Neil Tennant returns to his home town: a Pet Shop Boys double feature in Newcastle with a live Q&A

Pet Shop Boys will screen their film It Couldn’t Happen Here at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle — the city where Neil Tennant grew up. The screening on 11 October is a double feature, and between the two films Tennant will come out for an interview and a Q&A with the audience.

This was announced by Pet Shop Boys.

It starts at 14:00 on Sunday 11 October and runs three hours twenty minutes including the conversation. Tickets are already on sale through the cinema.

It Couldn’t Happen Here — the film the duo made at their peak

The 1987 picture was directed by Jack Bond and stars Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe themselves. It is neither a concert film nor a conventional musical: the duo lead the viewer through a stylised journey into British identity, memory and pop culture.

The supporting cast features British actors Joss Ackland and Barbara Windsor. The cinema describes Bond’s direction as vivid and experimental — a match for the sophisticated pop sensibility of Pet Shop Boys.

The soundtrack is built on songs from the duo’s first two albums, Please and Actually: the film includes “West End Girls” and “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”, among others. For the band it is both a 1980s time capsule and evidence of how far they were willing to go back then.

A score first performed in Trafalgar Square

The second half of the evening is the 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin, in a recently restored centenary version, for which Pet Shop Boys once wrote their own music.

That score was first revealed on 12 September 2004, at a free open-air performance and screening in London’s Trafalgar Square that drew an estimated 25,000 people. It was played by the Dresdner Sinfoniker under conductor Jonathan Stockhammer, with orchestrations by Torsten Rasch. The music blends electronic beats with orchestral grandeur.

Two nights in a row close to home

The cinema calls Tennant a local music luminary — he grew up in Newcastle, which is exactly what gives the event its flavour.

The night before, on Saturday 10 October, Tennant appears nearby at the Durham Book Festival. There he will talk to Fiona Hill, Chancellor of Durham University, about how growing up in Newcastle shaped his life as a musician. The conversation runs from 7 to 8pm at the Gala Theatre, and it can also be watched online.

Where Pet Shop Boys are right now

The duo are in the middle of the Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live tour: on 20 August they play Unity Arena in Oslo, on 22 August the Suset Festival in Esbjerg, Denmark. Their most recent release is the compilation Disco 5.

As ONE//FM reported earlier, electronic classics keep returning to the spaces they were written for — Brian Eno’s album for airports will finally be played in an airport.