Pet Shop Boys Community

Patrick Bateman wrote:I was just about to buy it but £36!!!!! I'll wait for the inevitable price-drop.

http://hmv.com/hmvweb/displayProductDet ... sku=918078

I'd never pay that for it, I think the only boxset Ive ever spent that kind of cash on was £40 for the Kraftwerk "Minimum Maximum" 2cd + 2dvd.

Call me a tight arse but £36 for basically a cd and dvd in too much.

The guy I got it off on ebay had 0 feedback which is probably why I got it for so cheap. Ive had it sent to my folks in England and they received it today! Lokking forward to giving the dvd a view and I remember the Breath of life live on totp, Ive taped all of the Erasure and PSB performances back then and some are quite hard to watch now!

JSDOUVRES wrote:I'd never pay that for it, I think the only boxset Ive ever spent that kind of cash on was £40 for the Kraftwerk "Minimum Maximum" 2cd + 2dvd.

Call me a tight arse but £36 for basically a cd and dvd in too much.

The guy I got it off on ebay had 0 feedback which is probably why I got it for so cheap. Ive had it sent to my folks in England and they received it today! Lokking forward to giving the dvd a view and I remember the Breath of life live on totp, Ive taped all of the Erasure and PSB performances back then and some are quite hard to watch now!

I'm more of a casual Erasure fan so I'm not particularly interested in the DVD or the live cd so it's not really worth my while. Why didn't they stick the remix cd with the other two and make it a triple cd without the DVD?

I'd rather have just the DVD. Not bothered about the live cd and we have the first pop. As for the 2nd 40 'hits', forget it.

Pop40 is now top 20. It should easily maintain that position, with sales being a bit slow this week. I think Mute will expect it to stay top 20 for at least 3 weeks, just to make a bit of profit. Especially on the back of quite an aggressive t.v campaign.

"Aggressive" TV campaign? I haven't seen anything.

This has absolutely no chance of staying in the Top 20 for three weeks. It'll fall faster than a steel leotard. I'm pretty amazed it's in the Top 20 now.

I've seen 1 TV advert, Andy doing a few interviews here and there. They're obviously pushing this more than their last few studio albums and combined with PSB's brit performance and the general resurgence of electronic pop its nice to see the album climbing into the top 20 rather than falling flat on its arse after the first midweeks. However, one could hardly call it an 'aggressive tv campaign'.

It would be a shame if it didn't at least hang on to the top 20 position because the first disc is a simply stunning of collection of pop songs from a band that was on top of their game and captured the zeitgeist at the time. The second disc, less so, but there's still some nice tunes on there and Erasure deserve a alot more than fading into forgotten obscurity.

If they record a proper album and forgot those horrible soft-synths they've been using for the last couple of albums and go back to basics - which from the sounds of it, they will be doing - there's no reason why they can't record an album up there with the classics. They just need to be more ruthless with their output, drop the filler, keep writing until they've got 10 quality songs and get an outside producer to bring out the best in them but not tread all over their sound.

Their last album was poor with only one amazing stand-out track - Storm in a Teacup; which is up there with the best of them. That said, the production was horribly dated and limp. The remix ep Storm Chaser actually highlighted that a few of the songs on Light were actually a alot better than the production would have you believe. The GRN remix of Golden Heart brought new life to a song that sounded uninspired and generic on the studio album. Still, they can do much better.

Pretty much spot on, Frequency.

As for the t.v campaign, i've seen it at least 6 times in 3 days. We have the t.v on at work and it's on more than Rodger Whittaker!

Actually, to be fair I don't watch much TV so I'll take your word for it. It must be working though since its gone up in the midweeks.

T.V advertising is a gold mine. When i use to work in retail, sales of whatever product they were advertising could go up 1000% in a few hours.

Interestingly, I have a lot of friends who work as media buyers in Canada, the UK, and the US, and it's shockingly inexpensive to buy time during certain time slots and on certain channels - even the main national ones. Throw in bulk allotment deals that certain major companies strike and various campaigns can actually be "free" depending on how much was purchased in one lump some periodically.

Of course, if you advertise during the Super Bowl or like events, you are paying in diamonds.

It can cost up to £250,000 to advertise on t.v, depending on the amount of times it's broadcast, when it's shown and the length of the advert.

Churchill, the insurance company, must pay out millions because their adverts are on nearly every break on Sky.

Got my replacement Deluxe set today. Much better DVD at least. Still some out of sync miming but maybe thats down to the footage being old. The live cd is alright but still cant get into the 2nd pop cd at all. Too many tunes sound exactly the same and half hearted. Maybe it will grow on me but i can still only enjoy 3 or 4 songs of it.

Still, it's a great release. Only the awful cover lets it down.

Popjustice has a competition going for Total Pop!

"---

Erasure's a bit of a funny one. It's easy to think of them as a band who - like many if not most - simply stopped being any good immediately after the release of their first greatest hits album. Then you look at the extra twenty tracks they've added to the original 'Pop!' compilation and they're actually pretty good. As it happens we were going to have a Depeche Mode day in the office a few weeks ago and got sidetracked when we were chatting about Vince Clarke and ended up having Erasure on the stereo for about an hour and a half. True story, readers. True story. Every day's an adventure here at Popjustice.

---"

Pop40 is a new entry this week at 21. It sold 10,202 copies. Not a great performance imo. This really needs to stick around for a month or so, to recoup some of the losses that this will undoubtedly be making due to poor sales. Lets hope it can stick around, even if it will mean getting a little bit more quality into the next release.

Undertaker wrote:Pop40 is a new entry this week at 21. It sold 10,202 copies. Not a great performance imo. This really needs to stick around for a month or so, to recoup some of the losses that this will undoubtedly be making due to poor sales. Lets hope it can stick around, even if it will mean getting a little bit more quality into the next release.

You can guarantee a collapse of Total Pop! in the coming week/s. Fortunately, money doesn't automatically equal great art. You probably wouldn't know that, though, mister unit counter. I guess if you depend on your producer to the highest degree for your sound (and even your writing now), then the quality may very well be "coin-operated."

Hey look! U2 sold five billion records! Their next album will be the greatest thing ever written!

The brunt of all production costs come from a studio. Vince now lives with his studio again, like he did before. This bodes extremely well.

And for what it's worth, I wasn't saying that the other Undertaker accounts on the other forum were you, but I am saying that you are on there with different account names. At least I have the honesty and integrity of making it very clear who I am.

Sorry but no. Erasure's last decade of music has sounded tinny and cheap. Their recent poor sales confirm that. Mute aren't backing them because they cannot afford to. The quality doesn't just come from the studio at all. Vince needs some help in writing melodies because he;s run out of idea's and he's hardly going to get that from Andy Bell! They need a producer who knows what he's doing and the producer also needs some decent work to go on.

As for your comparision with U2 ;- Well most on here don't like U2. That doesn't mean it's shit music. It can't be because millions buy it. It's just not our cup of tea. It's like saying Constables Haywain is crap. You might not like art but it doesn't mean a painting is crap.

Erasures input over the past 10+ years has been poor imo. Hardly any decent lyrics. No decent production. Poor songwriting and same old, same old.