Pet Shop Boys Community

Drico One wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 1:56 pm I think at his point it is worth acknowledging the profound importance of Disco in their career.

leesmapman wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 1:41 pm Funny, I think the Release tour version is the best live version. It's absolutely a great song to play live.

Neilatrone wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 2:17 pm Disco set them apart from other acts

Drico One wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 1:56 pm I think at his point it is worth acknowledging the profound importance of Disco in their career. I, like many, bought Disco before I bought Please. Stuart Price pretty much owes his career to it...(Disco, not my purchase...).

The Shep Pettibone and Arthur Baker mixes are incredible - and Suburbia (the full horror) invented them as purveyors of pure pop drama. Please had the songs and the seedy, cyberpunk hits - but Disco had the glitz.

Drico.

Neilatrone wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 2:17 pm

Drico One wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 1:56 pm I think at his point it is worth acknowledging the profound importance of Disco in their career.

Disco set them apart from other acts - Introspective added fuel to that trajectory.

Disco. wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 3:30 pm

Neilatrone wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 2:17 pm

Drico One wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 1:56 pm I think at his point it is worth acknowledging the profound importance of Disco in their career.

Disco set them apart from other acts - Introspective added fuel to that trajectory.

Yes, and Parlophone didn’t really want to release it, and then it sold three million copies, for mixes that they already paid for !

telys wrote: Wed 20 Mar 2024, 11:00 am Opportunities could be made in to a very long song, it has so many parts, like a mini-synth-symphony.

Drico One wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 6:42 pm Track 5: Suburbia

Chronology: Please, Track 5

Suburbia was the song that first introduced the world to Pet Shop Boys' now patented over-the-top kitchen sink "stomper". With each successive release, they seemed to unveil a key characteristic of their act and each single seemed more compelling than the one that went before. The romantic sincerity of Love comes quickly gave way to the irony of Opportunities and now we have the bombast and social commentary of Suburbia. The The Full Horror is, of course, the definitive version, bringing the rather primitive - possibly rushed - album version to seedy, effervescent life.

This is another escape into the night, this time out of the city, away from the neon lights, and further into the "suburban dreams" that spawned them and many of us. However, it appears that we've ventured into what has now become a sink estate and things are getting a little rough. I've always felt that suburbia is really what we were escaping from in Two divided by zero. The sheer tedium of suburban middle-class life is what generates the desire to elope. A "run with the dogs" and other "roaming suburban boys" breaks the monotony and boredom of it all... Dysfunctional middle-class life as social dystopia.

This was the single that definitively proved that they would not be a one-hit-wonder and created the template that would help produce the even more OTT It's a sin nine months later.

TallThinMan wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 7:15 pm I liked the album version of 'Suburbia' until I first heard the single version, after which it was never the same again and sounded rather pedestrian, although all the street battle samples from the Emulator's 'Armageddon' disk were already in place. Chris's bassline on the album version was inspired by Madonna's 'Get into the Groove'.

I have the impression that Parlophone were spooked when both 'Love Comes Quickly' and 'Opportunities' failed to replicate the giddy success of 'West End girls', with neither single bothering the top ten in the United Kingdom. What do record companies do when it looks like an artist's hits are drying up? They either drop the act or spend money bringing in a crack production team. Accordingly, 'Suburbia' marks the first time our heroes worked with Julian Mendelsohn and Fairlight programmer Andy Richards from Trevor Horn's own "Wrecking Crew". Both had worked so well together on the monster Frankie Goes to Hollywood hits two years previously and brought the same over-the-top sound to bear for the single remix of 'Suburbia'.

In a sense then we could say that 'Suburbia' saved the 'Please' campaign in commercial terms, charting at number eight in the U.K. Interestingly, it only cracked number 70 in the States.

telys wrote:

Disco. wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 3:30 pm

Neilatrone wrote: Thu 21 Mar 2024, 2:17 pm

Disco set them apart from other acts - Introspective added fuel to that trajectory.

Yes, and Parlophone didn’t really want to release it, and then it sold three million copies, for mixes that they already paid for !

We have to remember that all the mixes on Disco were raritites at the time of release, really hard to get. So it wasnt merely a collection of 12"s and b-sides.