Pet Shop Boys Community

homer1972 wrote:Who had the profile pic of the footie strip wearing bloke with the fat thighs sitting on a chair in a dimly lit room on there?
I used to like that one, it was rather lovely.

Now you know that was me because you have obsessed over it many times before on here with cheap insults. Still a pretty lame attempt to wind me up though. You aint learning lessons.

You seemed to go very quiet as well last week. A deluge of posts when you thought Love etc wasn't going to get anywhere near the top 20, then when it started moving up, you went very quiet.

No, I personally like fat womanly thighs Dave, though much prefer the muscular manly type if given the choice.
Quite like Love etc myself although Did you see me coming?? would have made a better first single IMO.A nice little album to be fair, credit where credit is due.

Came across this last night. An old interview for anyone interested.

Still meisters of hen-party anthems, Erasure seem indelible, says Stephen Dalton

ANDY BELL perches nervously on a plush armchair in a West London club, chain-smoking. The singer's long-term musical partner in Erasure, Vince Clarke, has been detained at his New England home, and Bell seems daunted by the prospect of tackling interview duties alone.

Twenty years and more than 15 million album sales since their 1985 debut single, Oh L'Amour, Bell and Clarke have a fine new record, Nightbird, to promote. And yet, even though Erasure have been touring and recording steadily for two decades, some promoters still write them off as a 1980s revival act.

"I can't understand it when they harp on about the 1980s and how fantastic it was," says Bell irritably, "because to me it's just now. We would rather go and play the Barfly in Camden on our own than do one of those revival tours. We don't need the money, and it's not like we were one-hit wonders."

Indeed not, although Erasure's impressively long run of chart-topping disco belters, glittery Abba covers and gloriously naff hen-party anthems began to falter with the rise of Britpop a decade ago. The past few years have proved turbulent for the duo, especially Bell. After the hits started drying up, his drug habit worsened and his medical problems multiplied. A bout of pneumonia in 1998 coincided with the singer discovering he was HIV positive. A private matter before now, he drops it almost casually into our interview.

"It wasn't a huge thing," the 40-year-old singer insists. "To me it was like a gay tattoo. I haven't got any tattoos but I thought, I just want to be HIV. It was in my mind's eye. I didn't even think about if I was going to die. Thank God it's not a death sentence now, although it is for lots of people."

Bell seems strangely blase about deliberately seeking out HIV infection. Where did this self-destructive urge come from? "Probably from self-loathing," he says. "The only reason why you take drugs."

After a decade of cocaine addiction, the singer finally checked in to Narcotics Anonymous late last year. He had dropped hints about drug abuse in interviews, but never seemed like a serious candidate for rock'n'roll excess.

"Well, there you go," he smiles, "I do very well at hiding things. But just being in NA and hearing all the people, what they've gone through -they've been on crack, been in prison, been on heroin, lost their daughter, their husband -I just think to myself, you have got no problems. You're a f****** lucky bastard."

He may put on a brave face, but Bell's good luck has been fairly scant recently.

He has spent the past few years nursing his long-term boyfriend, Paul, through the after-effects of a stroke. Meanwhile an increasingly painful condition in both legs finally led him to undergo two full hipreplacement operations last year.

Doctors blamed a number of factors, including 20 years of prancing around onstage in stack heels and outlandish outfits. But once again Bell seems to take misfortune in his surgically enhanced stride.

"It's because of the blood drying up on the bone," he explains cheerfully. "It becomes brittle and crumbles, so they had to cut the top off each one. And it's uncemented, so they just bang it in with no glue and put these little cups on the top -they're beautiful things. So now I'm bionic. I've always been singing with synthesizers anyway, so I might as well be a synthesized person."

Even for Vince Clarke, the seriousness of Bell's condition came as a surprise.

"Andy's very brave; he keeps a lot of his stuff private," says the 44-year-old keyboard wizard down the phone from Maine.

"His whole leg thing was something he would grin and bear for the past ten years.

Nobody really thought it was that big a deal. Then he had the operation and suddenly he wasn't in pain any more, he just couldn't believe it. He'd got used to the pain."

After months of physiotherapy and rehabilitation, the singer now insists that his condition will not affect next month's Erasure tour, a typically understated orgy of high-camp excess with an Elvis-meets-Marilyn motif. Nor has it affected the duo's work rate, with a Bell solo album and an acoustic collection of Erasure tunes in the can, plus an album of nursery rhymes on the way.

Whether all this activity will help to improve the band's patchy commercial track record of recent years is another matter, but the new album deserves a fair hearing. Cool and polished, Nightbird sounds like vintage Erasure, all soaring choirboy vocals and voluptuous electro melodies. It may not fit easily into the current media climate, but the duo appear philosophical about their place in the pop pantheon.

"You don't have any control over things like that," Clarke says of the band's declining chart profile.

"But we're fortunate to be signed to a very supportive record company. There's no pressure to make a big commercial thing. We still don't have a record contract, it was just a handshake. I understand teenagers aren't going to be interested in someone who's 40. When I was 17 I wasn't either. I've got nieces now. Ten years ago they were really young and thought I was cool. Now they think I am Cliff Richard."

Bell cannot resist a bitchy aside. "The thing I'm trying to get out of my system is being envious of the other little pop starlets. I just think: if only you knew.

Like all the X Factor and Pop Idol people -it's almost like, if you've got a brain cell in your head, they don't even want to know because you can't be exploited by them. They're terrible. It's not doing anything for the music industry at all."

Bless him. It seems oddly heartening to hear Bell venting about pop rivals when he could be wallowing in self-pity over drug problems, hip-surgery, serious illness and all of life's other little tragedies.

"Tragic?" he muses. "Well, I try to be tragic. But it's not really me, you know?"

That interview always reminds me of Brass Eye where they pretend there is GOOD AIDS and BAD AIDS and take the p*** out of the idiots and underclass who agree with them.

Why haven't they got Andy to replace Thora Hird as the public face of stairlifts?

homer1972 wrote:Quite like Love etc myself although Did you see me coming?? would have made a better first single IMO.A nice little album to be fair, credit where credit is due.

Music always sounds better when it's free, doesn't it?

Fugitive1979 wrote:

homer1972 wrote:Quite like Love etc myself although Did you see me coming?? would have made a better first single IMO.A nice little album to be fair, credit where credit is due.

Music always sounds better when it's free, doesn't it?

Yes.

Come on, lay off homer. The bus company sacked him when he turned up for work in his skimpiest leotard and proceeded to serenade the schoolchildren with a truly blue savannah. Times are hard.

A glitter puffball skirt actually and I only sang to the boys.

Patrick Bateman wrote:Why haven't they got Andy to replace Thora Hird as the public face of stairlifts?

Those stairlifts can only take so much weight.

pulse wrote:

Undertaker wrote:There are some angry people on that Erasure forum.

Check out Mistermigs stress. This coming after he claimed that a different single to Always 2009 would have shook the world. Someone has upset him. He then goes on this rant ;-

Sorry, but it needs to be said ... this album is utter tripe, just terrible. The only two songs that are almost worth anything are All Over the World and Pandemonium, but the former is harsh and cranky and doesn't fit with the chorus at all, and the latter is just totally half-ass, it just doesn't hit the mark.

It is unfortunate, the PSB had some great hits in their time. But that time is obviously ending now, and it's time to hang up the coats. They will probably continue with some production tho, and they are sometimes good at that (except for that horrendous She's Madonna by Robbie Williams, ugh)

pulse wrote:
Strange. If you were banned as Undertaker on that forum, how are you reading/cut&pasting posts like this when you must have an account to sign in? That's odd, hmmmm.

bump

What does "bump" mean?

homer1972 wrote:What does "bump" mean?

Do you honestly not know, or are you just being funny?

He's 'trying' to be funny but he's run out of idea's

Undertaker wrote:It looks like someone bought a copy of Pop Deluxe, it's being bagged up.

Here is an example of 'bumping' a post