'The thrill of emergence, the quasi-royal ubiquitousness of established fame, the imperial phase of world domination, the disciplined strategies of survival.'
So wrote Neil Tennant in the foreword of the catalogue that accompanied a 1999 exhibition, Icons of Pop, at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Well, he should know.
An entire lifetime later, Tennant and musical partner Chris Lowe continue to ply their trade as Pet Shop Boys, now national treasure-adjacent if only the descriptor didn’t actually underplay their achievements. Not least in the field of graphic design and art direction, an area the duo commands as effortlessly as they do songwriting and, perhaps unexpectedly, live performance. Has any pop act in history curated its visual communication with as much consistent creativity and panache as Pet Shop Boys? We can’t think of one.
Much of this is down to the designer Mark Farrow, long-term creative foil and sparring partner who shares Tennant and Lowe’s northern roots, unsullied vision and no-nonsense agenda. Farrow and his team have racked up a body of work to rival the all-time greats of graphic design, with clients drawn from right across the spectrum, Marc Newson, The National Gallery, and the Tate Modern to name but three. The office shelves groan under the weight of awards won, multiple Grammys and D&ADs among them. He managed to make art out of the compact disc, and worked eye-popping wonders on the Camper-sponsored Volvo Open 70 ocean-racing yacht.
As a new history of Pet Shop Boys’ work, Volume: The Complete Visual Record, is published to coincide with the 40th anniversary of their first album ‘Please’, Wallpaper* sat down with Farrow for a rare PSB-oriented retrospective conversation. 'People tend to think it’s very clean and minimal,' he says, 'but there’s often a lot of humour in there.'
Wallpaper*: Do you remember the first album cover that really hit you?
Mark Farrow: The epiphany was the Joy Division album, Unknown Pleasures. I had no idea that a record sleeve could look like that. When I first came to London from Manchester, I’d done a few Factory sleeves, some handbills and flyers for the Haçienda club and various places. Had punk not happened I would never have got the opportunity to do record covers. I loved music. When you’re 16, it’s all you care about, but I couldn’t play anything and I couldn’t sing. But the sleeves? I could see myself doing that. I knew Peter [Saville] and Malcolm [Garrett] a bit because I worked in a record shop in Manchester city centre, in a little unit in an underground market.
W*: You started at XL Design, which had Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the ZTT record label on its books.
MF: They’d advertised in Creative Review for a designer. If I’m honest, I didn’t love the work they were doing, but they were really hot at that point. I thought, ‘well I can change it from the inside and do my own stuff’. [laughs] The company combined XL, Big Features, which made pop promos, and Massive Management. And I was set to work on Pet Shop Boys.
W*: Your first sleeve for PSB was a remix of ‘West End Girls’ [1985]. Much-loved by the fans, then and now.
MF: And the first thing I did was get rid of all the type. I hated that original Pet Shop Boys logo, with the elongated letters. I wasn’t working with that. Neil and Chris think it’s funny, especially as it’s recently made a comeback. My partner at work, Gary Stillwell has redrawn it, it’s lighter and the letters have changed shape, so it’s not exactly the same. If Gary had said, ‘shall we look at the old logo?’ I would have said no. But he did it anyway. He was quite clever there.
W*: The essence of PSB as we know them now was established at the very start, wasn’t it? And it’s been so consistently maintained.
MF: Looking through this book, there’s none of that, ‘what was I thinking there?’ There’s a thread that runs through everything that they do. They’ve constantly reinvented, they always look forward, there’s never been a nostalgia. And they’re still important.
W*: So how do you translate that ideology into what you do, for each new album?
MF: I don’t think about it that hard. It just comes naturally. It’s based on what the music is going to sound like, what the title is, what Neil and Chris are thinking at that point in time. It’s very organic in that respect, and not that calculated.
W*: Instinct, then.
MF: Totally. Totally. Everything is.
W*: ‘Love Comes Quickly’, the follow-up to ‘West End girls’, dispensed with any branding. A punchy move. How did you persuade their label [Parlophone] to go for that?
MF: Well, they’d done four Top of the Pops appearances by the time that came out. Chris in the Boy cap and the glasses and cap pulled down was well established. I thought, ‘Chris is the logo’. Everyone’s going to know who this is. What else do we need?
W* ‘Please’, the first PSB album, has just turned 40, and still looks dazzling in its simplicity.
MF: Everything in the mid-Eighties was big and bold and had five different typefaces competing for your attention. A very bright, poppy Smash Hits feel. The 12in white square that is the ‘Please’ sleeve was just so different to anything else, it really jumped out in the HMV or Virgin Megastore window. I thought people would want to know what the tiny image in the middle was, and would be curious to read the little bit of type. It felt logical to me that it would stand out by not standing out.
W*: The ‘Suburbia’ [1986 single] sleeve is one that secured their visual tone. Another cover with no type.
MF: They’d seen an article, in The Face, I think, about these kids in Derry or Dublin, I can’t remember which, who were nicking cars and setting them on fire and generally marauding. Neil and Chris wanted these images to be the cover of ‘Suburbia’. Then this box of prints arrives from their photographer, Eric Watson, and I said, ‘forget the kids, guys, I get the idea, but this has got to be the sleeve. [pause] It was a bit of a fight, that.
'Suburbia' sleeve
W*: Did you tussle with them much?
MF: Chris has never liked photographs of himself. As time’s gone on, arguments happen less and less, because they trust us. But the biggest scrap was about the cover of Actually [1987 album]. The image we used was an out-take, they’d been doing the video for the single with Dusty [Springfield]. It was two in the morning, Chris was pissed off and Neil genuinely was yawning. On the next shot on the roll they were probably smiling, but I thought, ‘that’s them’. That’s what everyone thinks they are, Chris is grumpy, Neil’s bored. Chris hated that photo with a venegance, still hates it just as much now. Nobody really likes photographs of themselves, so I can empathise. Persuading the record company wasn’t easy. ‘You’ve just had a number one album and you’re yawning on the follow-up?’ I thought, ‘but it’s fucking perfect!’
W* The book is a history, but it also acts as a four-decade journey through graphic design. Are you surprised by how well the work holds up?
MF: Looking through it, you don’t think, ‘well that was a terrible period of graphic design’. In the Nineties, you had people like David Carson and Tomato, that kind of scrappy, photocopied look. I could appreciate it but I was never going to go there, I wasn’t going to start trying to echo that. I’ve always wanted my work to look like it came from my studio. Certain companies would give you anything you wanted. When I work with a band, I want them to want what we do. I lose interest quickly if people start going, ‘what about this, could we make this bigger?’ Well, why have you come to us, then? Surely you understand what we do.
W* Do you have any personal stand-outs?
MF: I like Introspective [1988]. And I like Actually because of the battle we went through. I remember the sleeve for ‘Miracles’ [2003 single]. We had cut outs of Neil and Chris on the cover, the sleeve was white, the inner bag was covered in cherry blossom, the inside of the inner bag was covered in cherry blossom, the vinyl was white, the labels were full colour. I remember thinking, ‘what a complete object’. There’s nothing more I can throw at this. To give Neil and Chris full credit, I needed them behind me all the way to make these things happen.
W*: After all this time, presumably you still enjoy working with them.
MF: It’s an absolute highlight when they come in. It’s the funniest couple of hours you will ever spend. Some of the suggestions they come up with that would never see the light of day… it’s just brilliant fun. This conception that they’re miserable fuckers? It’s quite the opposite.
W*:The ‘tick’ graphic on 2009’s ‘Yes’ album is classic Farrow and PSB…
MF: They came in with Gerhard Richter squares [see 4900 Colours, 2007] and said, ‘we love this’. So did I but it felt like Introspective to me, and I didn’t want to do that. We started exploring the idea of each square representing a track on the album, and we thought, ‘let’s make it into a tick’. Affirmative, yes, it works! And we went from a square to a diamond and that informed the typeface, and then we were up and running, across formats and beyond. They actually agreed to take one song off the album so that the tick would work better graphically. They said, ‘we have been debating about whether to include this one track…’ So I replied, ‘well, maybe that’s the decision made for you.’
W*: The vinyl box set version won design awards. It’s a phenomenal object in its own right.
MF: The streaming era has opened the door to do something real and tangible. We can create wild things because people will buy them. The Vinyl Factory wanted to do a special edition with us, and we decided to do one track on each 12in, with a colour coded sleeve, which you could lay on the floor to make a huge tick. As for the Perspex box, I was thinking of a record deck cover from the Seventies, a smoked glass thing with a gold logo in the middle of it.
W*: I’ve always been intrigued by the cover of the 2016 album ‘Super’.
MF: Chris said, ‘can we do something a bit more vulgar, something louder?’ That felt like a good brief. It was also at the point where people were just listening to stuff on their phone and looking at the screen. So the big red dot would really pop, it looked like a button you would push. It wasn’t a record sleeve so much as a corporate identity, and everything would be circles, in different colours. So the one for Apple Music was different from the Spotify one and so on.
Inner sleeve, Super, 2016 © 2006 and 2026 Pet Shop Boys
W*: The lurid green and deliberately lo-fi typeface of Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ album proves that graphic design in music still has massive power.
MF: If I’d been invited to do that, I’d have ended up in exactly the same place, but the type would have looked… better. [laughs] I think about this a lot, and I wonder if I am just getting old and nostalgic. I don’t think I am. There’s still a vitality about what we do. But I do worry for the next generation, and I worry for anyone who wants to design record sleeves now. The music industry is about Instagram followers and TikTok, and using the algorithm to work out what the sleeve should look like.
W*: Do you think about your legacy?
MF: I never think about the impact of the work, although it did occur to me that, given the amount of records PSB have sold over the years, there may be 50 million people who have something I designed somewhere in their house. That’s a freaky thought, though not in an egotistical way.
(‘Pet Shop Boys Volume: The Complete Visual Record’ is published on April 7th, and is available to pre-order from Thames & Hudson, priced at £40.00)