— Mark Frith
For the first time in living memory (or close enough to it) UK pop was going through a full calendar year without a new release from Pet Shop Boys. They had been a cornerstone of Britain's charts in the late eighties but their fortunes had begun to slide at the start of the new decade. Behaviour had been their best album — as it remains to this day — but a combination of not great word-of-mouth and the public being a bit tired of them meant that its stay on the L.P. charts had been brief. The singles were underperforming as well, especially with the relative flop of the magnificent "Being Boring". Even their strength-to-strength greatest hits collection Discography failed to generate similar sales to compilations from Queen, Eurythmics and Madness. So much for being a national treasure.
The Pet Shops may have been away from the "scene" but Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe remained active. The singer appeared on the Electronic single "Disappointed" which is every bit as good as a team up involving members of PSB, New Order and The Smiths deserved to be (in spite of the horrible use of French in the chorus). It was a Top 10 hit albeit one that crashed out of the listings rather promptly. They were also at work helping to put together the soundtrack to the outstanding Neil Jordan film The Crying Game. They even came this close to putting out a stand alone single with "Go West" which they ultimately decided to hold over for the following year. The pair were also getting involved in their own label Spaghetti Records and its first signing, Scottish singer David Cicero.
Tennant and Lowe weren't just massive pop stars but they were also their generation's finest songwriting duo. Patsy Kensit's band Eighth Wonder, Dusty Sprinfield and Liza Minelli all had hits with their compositions. But rather than gifting another Tennant/Lowe original to Cicero, they evidently had enough faith in him to allow him to write his own material. They even stayed away from the production side for the most part. It was only when third single "That Loving Feeling" ("wordy but dull", according to Mark Frith) stalled outside of the Top 40 that the decision was made to his famous mentors in for a little "additional production".
"Additional production": apparently, a simple "remixed by" credit just wasn't good enough. Either way, however, it should've been easy to spot that Tennant and Lowe had come in to lend some long-needed support to a young artist who wasn't delivering on his own. And this wasn't simply a case of a disinterested public no longer keen on anything to do with the Pet Shop Boys: Cicero's records were on the whole competent but unremarkable. (The exception was probably "Live for Today" which was credited to the Scottish singer as well as Sylvia Mason James, a longtime backing vocalist for Tennant and Lowe; it would appear on the Spaghetti Records soundtrack to The Crying Game, alongside Boy George's wonderful cover of the song of the same name)
It would be easy to dismiss something like "Heaven Must Have Sent You Back to Me" as a Pet Shops clone record but for the fact that it's not that at all. Cicero's voice is closer to Tennant's Electronic mate Bernard Sumner, making it resemble a New Order record more than anything — and, even then, one of those forgettable deep cuts from the forthcoming Republic album, so hardly vintage NO. That patented Tennant/Lowe songwriting style of brimming choruses with sparkling middle eights isn't present either. Very few can write a song like Neil and Chris and there's no shame in that. And good on him for trying his best not to piggyback on his famous benefactors. He'd been hopeless at waiting tables while dreaming of his big break and it only came when he had the nerve to hand a demo to a member of the Pet Shops' inner circle at a concert in Glasgow.
This remix is an definite upgrade on the original "Heaven Must Have Sent You Back to Me" but it nevertheless nothing special in the scheme of things. Even among a fairly rum selection of new releases for Mark Frith to go through, it's just average. (The only standouts are the selection below and Annie Lennox's "Walking on Broken Glass"; at least Cicero isn't one of the utterly hopeless entries like Dannii Minogue's horrible cover of The Jacksons' "Show You the Way to Go" and Nu-Matic's "Spring in Your Step" which must have emerged from novelty song hell) A bit cool? Yeah but only had it come out five years' earlier. A bit enigmatic? No, not particularly. A bit good? Yeah, I can go along with that.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
The Brand New Heavies: "Don't Let It Go to Your Head"
Allegedly popular with people who don't like music and dismissed by too cool for school types ("you're not supposed to enjoy pop music, you know"), The Brand New Heavies are Generation X's version of Shakatak, right down to their insane longevity. Is it glorified wedding band music? Sure but why's that even a bad thing? I realise they're so utterly middle class but I like The Brand New Heavies and "Don't Let It Go to Your Head" is one of many first rate singles they crafted over the course of the nineties. Frith reckons you have to live the Heavies' life of "designer waistcoats" and "star-shaped shades" in order to really be a fan but I respectfully disagree: it's their music that instantly gives you all the accompanying accoutrements which is great since I'm otherwise not a designer waistcoat kind of guy.
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