Pet Shop Boys Ultimate (EMI)
4/5
By: Tom Hocknell
You know it’s Christmas when record companies compile bands’ singles for fans who already have them. It also ties in with the 25th anniversary of their first hit, ‘West End Girls’. Although this isn’t for the fans, it’s for people possibly disinterested in their ballet score next year, hence the crap Tesco-till queue grabbing Ultimate title, which implies the rest of their extensive catalogue is less than ultimate. Mind you, it’s only crap in light of their high standards of album-naming, and does not divert from the one word tradition.
For the fans it should be called Debate, as enough singles equally well representing Pet Shop Boys are missing, and it is a shadow of 2003’s comprehensive Popart. But for those people wandering around with lives absent of catholic electro stompers (‘It’s a Sin’) and airy early Madonna pop heaven (‘Heart’) then this collection adequately addresses their oversight.
With the pounding euphoria of recent single ‘Together’, Pet Shop Boys have released over 45 singles, so collating them now is always ungainly. From the seedy ‘West End Girls’, to the anthemic ‘Suburbia’, through the regretful ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’ (not featuring Dusty Springfield, but pointedly with), to the triumphant summer of ‘Se a Vida A’ and modern classic of last year’s ‘Love Etc.’ this does what it threatens: providing succinct snapshots of their talent for those living under stones . It is a shame the slide-guitar heartbreak of ‘You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk’ is missing and you only really need ‘Go West’ or ‘New York City Boy’, while the cover of ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ now sounds deeply inessential.
Their number one album Very is strangely under-represented, some songs on which (‘Yesterday, When I Was Mad’) have dated, but not including the gorgeously autumnal ‘Liberation’, or the ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ barnstorm of crunching chords, is criminally unrepresentative. It does however include the finest single ever recorded, despite the singles’ char t of late 1990 being less impressed, in the soaring ‘Being Boring’. Even detractors must accept it is the finest number 20 single ever recorded.
Nonetheless, this is well worth a glance at those stockings for; particularly the accompanying exhaustive DVD of their Top of the Pops performances and their triumphant 2010 Glastonbury show. But anyone who likes music will have the audio highlights (and more) of this already.
Artists in this article: Pet Shop Boys
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