Pet Shop Boys Hotspot Out Friday
If anyone ever tells you that modern music is dumb, you can shoot them down with three syllables: Pet Shop Boys. For 35 years, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have been making electro-pop that glows with a warm intelligence.
In photos they play the Gilbert & George of pop, but their work has more depth and range. Besides dozens of hits, they’ve written two musicals, a ballet based on a tale by Hans Christian Andersen and songs for the stage version of Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette.
If not quite national treasures, Pet Shop Boys are part of the fabric of our culture. Last June they were at Glastonbury, guesting with The Killers as they headlined the Pyramid stage.
If anyone ever tells you that modern music is dumb, you can shoot them down with three syllables: Pet Shop Boys (Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, above)
This month they were acclaimed on Desert Island Discs when the actor Rupert Everett not only chose a song of theirs (Being Boring) as his favourite piece of music, but also called them ‘my household gods’.
A week later they cropped up in obituaries of the conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, who once accused them of making only ‘a minimal contribution’ to their own records.
This clever man knew so little about pop that he bracketed Pet Shop Boys with the Spice Girls. They sued him, and won.
Now here is Hotspot, their 14th album since West End Girls turned two grown men – one an editor at Smash Hits, the other a former trainee architect – into an overnight sensation.
Listen to it once and it may seem like just another Pet Shop Boys album, with the same old ingredients: succinct title, measured synths, limited vocals, nuanced lyrics and polished production from Stuart Price.
Stick with it, though, and you find some new flavours. There’s a subtle protest song, Dreamland, with Olly Alexander of Years & Years joining Tennant to dream of a place where ‘You don’t need a visa/You can come and go and still be here’.
There are fond references to Berlin, the duo’s second home; much of Hotspot was recorded at Hansa Studios, where David Bowie made Low, his synthiest album.
There’s plenty of dancefloor energy in the punchy Will-O-The-Wisp and the larky Monkey Business. But there’s also a meditation on growing old in Burning The Heather, with Tennant’s thoughts as he turns 65 playing off some elegant acoustic guitar from Bernard Butler, and something that sounds suspiciously like a trombone solo.
If you love Pet Shop Boys’ genteel raps, there’s a good one on Happy People; if you prefer their elegiac mode, Only The Dark is a treat. ‘Only the dark,’ it goes, ‘can show you the stars.’
Hotspot ends, like a romcom, with a marriage – a big-hearted number called Wedding In Berlin. The hooks throughout have been as strong as they were in the days when Tennant and Lowe had a season ticket to the Top Ten.
No, this isn’t just another Pet Shop Boys album: it’s the first of the albums of the year.
GIG OF THE WEEK
Judy Collins
Grand Central Hall, Liverpool Touring until February 3
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Judy Collins is 80, which doesn’t bother her one bit. Her boots are leather, her heels are high and her top is sparkly, like her patter. ‘I just want you to know,’ she says, ‘that you’re looking at the American Idol of 1957.’
When she broke through in the folk clubs of Greenwich Village in 1961, she was already a wife, mother and former clerk. She brings the ruefulness of real life along with a fabulous voice, clear as the bottle of water at her feet.
She does a definitive Send In The Clowns, a mighty Amazing Grace and a beguiling Norwegian Wood, written by John Lennon, who was a year younger than her. The traditional folk songs can be patchy but Collins’s taste in folk-rock is impeccable.
Judy Collins is 80, which doesn’t bother her one bit. Her boots are leather, her heels are high and her top is sparkly, like her patter
The first person to have a hit with a composition by Leonard Cohen (Suzanne), and by Joni Mitchell (Both Sides Now), she was there, in Woodstock, the night Dylan wrote Mr Tambourine Man.
She’s still singing these three songs – all different, all beautiful. Her show is like a visit to a great museum.
THIS WEEK’S CD RELEASES
By Adam Woods
Louise Heavy Love Out now
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No one will judge you if you can’t remember every one, but Louise Redknapp had a dozen Top 20 hits around the late Nineties and early 2000s. She’s been back in business since her 2016 Strictly rebirth, and here comes the new music: shiny, worldly wise dance-pop with sexy notes. Heavy Love strikes a confident, universal tone, vindicating her decision to return
Wolf Parade Thin Mind Out Friday
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Guitar music has largely been cast to the outskirts by electronic pop and hip-hop over the past decade or so, but Canada’s Wolf Parade pack an impassioned punch on Thin Mind. Every song is a tangled blast of guitars and synths, and the kind of wry angst that’s probably an inevitable by-product of trying to make a living as an indie-rock band in 2020
Selena Gomez Rare Out now
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Today’s pop superstars aren’t shy about sharing their woes; the difference with Selena Gomez, perhaps the most readily likeable of the lot, is that she can justifiably complain, with a lupus diagnosis and a kidney transplant in her debit column. Actually, her first album in five years wallows very little, but it’s classy and wise, powered by the slinky, understated pop that has become her signature
Georgia Seeking Thrills Out now
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Twenty-nine-year-old Georgia Barnes’s roots are in the Nineties rave scene – her dad is Neil Barnes, of electronic pioneers Leftfield – but her excellent second album touches many bases: from the euphoric pop of About Work The Dancefloor to the sing-song dub of Ray Guns. She plays almost every note herself, and, much like Robyn, binds all together with her own charisma