Pop Art

Official UK Charts, 1st March 2009. Rare Thrill!

NT: I don’t think pop needs to worry about whether it’s art … it’s not really the concern of pop to decide whether it’s art.

CL: Thank you for expressing in words what I can only sigh and groan.

(Guardian)

If you participate in or follow music that is unlikely to catch on with the greater public, the keen disclaimer is that the charts are not the only measure of success for musicians. But it is nice to revel in them now and again.

The charts, like many methods of assessment, are not perfect. They give the straightforward statistics of the current market for music. Record labels, along with the artists, work assiduously at creating demand. Strategies include popular advertising, weeks of prior radio or television airtime, and choosing the release date, with the most explicit example the high-exposure X-Factor, now with monopolistic control over the coveted Christmas no. 1 spot. But the last twelve months have shown that certain events which upset the charts or resurrect older music can still bring a mischievous sense of fun to it all.

Consumer demonstration against the X-Factor winning single in December 2008 forged an antagonistic and reactionary interest in Jeff Buckley’s 1984 cover of Hallelujah, which made no. 2 in the singles chart, and brought Leonard Cohen’s original, which had never itself seen such exposure before, also inside the top 40. The Pet Shop Boys’ recent (and long overdue) acclaim with a BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music and a prime time live performance saw their 2003 PopArt album reenter significantly higher than its original placement of 30, and anticipates the release of their new album, Yes, later this month.

PopArt! Back in vogue?

for everything which is Natural...

As pleasant a surprise as it was for tripping generic expectations, the rise of Scooter’s Jumping All Over the World to no. 1 in the album charts in May 2008 was considered a shock. Had record labels not missed an opportunity here? Word is, that if a techno outfit, whose previous single releases (despite delighting clubbers) have not threatened the higher reaches of the UK charts, can reach the top spot, it speaks of a real lack of quality releases and an opportunity for another battery album to reach a coveted statistic.

Such a response hints at the nature of the music business, predicting, presupposing, and pushing to determine trends. We are talking about the symbiotic relationship between business and culture: what will sell, and fashion, what consumers want. Fashion is attached to period: perhaps twenty years, perhaps a season, perhaps a few weeks, or maybe as brief as a single week. It speaks of the here and now. What the charts essentially show is fashion, as superficial as it might seem on occasion. The charts are not there to celebrate Queen’s 1981 Greatest Hits every week, nor to concede that more people own that record than most no. 1 sales for several years combined, but instead to celebrate, for example, The Saturdays’ latest new entry at no. 2, a cover of ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’. Thankfully, the writer of this track, the grossly underrated Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Erasure), wasn’t a million miles away.

This is not a criticism of the format: a hierarchy of greatest selling albums remaining the same every week would be no use, and the absence of such revered bands in the charts does not in any way detract from their great achievements. The charts provoke interest, competition, and a mark of success that everybody strives for. Top ten hits prove a fan base; success makes much more possible. Without the security of a multi-record deal, an album that fails to take off could always be an artist’s last. The criticism might be that the mark of success sometimes holds a disproportionate weighting in judging quality. Simon Amstell’s take on self-declared avant-garde says enough. [Message for the clip]

So, how should success be measured in the music industry? Charts and sales are the automatic indicator, but there is a certain frivolity to the cultural sphere of market driven output, when artists flitter in and out before disappearing off the horizon. Like sports league tables, if you support whatever act is floating near the top at any given period, success and victory have a certain inevitability, if not a shallowness, to them. It was reported in December that around 500,000 copies of the X-Factor winner’s single had been pre-sold before the winner was announced. Is that a perfect reflection that half a million consumers would have been as happy with an Eoghan Quigg rendition as an Alexandra Burke one, or is it about trying to buy into a little piece of success for oneself? “That recordbreaker – I was part of that!”

For music, a cultural entity shaped by new technology, evolved language, a sexual revolution of sorts, indulgence in the short-term and fashion, and essentially, a changing world, what about longevity? You can imagine the disgruntled headline in some quarters, and a tickled amusement in others: “What is the world coming to? The Pet Shop Boys and Erasure are sitting proudly in the album charts.” Absolutely Fantastic.

If part of my identity is music that strikes a different demographic, then I’m behind any attempt to drive releases up to unlikely heights. A defining memory from my Masters year at Edinburgh in 2006/07 (something about studentdom and independence), was getting behind Erasure’s releases and getting them airplay. It was refreshing to know that presenters of the calibre of Jonathan Morrell were all too glad to comply. Success can be judged on its merits. Nobody supposes that artists forever dubbed with the quintessential tag of ’80s’ continue to release material with any expectation of chart-topping, but reaching the top 20 is neither a foregone conclusion, nor a poor achievement, and if I speak for fans, this one has certainly been appreciative.

The ingredients of an unlikely postgraduate: SCONUL card and Erasure single

Moving from context to content, with a precursor. Writing about pop can be a dauntingly intellectual pursuit, and rightly so. If the pioneering Pet Shop Boys warranted a label, perhaps ‘intellectual pop’ would not be far from the mark. One of my main insecurities about writing is not knowing enough: even writing a doctoral thesis, there is always an unerring feeling that somebody out there knows  more. The first rule of such writing, however, is writing about what pleases. Even if I can only be a New Critic to Iain Moffat’s relative brand of Historicism, I am reassured that passion for the music is always the best place to start.

One of the more negative practices encountered through my specific academic endeavours is the critic’s prerogative to categorize schematically – almost as if it is a test of the credentials to do so – and then to trouble over, or manipulate evidence around, the works that their structures do not accommodate. I adore the glowing reprisal of the upcoming Yes, and yet am troubled by any consensus that the 2006 album Fundamental was such a disappointment. Even in their praise, reviewers of Fundamental, in turn, address the poignant 2002 Release with reluctant tones. Pop is, for many, there to entertain; the intricacies can please and puzzle but not trouble. That is, to some degree, the problem with genre, which subconsciously carries too much expectation. In the wake of the BRIT Award last month, Rob Morris says it perfectly:

What sets them apart is their bloody-minded refusal to do what people expect. It annoys people who just want them to put out another Very-esque album of disco stompers (even though that album isn’t actually that disco heavy), but it means they’ve a rich and varied catalogue which always sounds quintessentially them whilst regularly sounding like nothing you’ve heard them do before.

It also means that the claims of “a return to form” which have, bizarrely, been thrown at their last and next albums, are invariably wide of the mark. They can’t return to form, because they never actually left it, they just didn’t do what you expected.

… They like dance music and they like pop music, like I do, and they manage to make both intellectually satisfying. “Depth through surface” is how they were once described, and I think that’s a fantastic result to achieve.

(Fallen-Angel / Rob Morris)

Effortlessly, without donning the mantra of prog. rock predecessors, they defy generic expectations, and thus continue to divide opinion quite severely. They are the closest musical entity I can proscribe to Andrew Marvell. Firstly, everything is underpinned with lyrical quality. They are poets, of an unexpected leaning: their very own ‘once-in-a-lifetime production’. Very much left to their own devices, ‘Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat’ exemplifies the nuclear fusion that once took place between the compelling, and yet repelling too-striking lyric, with the energies of the pop engine. ‘Form, Earth, Life, Decide something less decisional’ counters ‘the greatest vocoder-rized chorus of the new millennium’ (Stylus). It is a formula which, like the metaphorical fusion it derives from, feels unstable through its surreality, but which produces a unique isotope in the music world.

Secondly, ambiguity constantly promotes much from little. ‘A sharp suggestion, He couldn’t get an erection’: the story of ‘Casanova in Hell’ from Fundamental about the shame of a failed sexual experience strikes as a reverse subterfuge. Normally, one looks for innuendo, the explicit within the implicit. For all the expletives that are paraded in modern music, nowhere else do we get anything that cuts the atmosphere like this. Typically, empty bravado stems from the man who isn’t getting any, not honesty bound with shame. Who else would face failure in masculine credentials right in the eye? (Pun intended.) Take the film scene, with one character left standing as time speeds around him, crowds dash by, until all dies down and all that remains is swirling rubbish and dereliction. Take the white suits, the long limos, and the tangible air of masculinity, and know that Tennant and Lowe stand aloft, as pop counsellors to the superficially broken. How often, given the explicit, is one so compelled to seek out the profundity?

Thirdly, fierce public political messages are matched with concerns for privacy. Fundamental is an album that fascinatingly troubles me. I agree with the Guardian review that the single, ‘I’m With Stupid’, was a ‘misfire’, although that is through my own apprehensions at the admirable complexity of a catalogue being misrepresented by a song that caught public imagination through its sardonic and moronic catchphrase. All the pieces were there, but something about the album does not sit comfortably. The choice of singles was questionable, likewise the order of the tracks. Yet, there is a surreal aura about the album, a vortex of static electricity, that thrives off its imperfections. ‘God Willing’, as dramatic an opening as 80 seconds can find, punctuates the middle of the album, and flows directly into ‘Luna Park’. There’s your quota of coherence. No messing, however, with the outspoken and demonstrative dance inferno which completes the album. ‘Integral’, a condemning view of ID cards, leaves you in no doubt that music can carry messages much more powerfully than a soundbite in a newspaper column.

In certain counts, the delicate Release (2002) could not be much different. On another, the beautiful ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’, the penultimate track of Fundamental, blends in effortlessly. There is a strained, cathartic purpose to Release, but it showcases interiority with a poignancy that Fundamental for the most part avoids. Even ‘Casanova’ finally gets it right. The Pet Shop Boys hide novels and mandates in albums, they tease musical theatre through a delightful escapade of electronica and dance, they are cut-throat and yet empathetic, progressive and yet nostalgic. All of this goes some way to explaining the 10 consecutive top-ten albums across three decades between 1987 and 2002, and Fundamental’s fully justified no. 5. Their music, to paraphrase what has been said of Marvell’s ‘The Garden’: is, and it isn’t, anything and everything you want it to be. They are the most slippery of eels, and amongst the finest of contemporary musicians.

The PSBs team up with Girls Aloud producer Xenomania for their new album, Yes

It is a parallel, and a journey, that Erasure dearly deserve, but have yet, and seem unlikely, to find. One of Vince Clarke’s treasures sitting at the top of the charts serves as a reminder of how underrated Erasure remain. What the Pet Shop Boys publicised throughout the late 80s and early 90s, Erasure, in another sense, mastered. Whilst few pop figures carry half the charisma of Neil Tennant, Erasure have become victims of their own quietude. Nobody would easily guess that Erasure had five consecutive UK no. 1 albums: The Innocents (1988), Wild! (1989), Chorus (1991), Pop! (1992), and I Say I Say I Say (1994). To put that into context, of all the most popular artists I could think to check, including Michael Jackson, Queen, The Smiths, Pink Floyd and (-give me strength!) Westlife, only The Beatles, Abba, and Robbie Williams share that credential. Erasure collected a BRIT award in 1989 for best British group, but have received precious little recognition in recent times.

If the Pet Shop Boys have a strongly political identity, Erasure’s has been a predominantly gay one. That it not to say that it has been inflicted on an unwilling audience, nor that it has excessively infiltrated the music. For one, even the most endemic of their classics, ‘A Little Respect’, is hardly Village People; for another, the venerable Vince Clarke is married with a young son, Oscar, and tucked away in the outskirts of Maine, New England. But openness has remained part of Andy Bell’s persona, and Love is synonymous with their music. There is a touch of the bucks-fizz: sparkle, sweetness, and firmly grounded. Without intellectual faux-pas, Erasure reach closest to home. Their lament for a bleak climate of unemployment in the late 80s, the plaintive accordion jaunt of ‘The Circus’ (‘There was once a future for a working man’), could soon come back to bite. If the Pet Shop Boys are metaphysicals or neoclassicists, Erasure are undoubtedly the ‘romantics’ of pop.

Tours in recent years have involved Pride and True Colors in the US, whilst it could be argued that they never hit the heights they could have done in the States because of a dilemma about how they should be marketed to what was believed a homophobic music audience. The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers recently noted in the documentary Pet Shop Boys: A Life in Pop that ‘America is still getting used to this word gay … there’s going to be a wall that’s going to get put up’. The PSB hit ‘Opportunities’ from their first album, Please (1986) strikes a particularly resonant chord because Erasure have nobly put identity, and, in Vince’s case, family, before opportunity. This seems all the more fetching when we note that Vince’s local community in Maine have no idea about his musical credentials [Boston Globe], and Andy Bell’s recent activity involves selling bread on a market stall in Hastings [Quietus]; meanwhile the likes of Tom Jones and Michael Jackson continue to cash in on empty careers.

Erasure: Wild (1989). Worthy pin-ups 20 years ago

It remains to be seen how gay issues (beyond orientation) affect the market for music in the UK as well. In 2006, the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘I’m With Stupid’ reached no. 8 in the UK singles chart, and the subsequent Fundamental album went on to reach a worthy 5th in the album chart. The year before this, Erasure’s single ‘Breathe’, released in early January 2005, reached 4th in the singles chart, and yet inexplicably the Nightbird album only peaked at 27th. How defining was it that Andy Bell announced just prior to the release of the album that he had been HIV positive for several years? I ask this as a loaded question because Nightbird, for me, is possibly the most complete pop album of the decade. It had a defining single – the right one – and somewhat softer, sadder, plaintive tracks that lose none of the pleasure of pop. The BBC reviewer Zoe Street rightly draws attention to the nocturnal quality of the album suggested by name: ‘it’s magical listening to it at night’.

The scale of the polarised reception itself showed how the widespread attitude to pop remains. Through methods unknown, the BBC review links Nightbird to King Crimson’s The Power to Believe, admirably rich acumen. Progressive rock it is not, but different from the 2005 crowd – certainly. One thing is evident: after Erasure’s perceived lull, with the obscure but likeable sound of Loveboat in 2000 and the richly nostalgic Other People’s Songs in 2003 (which fans will adore), and the Pet Shop Boy’s perceived dip with Release in 2002, Erasure made the move to keep this little corner of music afloat.

Magical listening at night

'Purely honest, tender and revealing'

Reviews suggesting that Erasure sounded bored could surely not have been further from the mark. Andy and Vince believed that Nightbird was their best work to date, and were enthusiastic about their future in music. Their next move, perhaps in response to the criticism they received from sticking to what they know best, was Union Street in 2006, an acoustic collection of some of their back catalogue revived with the clandestine exposure which shows Andy Bell to be one of the most underrated singers of his generation. He has a vocal range that Neil Tennant, and even A-Ha’s Morten Harket, cannot match. The underpinned but distinct American country sound plays a feeling second best to Bell’s naked flame vocals. You can strip away the sine qua non defining electro-synth sound (most then complain of its absence) and realise that beyond the pale is another supremely talented combination of gifted writer and gifted vocalist. Vince himself notes that ‘We’re not a synth duo, we’re a song writing duo who use keyboards’ [Quietus]. Moreover, Mallory O’Donnell’s review, the most moving I have found on Erasure, takes this low-key album and admits that he has them all wrong.

Erasure have taken a chance with Union Street, but then their continued insistence on making music this purely honest, tender and revealing is in itself taking chances in the face of hipster irony and designer miserablism. No doubt their fanbase will appreciate the evident amount of love put into this release, and no doubt a larger success will continue to elude them. What should not continue, however, is the critical mistreatment of one of the most dedicated, unwavering groups delivering pure pop satisfaction with a minimum of self-indulgence and trendiness. We could all stand to learn a lesson from the loyalty to one’s own vision that Erasure represent in the face of a world largely bent on indifference—an indifference that chafes particularly as we desperately need voices like these in such trying, callous times.

[Stylus]

It has also emerged recently that an Erasure collaboration with Kate Bush was unsuccessful [Quietus], which puts into focus the fortune that the Pet Shop Boys have had with their collaboration and networking. After Dusty Springfield performed for ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This’, which reached no. 2 in both the UK and US singles charts, the Boys were invited to produce her next new album Reputation (1990). Many high profile collaborators have followed, including David Bowie, Elton John, Madonna, and, tapping right into the heart of the contemporary market, The Killers and Girls Aloud. As Erasure built on Nightbird with the acoustic album, the Pet Shop Boys, likewise, followed up their 2006 Fundamental success by producing something different. A double-CD of a concert recording from the Mermaid Theatre in May 2006 was released as Concrete, and featured stunning performances from Rufus Wainwright, Frances Barber and Robbie Williams. Into 2009, what better advocate to present the BRIT award and speak of his admiration of the Pet Shop Boys than impressionable frontman Brandon Flowers? How Erasure could use some of the same fortune of their own, if any high profile fans wish to emerge from the woodwork.

Brandon Flowers performs at the Brit Awards. Hot property, and a hot contact

The resurgence of quality pop has to be a great encouragement to fans of the genre, and Erasure have joined the charts in 21st with their latest release, Total Pop!, a selection of 40 hits spanning their entire career. Perhaps it is not the smartest move to market the release in the same way as the no. 1 album Pop! released in their chart prime, though Vince Clarke has already revealed that this is the record company’s initiative with Mute now absorbed by EMI. Erasure’s career has taken many more twists and turns in the last 15 years than its opening decade, and the irony is that most of the numbers on CD2 (1994 onwards) are not ‘hits’ in the same sense and should be contextualised differently, although the release encourages a heady comparison. The later tracks are album songs, or temporal samples, responsible to their respective albums. That is the mark of a duo who have experimented with sound where the PSBs have with content; suffered the blows that the PSBs have manoeuvred around; and matured in their own way, to try and keep their musical identity and dignity above the nostalgia act which they have proven themselves far beyond.

Doubts aside, the timing of a best-of compilation, following the Pet Shop Boys’ BRIT award, has evoked favourable memory of Erasure. Can they do the unthinkable and follow? Unbegrudgingly, Andy Bell labels the Pet Shop Boys as the ‘media darlings’ of pop compared to Erasure’s working class heritage (tracks from The Circus come swaying back into memory), attributing this to the PSB’s affiliation with the larger record labels. But yes, he would be delighted if the call came their way [The Sun]. Such optimism is to be admired, and perhaps the chart and fashion swing back towards pop comes just in the nick of time. With Bell taking time out from Erasure at the moment, one had to wonder if there was anything left. Emulating the BRIT success may be one goal which the Erasure duo now see as achievable, and which nobody in their right minds should deny them. There is introvert and extrovert, and if it is to be believed that you get nothing unless you’re asking for it, let’s hope that Erasure’s domestic tendencies don’t see them overlooked for the lifetime achievement or outstanding contribution accolade that they so richly deserve.

Pet Shop Boys: Love Etc. Released today (16/03/09)