— Miranda Sawyer
The Christmas Number One sweepstakes of 1988 were heating up after a slow start a fortnight earlier. Bros, the hottest British act of the year, made their bid with the double A-side "Cat Among the Pigeons" / "Silent Night", a mix of yet another cut from their album Push and a seasonal favourite that might get more than the hardcore Brosettes to shell out. Rick Astley, the bookies choice a year earlier, was back with the SAW composition "Take Me to Your Heart". Michael Jackson was really starting to scrape the bottom of the Bad barrel with "Smooth Criminal". Kim Wilde taking the blubsome, heartbroken waif angle with "Four Letter Word". Phil Collins going all Motown on "Two Hearts". A-ha with yet another standard A-ha record "You Are the One". Ver kids were spoiled for choice when it came to buying presents for their brothers and sisters — and, indeed, for spending their prized Christmas record tokens from their uncles and aunties.
Also present is the Pet Shop Boys, who were the upset winners a year earlier. I don't know if them taking the best ever version of "Always on My Mind" to the top was a huge upset but Rick had been the one expecting it and a whole generation of pop kids are salty to this day that The Pogues didn't manage to pull it off so it seems at least a few people were upset by it. In any event, "Always on My Mind" proved to be one of the strongest non-festive Christmas number ones of all time and is frequently cited as the among the greatest cover versions ever recorded. It proved to be the apogee of their imperial period with a video that teased their upcoming film It Couldn't Happen Here with momentum aplenty to take the perfectly acceptable but still kind of underwhelming follow-up "Heart" to its own trip up to the top of the charts.
Their chances didn't seem quite as good the following year as they aimed to be the first group since The Beatles (back when it wasn't even a big deal) to nab back-to-back Christmas chart toppers. The following issue of Smash Hits did a feature in Bitz about the potential winners and they didn't like the chances of "Left to My Own Devices". They were "in poor form this festive season" and that "grannies won't have a clue what they're on about". In short, they were no longer content to make music that could appeal to as many people as possible; Tennant was beginning to write in a much more autobiographical fashion and Lowe was drawing upon house music for inspiration. Mass popularity had arrived and now it was time to guide the listeners and viewers to some new places.
"Left to My Own Devices" wasn't the biggest single that Christmas but it was the best tune on the charts. "Heart" had been an enjoyable let down but it led them towards their most creatively fertile period. Just being a standard synth-pop duo was no longer good enough. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe began approaching their albums thematically but Introspective arrived at a time when they could sacrifice LP cohesion in favour of an ambitious plan to record every track long. Other groups cut singles that would be extended for the 12" mix but they were interested in doing the reverse. "The idea," Tennant would later explain, "was to have an album where every track was a single". (Indeed, a companion EP could easily be compiled of the four singles from Introspective, as well as Eighth Wonder's cover of "I'm Not Scared" and the original b-side release of "I Want a Dog": suffice it to say it would be vastly inferior to the album itself) Introspective was met with mixed reviews (William Shaw thought they were guilty of "messing about a bit too much", while my mum was furious that there were only six songs on it) but it is now regarded as one of their finest works and the start of their creative peak.
Written in piecemeal fashion by Tennant and Lowe and with perfectionists Trevor Horn and Stephen Lipson producing, "Left to My Own Devices" took its time gestating before a proper song resulted. This could easily have turned the work into a mess but all concerned were on the same page in crafting their grandest number to date. It would be the first song they'd record with an orchestra and the video would be their first in ages to lack a narrative. But for all the new elements involved, it is classic Pet Shops. Tennant proved again that he's better at spoken word than singing (the trio of "West End Girls", "Left to My Own Devices" and "Being Boring" are all either rapped, narrated or whispered; it would only be until "Yesterday When I Was Mad" that he may have taken talking over their records a step too far) and their streak of pristine singles was in no danger of coming to a close. The only thing missing was that the eight minute album version was just that much more epic and over-the-top.
"Left to My Own Devices" peaked at a routine number four but it was out of the Top 20 by the time Bruno Brookes announced that year's Christmas number one. They would never be as popular as they had been in 1987 but their devoted fanbase remained and they happened to be at the peak of their powers. Loneliness, isolation, making a virtue out of not fitting it, dark humour: those of us who remained committed were set to learn a lot from them. Meanwhile, other pop stars would be factoring into the 1988 Christmas number one stakes including a certain synth-pop duo who were the chief rivals to the Pet Shop Boys.
The singles were reviewed this fortnight by Miranda Sawyer, another one of my favourite writers from the year I was a Hits devotee. In common with both Sylvia Patterson and Tom Doyle, she had the perspective of being a similarly obsessive fan of the magazine prior to working for it and it shows in much of her writing. Pop kids of the time could live out their fantasies of being pop stars, meeting pop stars, snogging pop stars, bashing pop stars and taking the mickey out of pop stars and this generation of hacks had that same mindset about them. The days of older, more serious critics lampooning Duran Duran were long gone and in their place were these young writers who loved pop and making fun of it as much as possible.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Neneh Cherry: "Buffalo Stance"
Not a favourite for the Christmas Number One, "Buffalo Stance" proved to be a slow burn up the charts and it didn't peak until the New Year by which point the Swedish singer/rapper and step-daughter of jazz trumpet player Don Cherry had made a name for herself with a legendary performance on Top of the Pops. The kids didn't know what a "Buffalo Stance" was nor were we clued in to the fact that the song seemed to be about prostitutes. The only stuff that mattered was that (a) it was a brilliant pop song and (b) Cherry was an awesome pop star. We'll be seeing her here again before long.
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