Pet Shop Boys with David Bowie - New London Boy (Glam Remix)

Pet Shop Boys & Divine - I´ve Got Plans (Involving You 2 Shoot Your Shot)

Pet Shop Boys - Domino Dancing Star (Then And Now Mix/Domino Dancing & D...

Pet Shop Boys x Everything But The Girl - Invisible Walking Wounded

"It's a journey so they say, but in this desert I was only a hazy, lazy mirage anyway. I'm invisible."

Directed by StellaVista

I have become a director yesterday! Thanks to this funky Text-To-Movie Program that lets you easily direct a scene with up to two characters. I was amazed at how easy and intuitive the process is. You can chose different settings, characters and languages (which in return allow you to let your characters speak with strong accents). Camera angles, expressions, movements and sounds can be easily selected and you can drag and drop them everywhere into your script.
In a relatively short while I came up with three short "music"-clips.

My first attempt has a Kevin Spacey look-a-like performing an excerpt of The Talking Heads´ "Once in a lifetime".



Next I went to Düsseldorf where tourists ask you the way to the "Kling Klang Studio" instead of the central station. Here I had lots of fun to teach the computer to speak with a German and French accent. "Ja tvoi sluga! Ja tvoi Rabotnik!"



I then managed to sneak into the Pet Shop Boy Mansion, where some fundamental questions were being discussed. "Love, etc?" is my most ambitious project today. But will the audience love me?



If you sign in for a free account you can also "remix" every film as you wish. George Lucas must have had his hands in this.

It´s great fun to play around with. You can call me Alan Smithee now.

This Used To Be "This Used To Be The Future"

"This used to be the future" is a track from the bonus CD of the upcoming, new Pet Shop Boys album "Yes". The special gimmick: vocals are not only sung by Neil Tennant, but also by Chris Low and Phil Oakey from The Human League.

MARCH 23 UPDATE:
This used to be "This Used to be the Future": After the song was taken down due to our beloved copyright violation bla bla (after all there is no such thing as free promotion?!) there is now the "Ken Saint X-tended Mix", which is surprisingly good and very close to the "original" version. I wonder how long this will be up...

The Annual Brit Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Pop-Excellence Goes To The Pet Shop Boys

A ten-minute medley (or potpourri as we used to say before the war) spawning the 25 year lasting career of the Pet Shop Boys was performed by the band at yesterdays BRIT AWARDS. PSB received an "Outstanding Contribution To Music Award" which justified this career mash-up.

In true PSB-fashion the show was a slightly odd and brittle performance of random imagery, unnecessary ballet, wacky wigs and Lady GaGa. All in all: A great success (minus the GaGa)

It´s a Glamurös/Minimal/Kompakt World

The video of the Pet Shop Boys/Sam Taylor-Wood cover of "I´m in love with a German filmstar", which I posted about here can now be seen in all it´s amazing glory. Don´t blink or you might miss a piece of the action!


Boy, did they give the song the "Rent/Love comes quickly/Dreaming of the Queen"-Treatment.

Also of note: The single will be released on Kompakt at the end of october. Remixes will be provided by the usual Kompakt-suspects. I guess having a song called "minimal" and loading it to the hilt with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Anne Dudley, opened the doors to the Cologne-based label.

In Love with a German Filmstar

The Pet Shop Boys are actually going to release a cover version of this enigmatic song
Enigmatic because I can´t figure out who the hell the singer fell in love with. Peter Lorre? Konrad Veidt? Max Schreck? Curd Jürgens?
The cover-photo of the PSB production which is sung by Sam Taylor-Wood as well as the original video suggests Marlene Dietrich. But I was never content with this.

Dog One

Rex The Dog is out again! According to his Myspace a new single and his first album will be out in late august on his own "Hundehaus"-label.


"The Rex the dog Show" could be the best Pet Shop Boys-album in 18 years, if he continues to produce songs like "I can see you, can you see me" and my favourite "Every Day (Could be the last day)"

Man Dog Machine

My imagined fantasy video for this Rex The Dog single would be populated by exotic carny-girls who would expertly repair some smashed Dodgem-cars on a sleazy fairground.
Don´t ask!

Rex The Dog: Every Day (Could Be Our Last)


Anyway, "Every Day (Could be our last day)" was released in 2006 and it fitted nicely into the Kitsune/Kompakt sound. Even if it boasts another, relatively simple octave-sawtooth bass - something I really don´t need anymore, but that must be only me -, it is Rex´s most poppy and catchy track. Hidden away as the last on the 3-track EP "Maximize", I always thought it should have received more attention.

I really dig the cut-up vocals which bear more than one resemblance to Neil Tennant (Pet Shop Boys) and the pseudo-ethereal "Ahhhhs" which actually make up the whole chorus are super-fine.
The sound has the right amount of sleazy, glittery aparkle thrown all over it and I can listen to it on endless repeat.

Play this to a Pet Shop Boys fan and tell them it was one of their lost, unreleased songs. See what happens...

Tonight is forever!

I love the idea of people being so into certain songs that they make their own, alternative videos. Sometimes its a cutting exercise that just needed some music, sometimes its a carefully edited montage that puts things into a new perspective, like the "Fly me to the moon" video I wrote about yesterday.

"Tonight is forever" uses a different, very simple approach to a stunning outcome. The author uses one of the great, early Pet Shop Boys songs "Tonight is forever" and plays it over an unedited excerpt of Godfrey Reggio´s "Koyaanisqatsi". Now, one of the things "Koyaansiqatsi" is famous for is the soundtrack by Philip Glass. The track that is used during the wonderful timelapse shots of Chicago(?) by night is called "The Grid" and is known for its relentless, minimal rhythms and melody fragments.



By replacing the original music, which is an essential part of the whole film, with the somehow elegic pop of the Pet Shop Boys, we see a non existing promo-clip to a non-existing single. The effect works so well, that many people on YouTube believed that this is actually an official release by the band. This is not surprising since PSB themselves let photographer Wolfgang Tillmans direct a video for "Home and dry", which shows nothing more than mice running around a London underground station. However, this concept is broken up with a 20 second scene of the band playing. As if some record company executive got cold feet at the last moment.

The song "Tonight is forever" appeared on the first Pet Shop Boys album "Please" in 1986.
It is somehow a "prototype" PSB song, as it uses imagery and the sentiment of rock music but turns it completly upside down by refusing to play to the rules of rock.
The thin, distant voice, nearly drained from emotions or a gender determination glorifies the decadence of nightlife while wishing to fall in love to be saved from it.
The elegic chords seem to slow down the driving disco beat, which cites the Hi-NRG era but also anticipates the upcoming house-sound that was about to dominate pop-music in the near future. There are also echos of italo-disco and the Bobby O. songs they wrote in the beginning of their career.

The overall feel of the song - despite its easy going positivity - is sad and there is a strong sense of loss. The singer is undecided and passive. He "could be wrong", he "could be right", he doesn´t work and is content with going out every night. He is waiting for somebody else who "holds the key" and "opens the door", so that things will never change but without staying the same.
These metaphors are actually pulled from the bottom drawer of pop-cliches and are begging for cheap laughs. However, as soon as Neil Tennant claims that "I don´t think of the future tonight", nobody is laughing anymore!

It was the height of the AIDS crisis and the carefree hedonism of the seventies disco-era was gone. While pop music was all the rage during this time, dance music was in a stage of transition. Italo and Hi-NRG was more or less over, (acid)-house had not yet arrived.
Clubmusic was dark and agressive. It was the time of Electronic Body Music (EBM) , Industrial and Gothic.
The urban melancholy of "Tonight is forever" really stands on its own. It is a timeless pop song that, despite its 80´s production values, still triggers strong emotions today.

As with so many PSB songs of this era, supressed or alledged homosexuality always looms under the surface.
This theme is often recurring in Tennants lyrics of that time: "Two divided by zero" suggests that "someone started a rumour" about the protagonist and his partner and they decide to run away before the news spread.
It´s one of the best "escape" songs ever: "We´ll catch a plane to New York and a cab going down across the bridges and tunnels, straight into town. Tomorrow morning we´ll be miles away, on another continent on another day."
Of course the "rumour" could be anything, but gay listeners immediately got the message.

The titles of some of the b-sides are even less cryptic: "I bet she´s not your girlfriend" and "It must be obvious" are nearly giving it all away. But then the ambivalence of the lyrics are shying away from a real statement.

Before "Very" which was sort of an "official coming-out" album, the lyrics of the Pet Shop Boys were much more satisfying, because they had more poignancy and were open to interpretation. After the masterpiece that was "Behaviour" and their finest hour "Being Boring", they made sure that the message of "Go West" was clear to everybody.

But instead of the over the top campness of their Village People cover, i could listen to "Tonight is forever" over and over while gazing at the detached time-lapse of the city at night. Thinking about the time when I was actually going home from the clubs while everybody else was going to work. The time when you were really living for the night, and when you knew - deep inside - that all this was just a passing phase. But for the moment you accepted that your life would go on like this. For ever and ever.