Pet Shop Boys reissues, second wave

Five years earlier, a PSB/Xenomania collaboration could have been stupendous. They just didn't get around to it until the core team was burnt out & about to split, and Higgins was too busy pouring his focus & money into trying to run a factory.

― shackling the masses with plastic-wrapped snack picks (sic), Tuesday, October 31, 2017 3:40 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is OTM - PSB and peak-era Xenomania could have been a magical combination. I think they used all of their best ideas on Girls Aloud.

Is there any further reading on this anywhere?

Nick Coler and Tim Powell both left around 2010 (Powell worked with PSB again on Together, and they both did a little bit on Words And Music by St Etienne). I don't know that Cooper ever left formally, but she doesn't seem to have worked with Higgins for about five years now. This Q article goes into some detail about how much time and money Higgins was sinking into turning Xenomania into a combination management / label / production house, just before the others bailed; he sold the house a few years later and by 2013 was holding open casting calls for teenagers in London.

i think Love Etc was originally for GA tho may be mistaken. they talk about this on the album commentary.

Got Introspective cranked up this morning... fuck, I love this band. One of the all-time greatest, IMO.

Love Etc. was originally a Higgins/Cooper track intended for an undisclosed project. For those who are curious abt the details...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scRkGqB0jyM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOIxXVigpvY

Okay both of those freeze frames are almost categorically designed to make Tennant seem like a stereotypical "Yes well YOU wouldn't understand but I'll try to explain" type.

The Yes bonus discs are a bit more of an odds’n’sods collection than their predecessors, but there’s some terrific stuff on there that I like way better than the album - especially This Used To Be The Future and Up & Down. The covers are great fun, esp My Girl and Glad All Over. And I think Together might be one of my absolute favourite PSB tracks oddly - it feels like the kind of thing they were aiming for with Yes but missed. Overall, a patchy album but a decent collection.

Tomorrow, onto Elysium, an album I’ve never actually heard in its entirety...

probably should keep it that way

The only PSB album I'd say, please throw in the trash.

Elysium still has 'Leaving' on it, though, which is great! I like the production on Elysium, too.

I'd love to have been at the meeting where they were all like "Yeah, 'Invisible', that totally works as the second track on the LP... it in no way kills the momentum completely..."

i'm really looking forward to the VERY reissue, that album was a life-changer for me.

I remember standing up for Elysium when it came out for some reason. It is indeed the low point of their career by some distance. Winner, Give It A Go, Hold On and Ego Music would all be in my top five least favourite PSB songs. Leaving is brilliant. Invisible and Breathing Space are both nice, but hardly essential. Memory Of The Future is pretty decent too even if it's the kind of title that Noel Gallagher would use for one of his High Flying Birds albums. I'm surprised they managed to make a worse album than Release. I'm still in shock how quickly they turned it around with Electric.

will the older albums have reissues which are different to the 2001 reissues?

not sure if yers read this, it's a couple of years old

https://www.popmatters.com/pet-shop-boys-behaviour-25-years-later-2495474918.html

"Winner" is one of the most embarrassing songs ever recorded, IMO

Aw, I like 'Ego Music' and 'Your Early Stuff', not because they're great songs (they aren't) but I like it when Tennant gets bitchy.

"Ego Music" is funny, at least.

Winner was a shocker, Pet Shop Boys A-sides are meant to be something special, especially lead singles from albums. (I remember being very disappointed by Before and finding it incredibly bland, yet it sounds great to me today) But I could hardly believe that in the form of Hold On, there was a song that was even worse.

the video was good.

Yeah, 'Before' wasn't instant love for me either - it grew on me a hell of a lot.

Since it came out, I've not seen one single person defend Winner. I can't think of a song so universally hated by a band I love. What the hell were they thinking making that the lead single? I honestly thought it was a joke at first.

Totally agree about Before. A massive grower, just like the album.

Winner was as if they set themselves a challenge to have their worst single ever be self-written

'Winner' isn't even the worst thing on the LP either.

oh hello

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDP6eAckTqM

lol KP you named the only three songs on the album I like (and Winner)

"A Face Like That" was good live.

Ah, I don't mind that one either.

Been listening to Bilingual again this week of the back of this thread. I know I keep banging on about the sequence, but I'm now into the idea of Electricity as a closer. Would work for me, anyway.

Call it performance
Call it art
I call it disaster if the tapes don't start

Contrarian that I am, I rather liked Elysium, and would rate it considerably higher than Yes. Some of the songwriting is a bit underpowered in parts, but I like the production sound and the downbeat, hazy feel. It also feels like it achieves what it set out to do rather more effectively than Yes, which is full of wannabe pop bangers that don't really ignite.

Leaving is gorgeous and the best thing on it; Invisible's really nice; Memories of the Future has a fantastic chorus; the spoken word bits in Ego Music are hilarious.

Also *ducks pre-emptively* I don't mind Winner too much. The idea of them writing an X-Factor winner's song and giving it the most literal lyrics ever ("I'm a winner / Enjoy it while it lasts") struck me as really slyly funny - I'm inclined to thing there's a little more irony bubbling away under the surface. I recall the marketing trying to tag it to the Olympics which seems an attempt to play the song at face value and therefore ruins it. I dunno, I might be reading too much into it, but it made me laugh.

The cupboard's pretty bare regarding the bonus disc, but all of the extra tracks are pleasant, including the Leaving remixes, and the Vocal demo is really interesting - still considerably more "up" than most of Elysium, but a long way from the banger it became.

Interesting note in the booklet regarding the intended producer for this album which was news to me but I won't spoiler unless requested.

Also, interesting that a lot of Electric seems to have been written alongside Elysium, meaning that Electric isn't so much a u-turn from a 'failed' album and more just the flipside to what they were doing at the time (rather like all the electroclash stuff on the Release bonus disc).

that was absolutely part of the narrative/marketing of Electric (note the pairing of the titles, and, again, that it was intended to come out less than a year later).

Yeah, but putting the narrative and marketing aside, Electric and Elysium are poles apart in terms of quality.

I guess it doesn't surprise me too much - to me Elysium just sounded like what someone who dislikes the band imagines all their albums to sound like. The talent was still there, they could still write songs, there was clearly a lot of effort put into it...it just doesn't push the right buttons

The only fan defense of Elysium I've read:

Elysium [Astralwerks, 2012]

The music may well seem too restrained, presumably because Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe figured that on an album where 11 songs find 11 different ways to mock, rue, ponder, and accept their professional mortality, the entitled glee of their full-on disco productions is off the table. Even the explicit "Your Early Stuff" and the valedictory "Requiem in Denim and Leopardskin" keep a lid on it, the better to fit in with the ones that go "Look at me, the absentee," "Say it's not so/That you'd rather lose me," "Our love is dead/But the dead don't go away," and everything else except the pounding "A Face Like That," which also boasts the only lyric that doesn't follow the program. Whether metaphysical ("Everything means something") or bitchy ("There's got to be a future/Or the world will end today"), they're at peace with the fate of their fame and their retirement accounts. And the understated beats suit their elysian equanimity. A-

As a birthday present to me, a buddy got me Nightlife. I hear no notable differences between it and the original release. I own many of the b-sides thanks to the comp released several years ago. The liners are a hoot. Tennant is sad and resentful recalling how this marked the last time PSB got Radio 1 play.

Shame about Radio 1.. sad and resentful Neil is not my idea of fun. Mind you he should look on the bright side they had a good run.

Any guesses what might be in the re-re-reissue sets from 85-95? A box set called Imperial Phase would be better than yet more double CDs. IMHO.

There's no need to guess; they're just putting the Further Listening sets back in print.

I think we've said this several times on the thread! Those rereleases are scheduled to be straight represses of the original reissues.

I would defend 'Elysium' over 'Release'. 'Elysium' has a few tracks on it that I enjoy whereas 'Release' has literally none.

(not totally straight represses - the albums themselves, at least, have been lightly re-remastered. but Tennant says not to waste your money if you already own them, and as far as pisces' question, the song content will be the same.)

I would defend 'Elysium' over 'Release'. 'Elysium' has a few tracks on it that I enjoy whereas 'Release' has literally none.

Release reminds me a bit of REM's Reveal album in that I enjoy a lot of the individual tracks but the album listened to from beginning to end is kind of soporific? I love E-Mail, The Samurai In Autumn, Love Is A Catastrophe and You Choose though, and there's lots of great tracks from that era that didn't end up on the album

Looks like Release doesn't include the Felix Da Housecat "London" remix/new-thing from Disco 3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3-lmIylbvg

A big difference between Reveal and Release is that I can make it through Reveal from beginning to end.

Looks like Release doesn't include the Felix Da Housecat "London" remix/new-thing from Disco 3

The Further Listenings have never included remixes that aren't done by the PSB themselves.