Desert Island Discs Revisited: Brit Award Winners - Neil Tennant

DESERT ISLAND DISCS REVISITED: BRIT AWARD WINNERS - NEIL TENNANT (320kbs-m4a/97mb/42mins)
BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast: 9th February 2025

Singer and songwriter Neil Tennant is castaway by Kirsty Young.

Neil is best known as one half of The Pet Shop Boys which, over the past 20 years, has been one of Britain's most successful and popular bands, noted for combining dance music with witty lyrics and delivering them in a uniquely English style.

As a teenager growing up in Newcastle upon Tyne, he felt himself to be an outsider at school, but found friends in an amateur theatre company. Yet he always felt his life would be different to theirs and used to tell them that he would become a celebrated pop star.

But Neil was 30 when he finally left his day job as a writer for Smash Hits magazine to pursue the musical interests that had dominated his life since he was a teenager. By that time, he was anxious that he had missed the boat.

Now, as well as continuing to release records with The Pet Shop Boys, he has branched out into other forms of composition,.

He's written a live score for the film Battleship Potemkin, a West End musical and has collaborated with Robbie Williams and the Scissor Sisters, amongst many others.

CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Dusty Springfield - I Don't Want to Hear It Anymore
BOOK CHOICE: The Human Comedy - Honore de Balzac
LUXURY CHOICE: DVD projector and DVDs

Producer: Leanne Buckle

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in February 2007.

Rex Harrison - Why Can't The English?
The Beatles - She Loves You
Sinfonia of London Orchestra, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli - Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia On A Theme by Thomas Tallis
David Bowie - Changes
Shannon - Give Me Tonight
Billie Holiday - Good Morning, Heartache
Dusty Springfield - I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore
New York Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Bernstein - Dmitry Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in D minor (1st movement)