Pet Shop Boys Rate. Part 1: 1985-1991. Winner.

Ray

Ray

I have to kick out the next one now, because my laptop is shitting itself (don't worry, I have FOUR backups of the rate, including on Backblaze) and I will be spending the evening reinstalling everything. Thanks for NOTHING, High Sierra!

55.​






















musically wonderful
















just awkward













Fine?​














Jack-The-Lad.jpg


55. Jack The Lad​
6.4083333333
B-side to "Suburbia".

Highest score: 10 (@Farnaby, @slurmjunkie, @Heaven on Earth)
Lowest score: 3 (@Peer_Gynt10, @JakeMagnus)

Neil: "Paninaro" and "Jack The Lad" were both on the b-side of "Suburbia", which came out as a double-pack, and the idea was that Chris would do a track and I would do a track. Chris' track was "Paninaro" and mine was "Jack The Lad". [Don't do this again, Neil. – Ray]
It started with a knock-off of one of Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopedies. [...] The idea of calling a song "Jack The Lad" came from Big Audio Dynamite, whose song "E=MC2" had a very similar chord change to "West End Girls". On "E=MC2" there's a sample from the film Performance which says, "Who do you think you are – Jack the lad?" And I had been reading about Lawrence of Arabia at the time, and about the spy Kim Philby; people who go too far, and people who practice deception. The second verse refers to the fact that Lawrence of Arabia is supposed to have been homosexual – "telling lies in public, breaking codes at home" [...] the line "to feast with panthers" comes from Oscar Wilde. The whole idea of the song is about how good it is to be a nutter, just doing what you want to do. You will inevitably make a fool of yourself but you shouldn't let it worry you too much. [...]
Is it some kind of resentment against your fellow upper class people that makes you want to betray them? It's a sort of anti-bravado song in a way. It's saying: why not come to terms with all this resentment you have? "We all fall" – everyone makes mistakes.

Ray: All this ^^ above is why Neil shouldn't be allowed to make a solo record. I like to imagine "jack" is a verb here, though.

@Jóga: I don't get what's so good about it. I enjoy it, but it's far from anything amazing.
@Future Lover: I don't care much about this. Keep forgetting it exists, actually.
@Mikey1701: Cute but forgettable. It’s not difficult to see why this ended up as a B-side. I can’t imagine that this a track that many people consider a favourite or listen to very much.
@KingBruno: This is just awkward.
@TrendyMüller: The beginning and the end is a total rip-off of Japan´s Nightporter (Just saying) The rest is musically wonderful, but I don´t really like the chorus.
@Sally_Harper: The piano intro tricked me into thinking this would be a nice slow song, and it’s not. I’m bitter but I love it anyway. Also the “Play with fire, you must be mad” bit reminds me of King of Rome, which is never a bad thing. [I think the piano intro is the best part of the whole thing. – Ray]
@One Stop Candy Shop: Good and dark.
@DominoDancing: Fine? I'll admit that the lyrics with all the references are not bad, and I like the chord changes when it goes into the "We all fall" bit, but it's not a song with a lot of replay value.

Exciting trivia: this was the first song on Alternative I felt like skipping when replaying everything for the 10000th time to do my own scores. I gave it 5 points. Because it's not bad, not good, it just... is.

 
V

Vive Indifference

So it turns out my taste doesn’t differ too much at the lower end of things ... I gave this a 5 ... It just doesn’t click with me for some reason (not a great analysis, but it’s as much time as I care to spend thinking about this track) …
 
TrendyMüller

TrendyMüller

Listening to the Demo and rough version of YKWYWW once more proves how good their judgement (or that of the producer) was when it came to strip all the clutter from the songs for the final release. And boy is there a lot of cheesy clutter in some of the demos. That female "empowerment" rap is particularly cringeworthy.

And here the intro/outro to Jacking the Lad
 
D

Deleted member 47

It’s going to be very difficult... Sorry Jack, they don’t know what they do.

Anyway Hit Music was a fair exit. Opportunities next please.
 
TrendyMüller

TrendyMüller

Eric Generic said:
Jack The Lad is one of those early PSB B-sides that I always love listening to but can never fucking remember them. So it probably got 9.5 or something.
Click to expand...
Exactly! This and Your Funny Uncle ( I only remember that it´s a "ballad", but can never remember how it goes).

Speaking of remembering parts of a song: It just came to me this morning what the chorus in that GWAR cover of West End Girls reminded me of: They made it sound like the chorus of Sweet´s Ballroom Blitz! Slightly amazing! Maybe thats a rip off "Trois Gymnopedies" too.
 
slurmjunkie

slurmjunkie

Hi everyone,

I'm a long-time reader and first-time poster who just signed up thanks to this rate. I didn't have time to send Ray my comments, but I will post some during the reveals. I just read the first ones and I can't really disagree with the first couple to go, although I gave The Sound Of The Atom Splitting a 5 (still making it one of my weaker scores in the rate as the quality in general is so high). Music For Boys (together with another track that disappointingly but predictably is still in) has my lowest score with a 4.

I can't understand that the next two songs to go weren't rated higher, but as has already been pointed out at least the average rates are already over 6. One Of The Crowd gets a solid 8 from me: I like the juxtaposition of Chris' colder vocoder vocals and Neil's warm voice. What stops it from getting a higher score is that I think it is a little repetitive.
You Know Where You Went Wrong is a good song (I gave it another 8) with a great bassline and atmosphere. The only bit that I dislike is the piano and whistle interlude at 2:18 and the over-the-top diva backing vocals starting at 3:43.

Numbers 56 and 55 are a shocker, though: I guessed that Hit Music (as one of the most underrated PSB songs) would be gone sooner than later, but not that soon. I gave it a 10 as I love it and there is nothing I could complain about. Sure, there are some songs on its parent album that I enjoy even more, but since we obviously aren't allowed to score over 10 (with the one exception), I can't score Hit Music lower than the perfect song I think it is. Actually, I think there is no weak song on Actually. By the way, if it weren't for Hit Music there might never have been a PSB collaboration with Johnny Marr: their first personal encounter was him telling them how much he liked Hit Music.
Jack The Lad is another of my 10s gone way too early. This is a beautiful song beautifully sung which I like better than anything on the second side/half of Please (apart from Later Tonight).

To me a boring and forgettable filler track is exemplified by something like Don Juan, which amazingly is still in.
 
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Ray

Ray

Yay! Glad to have you here @slurmjunkie! I think this is the first time someone voted in a rate before becoming a member of the forum!

54.
















slurmjunkie said:
To me a boring and forgettable filler track is exemplified by something like Don Juan, which amazingly is still in.
Click to expand...












TrendyMüller said:
Don Juan is of course amazing and a quintessential PSB song. I will tell you why in a (hopefully) distant future during the reveals.
Click to expand...












Don-Juan.jpg


54. Don Juan
6.4388888889
B-side to "Domino Dancing"

Highest score: 10 (@Heaven on Earth, @Eric Generic), 9.9 (@TrendyMüller)
Lowest score: 2 (@JakeMagnus)

Neil: The basic song was written in the Seventies, in about 1978, before I knew Chris. It was written on the guitar and was supposed to sound Spanish, which is why I thought of reviving it to go on the b-side of "Domino Dancing". While Chris complains that I write songs about Russian history all the time, this is about the Balkans in the 1930s. I was trying to write lyrics in the style of Façade by Edith Sitwell, a sequence of poems she wrote with music by William Walton. Façade was very controversial when it was first performed [...] as Edith Sitwell declaimed it through a curtain with a megaphone while the music was playing.
Chris: Was it slightly pretentious?

1a7175f24ad1d1554d9904cc61cfdd7b--neil-tennant-dance-pop.jpg


Neil: In the Balkans in the 1930s, they were caught between Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany leading up to World War II. They had all these funny monarchies. There was King Zog of Albania, King Boris of Bulgaria and Prince Paul, the Regent of Yugoslavia, and they were all trying not to be allied to Hitler while trying to stop Stalin annexe half their lands. Don Juan is supposed to be Hitler or Stalin but I could never quite work out which. [Meanwhile in Alternative: "And Don Juan is Hitler." – Ray] [...] It's like someone coming to their senses; throughout all this decadence and complex language, they have this flash of complete reason.
Chris: Then it goes into a bit which is like "Flashdance (What A Feeling)". [...] We recorded our demo at the same time as "Domino Dancing" in Los Angeles.
Neil: Chris wrote the "I've got this sinking feeling" bit of music.
Chris: A marvellous chord change, and it also goes with the lyrics. I also added the housey stuff for the intro.
Neil: We had the idea of calling it "It Would Be A Disaster".

Ray: I have a complicated relationship with this song, where I feel it is better than it actually is, and then I play it and I think "oh". (Right this moment I am thinking "well maybe if I played it, I'd like it more".) I love the "housey stuff", and the production in general. "King Zog is on holiday, Madame Lupescu's grey" is fantastic. And how many bands write songs about funny monarchies not wanting to be allied to Hitler? Only four or five, I'm sure.

@DominoDancing: I've always loved this song because it's so fucking bonkers. The lyrics are some of the strangest Neil has ever written, and musically it's quite complex. What I've never understood is why they decided to remove that awesome brass hook found on the demo from the final version. I guess they decided to generally go into a more experimental direction with the arrangement to fit with the weird lyrics. But a cleaned-up, properly mixed version of the demo would have been monumental (and single-worthy)! [I don't like the demo so much. It's a bit It's aaaa, it's aaa, it's a Don Juan.]
@KingBruno: I’m not really surprised that this is the B-side to “Domino Dancing”. [I am GUESSING this is shade.]
@TrendyMüller: Such a bop. I love „the teacher of the rich“.
@Sally_Harper: I just listened to this twice and I can’t remember anything about it, so it can have a five.
@Mikey1701: Repetitive. I’m not a fan.
@Jóga: Parts of the instrumental from this and Miserabilism sound alike to me.
@One Stop Candy Shop: It's not a disahster.

Here are a few versions of not a disahster.







So far it's all very "PSB have the BEST b-sides. Let's kick them all out." Which single do you think will leave first?
 
DominoDancing

DominoDancing

Grmph, I guess you can guess by my commentary how happy I am about Don Juan being out already.
First single out? Probably DJ Culture, although if it was up to me, Where The Streets Have No Name would be gone much earlier.
Other singles in danger (judging by this thread) would be Was It Worth It and perhaps Jealousy and How Can You Expect To Be, in the latter case depending on whether people scored the album or the single mix in the end.
 
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