There's Cracker, sifting through D'luv's Pet Shop Boys singles and wondering why there has yet to be a follow-up B-sides collection to 1995's Alternative!
At any rate, the PSBs new single "Love etc." is finally out today! The (sort of) good news is that it's already out of stock at Amazon UK. As well, the two digital EPs for "Love etc." are currently positioned at #21 and #55 on UK iTunes. If memory serves correct, "Numb" didn't even crack the Top 100 on iTunes, and still managed to chart at #23 three years back. Yay etc.There have been a slew of interviews with Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe over the past week. Below are excerpts from a few of them:
* From Metro: "Playing at the Brit Awards was dominated by a row over the budget—everything costs a fortune!' exclaims Tennant.
"Lady GaGa seemed to fit into our world because she's so visual and self-manufactured, and she's a great singer," explains Lowe. "We've always worked with people whose records we loved—the same goes for Xenomania and Girls Aloud."
* From The Observer: (Neil Tennant to Johnny Marr) "From [Dusty Springfield], I learned things that had never entered my head; how you arrange a song, how you change the melody at every verse and every chorus, how you give it a climax. There's a song on our new album called 'Pandemonium' where, at the end, I finally do a Dusty Springfield. On the last chorus I change the melody and take it up and I thought, 'Wow, I've never done that before—I'm trying to be Dusty!'"
* From The Guardian: "I was reading in a book about EMI that we were their most successful artists in the world in the second half of the 80s," Tennant says, "but nobody told us at the time.""The thesis that I've had for many, many years about beards is that pop music always goes wrong when pop stars grow beards, because they're going serious, they're going natural, they're letting it all hang out. So I mentioned to a journalist about Brandon [Flowers] growing a beard, which I found very alarming, because he has a great pop voice, a great pop sensibility. But he seems to have stuck with the beard. I read this great quote, where a journalist asked him, 'What are you going to do when you shave your beard off?' He said, 'I'm going to put all the hairs in an envelope and send them to Neil Tennant.' Anyway, they haven't arrived yet."
FUN CLIPS: Found these on YouTube over the past few weeks. The first is the 1986 U.S. interview with the original Chris Lowe/"Paninaro" quote, "I don't like country and western...", and the second is a cheesy interview with Cicero (once signed to the Pet Shop Boys' now-defunct Spaghetti Records label) for U.K. program The Ozone: