Chris Lowe

Full name: Christopher Sean Lowe
Date of birth: 4 October 1959
Birthplace: Blackpool, Lancashire, England
Favourite drinks: Gin and tonic, Evian water, Vodka and tonic, champagne, red wine, lager
Favourite food: Fish fingers
Favourite colour: Blue
Favourite word: Please
Favourite animal: Dog

Before the Pet Shop Boys

The following extracts are taken from an article called "The Pet Shop Boys Story" published in Smash Hits magazine in 1989.

Christopher Sean Lowe, as he was christened, was born on October 4th 1959, to be followed by a brother, Tim, a sister, Vicki, and another brother, Greg. As a youngster he seems to have been thoroughly normal. At 11 he was responsible enough to be made House Captain of one of the school's four "houses", St Andrew ("I suppose you could say I was quite a 'happening' person in those days," he quips). Other than that he enjoyed playing with his brother Tim with his Mini Trix car set and Tim's Hornby train set and used to go iceskating at the weekends (one time when he was ten they all did the conga, it went horribly wrong, a skate went over his wrist and he had to have ten stitches). His one disappointment was failing his 11+ exam - his reaction was simply to get swottier.

"I was a swot," he confesses. "I was never naughty. I used to quite like doing school work. I used to sit at the front of the class and creep to the teachers and do lots of homework and get 100 per cent on tests and come top of the class."

He even liked school food - he had a particular soft spot for the cornflake pie and remembers the introduction in the fifth form of chips as "really popular". For a while, however, he used to go home at lunchtime, to eat apple pie and cream and - in a thoroughly un-rock 'n' roll fashion - to watch the news. Somewhere along the line he got lots of spots. He wasn't a happy boy.

"Spots are the worst thing in the world," he explains. "Doctors just think it's a bit of a joke." And it's not. "Having spots makes you feel like such an ugly geek." Eventually he found a sympathetic doctor who sent him to a skin specialist - after a course of antibiotics they all disappeared.

His main interest, even then, was architecture. "We were always moving house when I was young," he remembers, "and I used to like designing houses for us to live in, just for fun."

Music came a poor second, good as he was at both the piano and trombone. Pop music, in particular, he simply wasn't very interested in. At 13 he'd like Diana Ross and The Beatles, then, as he puts it, "something went wrong". All his friends started liking people like Alice Cooper and the only thing he thought was "sort of" good was Gary Glitter.

In the end Chris decided that this pop stuff simply wasn't worth bothering with. "I ended up listening to my grandma and grandpa's music," he recalls, "like Dorothy Squires and Frank Sinatra and Tom Jones." Then Saturday Night Fever came out and suddenly the world was full of deliriously simple tacky disco songs by the likes of the Bee Gees. Chris loved it.

In the meantime he had been playing some music. He once boasted "I used to pretend that Tchaikovsky could compose through me, and it worked!" - whatever it was exactly that he meant by that, he did use used to mess about composing the odd thing. "I recorded lots of stuff onto cassettes," he remembers, a little sadly, "but my brothers and sisters recorded top 40 shows over them."

At one stage he also joined a cabarat-type group, called One Under The Eight, a seven-piece (hence the name). They played old "classics" like "My Way", "La Bamba" and "Hello Dolly" at places like the Blackpool Conservative Club and the local Masonic Lodge.

He also had hundreds of jobs. He helped a girl with her paper round, he worked in a kitchen washing cutlery, he did a Christmas shift as a postman, he operated the big wheel one summer on Blackpool Pleasure Beach and he worked at WH Smiths, graduating from sales assistant to the accounts desk. (He was moved off the shop floor after being caught chasing a girl called Annette around the staff room. "I was running around, weaving in and out of the pillars and I bumped into the manager.")

Best of all he worked as a glass collector in a disco called The Dixieland. "There'd be the most terrific brawls in there," he remembers, "just like a western." The best moment would be when they'd play a brilliant disco record, particularly the Gap Band's "Oops Upside Your Head". Everyone - even the bar staff and the glass collectors - would form one long line and dance along in formation. "It was suddenly like finding yourself in the middle of a huge musical. It was absolutely, positively, one of the best and most wonderful experiences of my life."

Nevertheless it wasn't glass collecting, formation dancing, or piano playing that he'd set his heart on - it was architecture. He was accepted to study at Liverpool University. In the middle of the course, in 1981, he did a year down in London to gain practical experience - building a staircase in Milton Keynes (as Neil Tennant later commented "can John Taylor say that? I think not.") and being "instrumental in the cladding of an industrial unit." Perhaps more importantly, one day in August he wandered into an electrical shop on the Kings Road and got chatting to a bloke called Neil...