The climate was against fey or gay synth pop. It was also anti-intellectual. By 1997, Britpop and lad culture had peaked, foppishness was only really tolerated if you were the rampantly heterosexual beyond-all-doubt Jarvis, and he was just about the limit of intellectualism too - if drug-taking was your thing. Technology had democratised, but electronic music was defined by drugs and lad culture - hence, the Prodigy and Firestarter (which was far more belligerently cartoonish and parochial than Charly-era rave Prodigy ever could be).Patrick Bateman wrote: Fri 07 Feb 2025, 11:54 pm So these are still running and we're now up to 1997. A Red Letter Day should have been on this evening but the R Kelly episodes are not being shown so the BBC4 audience misses the opportunity to see Chris in that weird chair and speculate on his health.
I wasn't a regular TOTP viewer by this stage and I was flicking through some of the episodes around this time on iPlayer...bloody hell, Erasure really had gone down the dumper by the time of Don't Say Your Love Is Killing Me. It looks and sounds like a completely different band! PSB may have been repeating themselves by this stage but at least they were distinctly themselves. It just shows how out of step both groups were after the Britpop phenomenon, ten years since their imperial heyday.
A Red Letter Day is one of the best Pet Shop Boys songs of the 1990s, but its production diminished it, perceived, as it was, as a Go West rewrite and a clunky sub-euro Gina G simulacrum. Regardless, Pet Shop Boys were effectively living out their own real-life version of Discoteca, not speaking the language of the time and wandering lost in a hellscape of TFI Friday, Shed Seven, Kula Shaker, Ocean Colour Scene, Louis Walsh, and CD:UK. Going "Latin" three years before it was fashionable was them being ahead of their time and simultaneously behind the times.
As for Erasure, their commercial demise was shocking, by comparison. While Neil and Chris may have been plummeting from 9 to 42 in the singles charts, they were at least still regularly cracking the top 10. Andy and Vince wouldn't see the top 10 in the 1990s again after Run to the Sun in 1994 - a mere two years after their annus mirabilis. I liked Don't Say Your Love Is Killing Me. In fact, I liked a lot of their dumper singles in the 1990s, but they had absolutely nothing new to say musically or lyrically. By this point, their pop lexicon seemed to consist of three words: "ocean", "motion", and "emotion".
I don't expect pop musicians to radically change their sound as they age. A style is a calling card. But the lyricist has to have something to say if the musical style remains consistent - which it does, by and large, for most great pop acts, whether they are Abba, Pet Shop Boys, or Erasure. The difference was, Abba had the songs - the lyrics to tell different tales. Neil Tennant is worth the price of any Pet Shop Boys album alone, if only for his turn of phrase or ability to fashion compelling empathetic character studies even if he is no longer of the zeitgeist (who is at 70?). Andy Bell? Well, he has MOE. Motion, Ocean, Emotion.
I still like the occasional Erasure single post their commercial heyday, mind. Breathe is superbly simple and effective and I Could Fall In Love With You is weirdly compelling. But they ran out of road commercially and artistically after they started elongating their songs in the mid-1990s as an experiment. That gave us interesting singles like Stay With Me that were commercially unappealing. After that? Let's not speak of Freedom...
Drico.
