Pet Shop Boys: Chart

Thankfully it's on the radio etc etc.

Haven't kept up with the interviews in the current media blitz, so don't know if Chris Lowe has come out yet.

PS Each man kills the thing he loves...

Attitude: The The

Dear The Attitude,

Neither Pet Shop Boys or Sleaford Mods have a 'the'.

Thanks. x

PS Pet Shop Boys Symposium, Edinburgh College Of Art. 'Analysing pop music is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.' Discuss.

PPS Forthcoming 4-part Radio 2 documentary, Chart, celebrating PSB's 30 years in the business of show.

Research: Musical Taste

Click to enlarge.

Compiled by YouGov from their profiles data.

If you haven't grasped it, these are the acts that queens are more likely to say they love than straight dudes do.

You can find - and come up with - all kinds of fascinating and funny 'People like this tend to like this...' etc stuff by fiddling around on their website.

Here, by way of example, is what happens if you ask what are 'Gay Times readers' like?

Loxfest: What Has Am, What Has Am, What Has Ambridge Done To Deserve This?

Pet Shop Boys have been announced as the surprise headline act at Borsetshire's first and finest music festival, Loxfest!

Fagburn is too thrilled for words.

Apart from all the words I am now typing, clearly.

The episode will be broadcast on Monday.

This is like, I dunno, Chomsky appearing on Curb Your Enthusiasm or something.

Fagburn would like to pad this out with loads of hopeless farming puns on Pet Shop Boys' song titles - West End Cows, It's A Pig etc - but needs a lie-down now.

PS But does this mean Ambridge rejected Morrissey?

PPS Next Pets' stop Festival No. 6 at Portmeirion! Now that's a nice venue...

Turing: Trailer

'Based on a true story' where he appears to be in love with a dame.

PS Pet Shop Boys' Alan Turing Proms piece, A Man From The Future, is broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on Wednesday.

Alan Turing: So Sorry, I Said

THE [sic] Pet Shop Boys are to use a new orchestral work about the computer pioneer Alan Turing to call for the “tens of thousands of men” imprisoned or fined for committing homosexual acts to be pardoned.

A Man From the Future, created by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, will premiere at the Proms on July 23 . The Pardon, the last song, references the posthumous pardon granted to Turing, who was prosecuted for gross indecency in 1952.

Tennant and Lowe will urge the government to pardon others convicted before homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967 [sic 'Gross indecency' was still a crime until 2004].

“So very many lives were ruined over such a long period,” said Tennant. “Frankly it rather disappoints me that Stonewall [the gay rights group] has not done more. So we’re making the statement ourselves.”

The Pardon will include references to Gordon Brown, who as prime minister in 2009 apologised for the “appalling treatment” of Turing after he innocently told police he had been in a sexual relationship with a man.

Despite his codebreaking work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and his groundbreaking research in computer science, Turing was ordered to undergo hormone treatment to reduce his libido. He committed suicide [sic] two years later, aged 41.

Tennant and Lowe were inspired to write about Turing by a 2011 TV documentary on his life.* “It’s a memorial to Turing, invoking the spirit of the man and his work,” said Tennant. “He was a man from the future in that his scientific achievments [sic]were in the vanguard and that, for us, his pioneering work on computers led to our electronic music.

“Then he was ahead of his time in being openly gay, though perhaps a bit too honest when he told the policeman, when he need not have done, about his sexuality.”

The Sunday Times.

During the campaign to grant Turing a royal pardon, many asked why he should be singled out, when an estimated 16,000 men were prosecuted for 'offences' which are now legal.

Some pointed out that a pardon for anyone was a silly piece of gesture politics anyway - particularly after such convictions could be overturned from 2012. 

Stonewall campaigned for neither pardon. 

Their then Big Chief Hiawatha, Ben Summerskill, explained why in an article for The Observer, Pardoning Alan Turing is a pointless exercise.

It's quite proper we've started writing off convictions for people who are still alive for trivial matters that would no longer be criminal offences... However, it's already too late for the countless thousands of innocents, not as eminent as Turing, who had their lives ruined as well. And perhaps rather pointless.

A more proper apologia [sic] might be to ensure that Turing's achievements, and his treatment by the nation that benefited, are included in every pupil's school curriculum. The 55% of gay pupils in our secondary schools who were homophobically bullied in the last 12 months might derive lasting reassurance from that .

No one doubts the good faith of peers from all parties and none who have now discovered the importance of equal treatment for Britain's 3.7 million [sic] gay people. But it may be more therapeutic for them, rather than helpful to Alan Turing, to be offering good wishes at this stage.

Please note how Pink News framed this story...

Why a gal might think there's some kind of queeny feud going on here.

Drop us a line if you can see where Pink News called for a pardon for all the other gay men prosecuted in any of their 40 something stories about Alan's. 

• A Man From The Future is sold out - but some tickets will be available on the night.

* I think they mean this 1992 BBC Horizon documentary, The Strange Life And Death Of Dr Turing.

PS Story regurgitated by The Independent on Tuesday. 

Alan Turing: Is That It?

Alan Turing died on June 7th 1954.

He was 41.

Nobody can be certain if his death by cyanide poisoning was suicide or a tragic accident.

Despite what you may read or hear elsewhere today.

So, what's going on? Tortured Genius: What was Alan Turing really like? BBC World Service. Benedict Cumberbatch outwits Nazis in The Imitation Game - First Look Entertainment Weekly. Alan Turing: 60 Years On Huffington Post (Hopeless). Turing2014: Can machines think? @ Royal Society, London...

Err, I hope this isn't it.

Alan at school, 1923, by his mother, Ethel.

• Alan Turing: The Enigma Andrew Hodges' website. The Turing Digital Archive.

Sunday Times
A Man From The Future is sold out - but some tickets will be available on the night. 

Pet Shop Boys: A Man From The Future

The opening night of the Late Night Proms will take place at the Royal Albert Hall on July 23rd, as part of the BBC Proms series, and will consist of music by Pet Shop Boys performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Dominic Wheeler.

The concert will be in three parts. Firstly Richard Niles' 1991 'Overture to Performance'. Then a guest vocalist and the orchestra will perform new arrangements by the film composer Angelo Badalamenti of some of Neil and Chris's most personal songs.

Finally the orchestra will be joined by Pet Shop Boys and the BBC Singers for the world premiere of a brand-new work by Tennant and Lowe, 'A Man From The Future'. This is an evocation of the life and work of the computer pioneer and code-breaker, Alan Turing and is written for orchestra, choir, electronics and a narrator with a text based on 'Alan Turing: The Enigma' by Andrew Hodges who has collaborated with Neil and Chris. The orchestrations are by Sven Helbig. The narrator is still to be confirmed.

Neil and Chris said: "It is an honour for us to be invited to present some new music at The Proms and to celebrate Alan Turing 60 years after his death." Andrew Hodges said: “It's just been wonderful working with Neil and Chris on this project”.

Pet Shop Boys.

Judging by their last two albums, the Boys are on a roll now, so this could be stonking.
'Darling, you were wonderful' etc etc.

You can hear He Dreamed Of Machines here, and here are Neil and Chris talking about Turing with Graham Norton.

Codebreaker, a new choral work about Turing by James McCarthy, has its world premiere at London's Barbican on Saturday. This hasn't got quite so much publicity as the Pets.

PS I know it's over but, PSB should stop doing all that silly big hat things and so flamboyant costumes when touring.
It looks like you're trying too hard now.
Thanks for not asking.

The Best Gay Possible: Oppressive

So eh, you know, no biggie but... the PET SHOP BOYS only went and made a track out of my Nobel Call speech!
And no, I'm not kidding.

Panti Bliss.

Listen here.

Just trying to confirm this is PSB, we think so, so far. My close personal showbiz pal Peter of Popjustice fame says it is. Pretty 'amazing' whatever...

PS Irish Sun thing.

The last Pet Shop Boys' album, Electric, is quite literally, AMAZING!

Album Of The Year: Another One

PS It's Pet Shop Boys' Electric.

Pet Shop Boys: Invisible

Pet Shop Boys: Passion

This is fun.
Pet Shop Boys tell sexpot Daniel Martin about their top ten favourite dance tracks.
With video links and everything!
Apparently they have a new album out.
Not sure you could call Disco-Tex a "drag queen" though, Neil.

Update: Video interview on the making of Electric.

Pet Shop Boys: I Came Across A Cache Of Old Photos...

"There's a certain level of authority to a man with a stick..."

There's a a vaguely amusing interview with Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys fame on Popjustice today, centred 'pon a retrospective tour round their secret warehouse.
It's alright, if you like that sort of thing, I suppose.

PS The Pets played this on Sunday >>
"Let's make lots of money" etc etc.

Richard Gere: Pet Shop Boy?

 
I’ve been glued to the scene from American Gigolo from 1980 in which Gere, a male prostitute, is moving around his bedroom half-dressed, selecting shirts and ties, singing along to Marvin Gaye. For male sexuality and narcissism, nothing on screen has come close, before or since...

Gere may have no illusions about himself, but others have plenty about him. Since he played a homosexual in Bent on Broadway in 1980, people have wondered (without any foundation) about his sexual orientation. Indeed, in the early 1990s he was the subject of one of Hollywood’s most outrageous and enduring myths – that he was admitted to the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in LA with a gerbil stuck in his rectal canal.
“I don’t know where that came from,” he sighs. “And I don’t care. So stupid. Childish."
Some other things they say about him are more soundly based in fact. The weirdest of them all is the story of the dissolution of his marriage to Cindy Crawford. Three years into the marriage of two of the world’s most beautiful people, the couple placed a full-page ad in The Times in which they declared: “We are heterosexual and monogamous and take our commitment to each other very seriously.” Shortly afterwards they got divorced. Even by the mad standards of Hollywood marriages, this struck me as odd. What possessed him?
“I don’t know,” he says flatly. “It’s so long ago. I don’t care."

More gaiety - if denied - from FT Weekend. 
Or GT Weekend as I've now wittily renamed it.
You may not be surprised to learn the interview was cut short.

Radio: Neil Tennant's Smash Hits Christmas

This programme is on the wireless tomorrow.
Due to Radio 4's delightfully baffling programming, at some ungodly time in the morning.
It's about the swingoriliant Smash Hits.
I imagine it will be very (SNIIIP!!!)

PS Here's Brian McCloskey's Smash Hits Archive.

Update: Darling you were wonderful! A joyous, funny and moving programme about Pop's golden age and a smashing magazine, I hope you'll listen on iPlayer. 

Pet Shop Boys: In Lego

This delightful range of yellow figurines by Little Artists also includes Quentin Crisp, Freddie Mercury, Harvey Milk, Alan Turing, Andy Warhol and... Miss Grace Jones!
10% goes to THT in November for World Aids Day.

PS Bit pricey for a bit of plastic, mind.

The People's Songs: Smalltown Boy

Today BBC Radio 2 broadcast a documentary by Stuart Maconie, Smalltown Boy: Mother Will Never Understand, part of a series The People's Songs: The Story Of Modern Britain in 50 Records.
Obviously, I'm gagging to hear it, it's my specialist subject and I'm a big fan of Mr Maconie, but my computer's playing silly buggers and I can't access iPlayer.
Here's the puff though, which was presumably written by Stuart...

"British pop has had a long and colourful history of powerful and visionary movers and shakers who just happened to be gay..."  

Erm, saying they "just happened to be gay", as well as being a laughable cliche, implies that you think their sexuality was of no significance.
If so why write a documentary about them, then?

"Openly gay pop music only arrived in the UK in the early '80s with the likes of The Pet Shop Boys and Bronski Beat..."

BZZT! Neither Chris Lowe or Neil Tennant were out in the 80s.
Also, it's a, it's a, it's a cardinal sin to call Pet Shop Boys "the Pet Shop Boys."
I could go on, but I'll probably start boring myself, but this doesn't bode well.
I know, picky picky...

PS And if you're interested in the subject of Pop music and The Gays in the 80s why not go to this talk in that London next month, Poofters, Pop & Pandemics? Sounds unmissable!

Thought For The Day: Neil Tennant

"You should always celebrate your successes because someone else will celebrate your failures."

Neil Tennant interviewed in The Guardian. 
Contains a link to a stream of the new album Elysium.

PS Also reveals Pet Shop Boys are "working with the BBC Philharmonic on a piece of music about Alan Turing, the codebreaker and computer pioneer who was prosecuted for homosexuality ("A terrible story," says Tennant. "Of course the reason they won't pardon Alan Turing is because they'd have to pardon all those homosexual men. Well why don't they? Why don't they pardon them all, actually?")."
Oddly this quote doesn't appear in the print edition. 

Pet Shop Boys: Older

“People didn’t expect pop musicians to be performing in their fifties, although people in their fifties have always been writing pop songs — the guy who wrote Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head was the guitar player in Mud. We can do it because from the very beginning we wanted to create our own Pet Shop Boys world. You can invite people into that world, like Dusty Springfield or Johnny Marr, but you’re not competing with others, you’re following your own rules...”
 “Oh, taxi drivers can be brutal,” he says. “‘My mum really likes you’ is one we get a lot. Worse than that is, ‘I used to really like you’. And that’s meant to be a compliment.”
“Apart from when they think you’re Holly Johnson,” adds Chris Lowe, from the leather sofa he is slouched in.
“Some lad came up to us the other day and said: ‘My dad used to really like you’, ” Tennant continues. “Well, thank you for that. And ‘your early stuff’ comes up constantly. People always like the early stuff.”

An amusing interview with Pet Shop Boys in The Times.
Many of the songs on forthcoming album, Elysium - like the lovely new single Invisible - are meditations on getting older, both as a band and as a (gay) man.

Twitter: Lego Gay Village People

'Dan bought some lego. So I made a gay club. Chris Lowe is DJing'
Best thing I've ever been tweeted -  via Oliver Basciano on Twitter.

PS You may want to check out the backroom later.