toilet’ moment. And I think we're always there to provide the soundtrack to that moment!”

3. Google translate was used in the making of The schlager hit parade.

The duo spend a lot of time in Berlin and this new track was inspired by Schlager music – a type of “very uncool” and often “aggressively happy” pop music that became big in Germany in the 50s and 60s after the Second World War.

“To get into the spirit of the song I Google-translated Neil’s lyrics into German to make it very authentic sounding. And then wrote the music to the German translation," explains Chris.

"Then Neil sang it back in English. It sounds a lot more German in German!”

4. They’ve never seen Pet Shop Boys as 'a project about fame’.

“Some young artists come into this and they want to be rich and famous, that wasn't our inspiration for doing this,” says Neil.

Although he does admit to wanting to be a pop star as a teenager, growing up with The Beatles, Motown, David Bowie, Punk and Disco as influences.

“There's a lot there to be inspired by, and also to want to be a part of. And I knew I could write songs, I just wanted to make that my life. But it wasn't really about fame.”

5. In fact, Chris was nearly an architect.

When they formed the band in 1981, after a chance meeting in a Hi-fi shop, both Neil and Chris had already started out on different career paths.

“I'd worked in publishing, for Marvel Comics, two book companies and I worked for Smash Hits,” says Neil. “Chris was by that point a qualified architect.”

“Well, not quite qualified,” corrects Chris. “Almost. I'd done the first two parts and for the third part you had to work for a year in a practice, and during that time the Pet Shop Boys were taking off, so I never got part three.”

Neil adds: “It's a sort of a cliché of music journalists to say to me, ‘So Neil, you were a pop journalist - so you learnt how to write the perfect pop song?’. They've said that to me hundreds of times probably. And I’d say, ‘Well, you're a music journalist, why don't you write a perfect pop song?'. It’s a different thing.”

6. Neil’s signature is ‘ineligible’, despite all the practice signing autographs.

“My handwriting has always been, 'you should be a doctor!', you know? I always get that,” says Neil.

“We spend most of our lives now signing things. ‘Would you just sign a thousand more of these please?’,” adds Chris.

“When you stay in a hotel, quite often they get you to sign the guest book and we always flick through every page to see how complicated some people's autographs are. I mean, some people manage to put grand pianos in theirs and all sorts of things, faces and all the rest of it, and ours are very...”

“Minimal!” finishes Neil.

7. They often say no to films using their music, but loved how it featured in Saltburn and All of Us Strangers.

“With both of those films, the music is used as part of the plot,” says Neil.

“In All of Us Strangers, the family all sing Always On My Mind together and then they glance at the television, and we’re on it because it's Christmas Top of the Pops in 1987.

“It's nice, because very often in films - particularly American films - you're aware they're going to use our music to establish, ‘it's the second half of the 80s and we're in a gay club’. And then sometimes we say no to that, because they just turn you into a cliche. Whereas this, both of them, felt heartfelt actually.”

8. They don’t like to plan too far ahead.

“We've got touring plans for next year, I think that's all we've got in the future and that's pretty much always been the case,” says Neil.

“The future takes care of itself in a way. When we signed to EMI in 1985, we were signed for a seven-album deal, and I thought it was a ludicrous idea - we'd never make seven albums! - because making one seemed like so much work.”

“I can't imagine doing anything else though,” adds Chris. “You never know, do you? You just don't know how long you've got. So good to have got this far!”

Listen to the full Pet Shop Boys interview with Front Row’s Samira Ahmed on 麻豆约拍 Sounds.

You can hear Front Row live on 麻豆约拍 Radio 4 at 7.15pm Mondays to Thursdays or catch up whenever you like on 麻豆约拍 Sounds.