Twentieth Century Blues: The Songs of Noel Coward.

It makes perfect sense that the Red Hot AIDS Charitable Trust--the British equivalent of our own Red Hot Organization, the musical AIDS charity launched with Red Hot + Blue: A Tribute to Cole Porter--would salute Noel Coward. England's own Porter, Coward was a theatrical songwriter of nearly unbeatable sophistication who managed to craft melodies every bit as indelible, wit-crazy, and classy as his eminently quotable lyrics.

Like Porter, Coward was gay and in the professional closet yet wrote from a perspective that seems as obviously queer as any of today's out and proud homos. He wrote of hidden obsessions, societal hypocrisies, nightlife escape, and estranged longing with an insight that still seems modern, that still makes sense for the mainstream while telling our stories from the inside of the outside. Any writer who slips a line into a hit song like "He has a gay appeal that makes me feel there's maybe something sad about the boy" was clearly aware of what he was doing, even if the status quo wasn't.

Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys is perhaps Coward's closest pop peer, and so it makes perfect sense that he'd be behind an album (available only as an import) that presents the composer quite convincingly as the archetypal English pop icon, the forerunner of the Beatles, David Bowie, and the Pets themselves. Working on his own musical with collaborator Chris Lowe, Tennant casts the album as would an astute director. Some of his Anglo-only choices may be unfamiliar to most Americans (Texas, Space, ex-Take That band member Robbie Williams, comedian Vic Reeves), but this is appropriate for one of the most intrinsically English songwriters, ever. A lineup that includes Elton John, Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithfull, Michael Nyman, and Sting can afford to take chances.

Nearly every one of the 14 tracks applies a different strategy to these standards. "Someday I'll Find You" matches the soul of newcomer Shola Ama (think young Randy Crawford) to the symphonic splendor of Craig Armstrong (the man who put the strings on Madonna's "Frozen"). "Mad About the Boy" keeps the arrangement in the West End, while Faithfull's expressive, experienced growl gives the lyric a lived-in quality most musical actors couldn't touch. "I've Been to a Marvelous Party" generates suitably over-the-top techno for a Cowardesque narration, which Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy nails with acerbic glee. On "Sail Away" the Pet Shop Boys will be Boys--ever wistful, ever melancholy, even in the most contented moments. McCartney croons "A Room With a View" as if creating a sequel to his own "When I'm Sixty-Four," while Bryan Ferry, Elton, and Sting lend similarly wizened, knowing readings to "I'll See You Again," "Twentieth Century Blues," and "I'll Follow My Secret Heart," respectively. (What is it about Sting that shines brightest when he surrenders to gay-themed material?)

As with most multiartist affairs, Twentieth Century Blues: The Songs of Noel Coward misfires occasionally, but the delights far outnumber the duds. Suede's post-Ecstasy trip-hop take on "Poor Little Rich Girl" characterizes everything right about an album that matches the master's songs to respectful yet thoroughly contemporary, often radical arrangements. Brett Andersen wails away as if he'd penned the poetry himself, while the band captures Coward's cautionary, morning-after dissipation with a hypnotic languor that's far from the song's 1925 origins but still suggests what the author intended. Coward would be mad for it.

Barry Walters is a pop-music critic for The Advocate.