Pet Shop Boys

From February 2012

A new Pet Shop Boys album was released last week: it will be the first in their 30 year history that I've not bought. Not that I've not listened to it, far from it as I've had it on repeat play via Spotify since last Monday.

Cutting my musical teeth on vinyl and now with a house stuffed full of CDs I've been slow to embrace listening to music via streaming. But in the last couple of weeks (and largely due to the acquisition of an iPhone) I've suddenly got it and my desire to actually own music as a tangible product has disappeared. Why bother when for £8.99 a month you can listen to anything from a library of 15 million songs?

It seems fitting then that Format is a collection of Pet Shop Boys B-sides, a phrase rendered defunct by the emergence of digital music. Pet Shop Boys were always generous with the music that they released on the B-sides of vinyl singles or as bonus tracks on CD singles and this collection rounds everything from 1996 to 2009.

There are a couple of songs - The Truck Driver & His Mate and Disco Potential - which could easily have been A-sides and the standard throughout the 38 tracks would make many other bands blush. My favourite is I Didn't Get Where I Am Today which steals the riff from The Fire's 'Father's Name is Dad' (see here for a previous spotting) and I'm fascinated to know if it has just been lifted from the original or re-recorded. Mmmm ... one thing Spotify doesn't provide is sleeve notes.

As Pet Shop Boys themselves once sang 'It's all about change, It's a metamorphosis.'