Preview – Pet Shop Boys

Here’s a belated preview for Pet Shop Boys, who are back with a new album Nevertheless in a couple of months, heralded by Loneliness, a nice but fairly dull lead single which reminds me a bit of 2012’s Winner (although that had some good b-sides and remixes, which doesn’t seem to be true this time). The one positive this time around is the video, which is a kind of post-industrial reworking of Domino Dancing, but even that makes it sound as though there’s a bit of recycling going on here. It looks as though it’s filmed in Sheffield, the spiritual home of this blog, which is another point in its favour.

Pet Shop Boys have had a good track record with lead singles in the last decade or so, but hopefully there are enough surprises on the album to make this the exception. Let’s see.

Oops

Sorry for the unplanned absence here – I had all sorts of nice posts lined up for the Christmas period which either never quite got posted or never quite got written. There’s always next year, I suppose. These next couple of months will probably be unpleasantly busy, so don’t set your expectations too high for the time being – I’ll post more when I can.

Amusingly, if you search for this song, the first result you get is a video which has no sound. Oops.

Preview – Karl Bartos

Karl Bartos has had an interesting career since leaving Kraftwerk at some point in the 1980s. His post-departure album Esperanto is great, but for many of his later works he seems to have hung on a bit too hard to his past life, sounding almost like a parody of his former self.

So for Bartos to have developed a new soundtrack for Robert Wiene‘s Weimar expressionist 1920 film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari is particularly interesting. Kraftwerk did something similar before, of course, with 1978’s Die Mensch-Maschine taking heavy inspiration from Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis, but this time he has taken on the full film soundtrack. It’s technically still electronic music, but using synthesised orchestral music, which still sounds to be somewhat in his traditional style, but the fact that he’s also worked on the foley sounds is a nice touch. It looks fantastic.

Live shows will take place across Germany during 2024, with a full album and DVD scheduled for release on 9th February. Here’s the preview:

Flowered Up

You may have already been familiar with the sad story of Flowered Up – I was not. I had heard of them vaguely thanks to some of their labelmates, but I hadn’t read much about them, and I certainly hadn’t heard anything they had recorded.

That’s a shame, because as you’ll see, they’re an interesting band. One of the more precocious of the “baggy” scene that grew out of Manchester in the late 1980s and went mainstream in the early 1990s, this London-based band managed just six hit singles and one album, but all of them charted, and several were decent-sized hits.

Formed in 1989 and overwhelmed by illegal narcotics, their story is better told by others, such as this piece from 2016. The sad irony seems to be that following those initial successes, drugs got the better of this promising group and effectively led to them missing out on most of the 1990s. An abortive attempted comeback in 2001 fell apart with only an album full of demos, a 2005 reunion concert ended badly, and a 2007 attempted reunion never managed to get all the members back together in the first place.

Two years later, the lead singer died from a heroin overdose, tragically also followed by his band-mate brother three years after that. It’s not hard to see why Flowered Up have been said to be cursed. To me, it’s also a sad illustration of the way that fame tosses people aside if they don’t quite play the fame game or manage the longevity that’s required.

In their time, though, they appear to have created plenty of great stories, such as the party with a name (Debauchery), so it’s little wonder that a band who barely broke the top twenty have been immortalised in a book and a film.

It’s worth checking out the highly influential video – which became a short film – for their thirteen-minute smash hit Weekender, and wondering (a) whether their criticism of people partying only at weekends is really fair given the circumstances, and (b) what they could have been if they had managed to stay sober.

Preview – Sleaford Mods

Perhaps this isn’t so much of a preview, given how fast the world moves these days – this came out on Tuesday, so it’s literally last week’s news now. It was a nice surprise to wake up on Tuesday to the news that Sleaford Mods have done a cover version of West End girls, and as you would expect, it’s delivered brilliantly, with a full East Midlands drawl.

The backing is surprisingly faithful to the original, so it’s clear they were having a lot of fun here trying to recreate sounds rather than reinvent the whole thing, but that makes Pet Shop Boys‘ own remix all the more surprising. Packaged with four versions in total, only one of which falls short (the purely vocoder vocal on the final mix makes for a very dull listen), it’s really a great new single.

The only thing that could make it better is a retro-themed video, which I can only presume is filmed on the streets of Nottingham, with a lot of similar shots to the gloomy Thatcher years that were captured in the original. The parallels to the present day are perfect.

All proceeds go to the charity Shelter.

Fragments of The Universal Sun

I mentioned that one of my major projects over the last few years has been working on what I hesitantly call my own music. I’ve written about it once or twice in the past, although I try not to let it intrude too often here, as I’m sure this blog’s readers have better things to do than listen to it. Some of it is, I’m afraid, unavoidably awful. But making it makes me happy, and it’s pretty much the only place I spend time where it feels as though nobody wants to criticise me. Actually, I’m sure the few people who do listen to it want to criticise me, but they never have, and that’s the main thing.

It’s not without success, either. I’ve clawed back a small amount of money. Some of the material I collaborated on appeared on a compilation. And one track that I recorded a few years ago seems to have ended up on a TikTok (I barely know what that is), which got played 175,000 times and earned me the princely sum of 4 pence.

Most recently, I’ve been working on an album that completes about a decade of development and finally feels like the album I’ve always been trying to make. That’s The Universal Sun, and I’ll talk more about it here at some point in the future. The collection of b-sides, bonus tracks, and unreleased material that goes with it is Fragments of The Universal Sun, and that comes out today. There are some links below – please click and give it a listen, and then we’ll go back to pretending that none of that ever happened.

https://ditto.fm/fragments-of-the-universal-sun

Preview – Delia Derbyshire & Barry Bermange

It is, of course, incredibly exciting news that a new Delia Derbyshire release is coming. Derbyshire is, of course, the musical genius who brought so many of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop‘s musical works to life through a combination of hard work and experimentation. Apart from the obvious composition that we all know about (the first couple of iterations of the Doctor Who theme), some of her other works such as Blue Veils and Golden Sands are truly awe-inspiring.

Although it’s been bootlegged a few times, Inventions for Radio has never been formally released before now, with production from the also-legendary Mark Ayres.

Inventions for Radio is on six LPs including lots of bonus material, appearing on 8th December. The only downside is the eye-watering price, which unfortunately renders it completely accessible to me, but I hope someone on here will be able to enjoy it. Here it is on Rough Trade.

Rewind

Before we really reboot things in earnest, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on where this blog has succeeded in the past. That’s a past which runs back to 2011, over 2,372 posts (some of which even had numbers) and more than 100,000 page views. This blog cited on several Wikipedia articles as an official source and it used to have a respectable Twitter following too, until I decided to cancel the account about a year ago.

Most popular by far are the obscurities, such as my post about Vince Clarke‘s Deeptronica album, Boris Blank‘s Avant Garden 1, 2, 3, and 4 and Pet Shop Boys‘ Bobby O Demos, or also their recently-reissued Relentless mini-album. Unfortunately, a lot of blogs offer illegal content for download (for the tape: this one does not), so it’s possible that a lot of these are short visits.

Then there are the fans of the British Rock and Pop Awards. This was a short series of posts which I wrote to help dispel a widespread opinion that this early ceremony was an initial version of the BRIT Awards (it wasn’t – it seems to have essentially been a readers’ poll for NEWSPAPER which got TV coverage). There’s next to no information elsewhere online, and so a small number of individuals have come to regard this blog as the place to store it. They have come to be some of the most popular posts here. While I’m surprised and confused by this, it’s nice to offer them a home, and I’m sure I’ll summarise the discussions here soon.

The most popular series of posts on here are the Beginner’s guides, which almost certainly need some updates. Depeche Mode were the most popular to date, followed by Kraftwerk and I Monster, perhaps surprisingly.

In terms of the things you click into the most, your most popular category is Awards and your most popular artist is Pet Shop Boys.

So, where am I going with all this? Well, it does give me some food for thought on what I should post about in this newly-regenerated blog. The Chart for stowaways, for example, seems to have long passed its peak, so let’s not bother with that any more. I’m sure there will be plenty of dull things coming up that I can slip in its place.

Hello

Well, that was a long break, wasn’t it?

While this blog was never really officially cancelled, it does seem to have been on hiatus for quite a long time. So it’s high time we brought it back! Hello!

What have I been up to since we last spoke? Well, mainly caught up with the real world, which has been very entertaining indeed, as I imagine everyone knows. I’ve had a lot less spare time in general, but in what little I’ve had, I’ve recorded two more albums (more on that to come in future posts) and done a lot of research about charts (which means that a lot of what I said about them previously can be proven completely wrong).

I know we’ve lost a lot of readers in the meantime, and I don’t just mean “David”, who, never having posted before, got very upset that one time I posted about Steps. (Sorry, David – I just did it again! Oops… Oh wait, that’s someone else, isn’t it?) I understand – I would have wandered off to pastures new in the meantime too.

Well, anyway, I do have one draft post that I started writing three years ago, as well. Exciting stuff. I definitely won’t be able to post quite as often as I used to, but I’ve got a few things that I want to say, so do stay tuned! Or become tuned, at least.

Decadence

Well, it’s been very quiet around here, recently, hasn’t it? My big secret is that I used to write most of the posts during my commute, and… well, thanks to the pandemic, I haven’t had one for a little over two years now, so it’s been harder and harder to keep up. I’m sure there will be a reboot one day, but for now, I’m sorry – we’ll stay in this holding pattern for a while longer.

I even managed to miss the tenth anniversary of this blog! Just by a few days, and it seems a slightly bitter milestone given that the ninth anniversary was only a few posts ago, but there you go. Time to celebrate a decade of, er, Decadence on this blog, with this lovely collaboration between Pet Shop Boys and Johnny Marr from 1994.