— Miranda Sawyer
This October, 1991 issue of of Smash Hits includes a Gordon Bennett! feature about the precarious state of the single. "Top of the Pops no longer features a Top 40 rundown. Sales of singles have reached an all-time low." Ver Hits proceeded to ask youths from all over Britain about it.
Their answers vary (some prefer not to have B sides, others like them and wish for more extras; some would like to buy more 45's, others seem content to wait for albums to come out) but they all seem to agree that singles had become a rip off and were no longer worth bothering with. While the Hits seemed concerned by this development, it's likely that the big record labels were happy with their prediction that "by the end of the century singles may no longer exist". In Britain they were allowed to grow prohibitively expensive for the average youngster while in the US they were being gradually phased out so that listeners would be forced to buy albums just for one song (aka to pull a Chumbawumba). CD formatting would revive the single somewhat in the mid-nineties but the days of kids snapping up 45's on a weekly basis en masse were drawing to a close.
And they certainly weren't snapping up many of the new releases in this same issue. Of the twenty-two records either reviewed by Miranda Sawyer or mentioned in the Also Released This Fortnight sidebar, not one managed to make the Top 10. Only eight were able to crack the Fun Forty — and the bulk of them aren't especially memorable. "The Show Must Go On" is mostly notable as the last Queen single released during Freddie Mercury's lifetime; "Caribbean Blue" (not reviewed since they evidently had to make room for the likes of Five Star and The Osmond Boys) is perhaps Enya's second or third best remembered song, so that's something I guess.
This even goes for "DJ Culture", Sawyer's Single of the Fortnight. There had been a time when the release of a new Pet Shop Boys' single meant a guaranteed Top 5 smash but this was no longer the case. Following the success of "So Hard" (their tenth Top 10 hit on the bounce) a year earlier, they had struggled to keep the megahits coming. The much-loved "Being Boring" proved to be their lowest charting single since the original version of "Opportunities" flopped back in 1985. In a move that smacked of desperation, they put out a cover of U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" which returned them to the upper reaches of the chart but this also prompted a backlash. Then, the magnificent "Jealousy", closing track and one of many highlights on their album masterpiece Behaviour, only got to number twelve. There's nothing wrong with peaking within the Top 20 but for sure this was a come down.
With the coming Pet Shops' greatest hits package Discography: The Complete Singles Collection it was decided to tack a pair of new tracks to the end of it, just as Madonna had done a year earlier on her Immaculate Collection. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe agreed to do so but weren't overly keen on it. "Chris spent the whole time saying, 'Obviously they'll both be flops'," recalls Tennant. Putting new material on best of's is supposed to be a good incentive for potential purchasers but it sets up an unwinnable situation: people flock to the compilation at the expense of one of the supposed 'greatest hits' on it.
"DJ Culture" failed to dent the Top 10 — while Discography proved unable to give them that long sought after number one album; quite why it didn't become one of those mega-selling comps like Eurythmics' Greatest Hits or The Beautiful South's Carry on Up the Charts is anyone's guess — but the song was ahead of its time in at least one respect. Having been composed in the aftermath of the First Gulf War, Tennant observed that supposed war hero leaders like George Bush and John Major began using Churchill as a way of bigging themselves up. Instead of speaking their minds, they relied upon "samples" of quotations, just as DJ's and remixers sampled other records.
What Tennant wasn't to know at the time is that through television syndication and social media everyone began sampling the words of others in order to pass themselves off as wits. (I am by no means being judgmental: I am as guilty as anyone of quoting Seinfeld, The Simpsons and The Office as a means of trying to be funnier than I actually am) The 1995 VHS reissue of the Star Wars trilogy (as well as the subsequent 'Special Editions' that hit theatres a couple years' later) resulted in a lot more people becoming familiar with lines from these iconic pictures. Oddly enough, it was around this point that the famous misquote "Luke, I am your father" became much more prevalent in the culture; thinking about this blog post has made me wonder if misqotes are as accidental as we make them out to be.
Quoting Churchill went from something that only the lettered would do to an idiot's favourite passtime. Knowledge of the source mattered little. My own Churchillian quote choice is the one about the female MP (possibly the UK's first though I have no idea) who was critical of the prime minister being intoxicated. He shot back that while, yes, he was drunk, he would be sober in the morning but her unattractive state would be harder to clear up. Is this even close to what he actually said? Who's to say? What matters is I used Churchill in my own words. Bully for me.
Tennant misquotes Oscar Wilde with the line "And I my lord, may I say nothing?". There's no place left for the true wit to thrive. They've been replaced by an endless stream of quotations and misquotations. Those individuals with a unique voice inevitably get drowned out by the din of everyone else getting a lyric wrong or repeating a famous person with garbled syntax. We're now coming to a point in which those with the largest platforms complain that they are being silenced while what they actually have to say is of little value. There's no room for the public intellectual when everybody has a voice that they don't even use responsibly.
With "West End Girls" capturing them on the cusp of stardom and "Left to My Own Devices" at a creative peak, it's only right that the Pet Shop Boys would bring their six year run of unbeatable singles to a close with a third in a series of brilliant half-rapped, half-sung records. It isn't quite as astounding as either of them but the song's bridge rates as one of their finest. The dreamy "indulge yourself, your every move" passage turns it into yet another certified PSB classic. Sawyer astutely observes that they're "at their best when they're wistful" — it just takes time for the wistfulness to settle in. (This could be explained by the song's cut-and-paste roots, having been pieced together over the past several months)
Amusingly, Sawyer manages to double down on her blasse attitude towards "Being Boring", a single she assessed a year earlier as lacking the "swooshy drama or singalong chorus that Pet Shop Boys songs are made of". She didn't trash it but her lack of enthusiasm for what many — myself included — rate as Tennant and Lowe's greatest moment is still baffling. Much as I love "DJ Culture", I couldn't possibly say that it "knocks spots" off of "Being Boring". There's a reason one of these two songs remains a firm part of Pet Shop live shows to this day while the other has almost become an afterthought (to quote Sawyer, "sad but true").
I picked up Discography that November. I was grateful to have "DJ Culture" and other new track "Was It Worth It?" but I was even more thrilled by singles mixes of "Suburbia", "Heart", "Left to My Own Devices" and "It's Alright". (I was even excited to finally have "Where the Streets Have No Name": those kids in Smash Hits weren't the only ones who seldom bought singles) The two tracks at the end felt like a bonus, which in effect they were. The Pet Shop Boys had been such an important part of my life but I was now beginning to wonder how I might cope without them. (Was it even a certainty they'd carry on past this greatest hits they'd just put out?) It was time for them to step away for a while so that we might be allowed the opportunity to miss them. And just like "Liz before Betty, She after Sean", they were set for a rebirth of their own.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
MC Buzz B: "Never Change"
Bunny's runner-up for SOTF and one she seems to gush over more than the Pet Shops — "he's the Shakespeare of rap (only not as boring)". This MC Buzz B bloke (aka Sean Braithwaite) made significant use of Bruce Hornsby & The Range's "The Way It Is" thus putting him ahead of the curve of rapper's using samples of MOR adult contemporary, a trend that would continue throughout the nineties. He maybe could have dialed back on piano loop a bit but otherwise this is a splendid effort that deserved better than going absolutely nowhere. Really the only other decent single reviewed this fortnight in a batch of flops that aren't much fun to listen to.
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