Into the blue: a loved track

OK. So what happened in 2005 that was so important? Pope John-Paul II died. Tony Blair was returned as Prime Minister. The Live 8 concerts were held. Some wacko surgeons in France performed the first face transplant and we decided to put Saddam Hussein on trial. Strangely none of these events have left a mark on me and never enter my daily life. So if nothing of extreme importance happened to me in this year, why in the name of God did I miss the release of the Heaven 17 album “Before After”?

You may find this a curious statement; so let me explain.

I like music, more specifically I love electronic music and I adore good electronic music above almost anything else. I have ‘loved’ 123 tracks on last.fm and they are all worthy of this accolade. However, few are more admirable than the 124th and latest selection: “Into The Blue” by Heaven 17. Whilst this track was released 7 years ago, I only heard it in the last few weeks and I can't explain why this should be.

Martyn and Glenn. Nobody is sure where Ian is.

Heaven 17 were always The Human League’s weirder half brothers and nobody pretends they sold anything like the same number of records. But then they never really set out to be especially commercial. Heaven 17 seemed to record the music they liked and waited for the rest of the world to catch up. Like many others I never really did catch up and left them behind in the early 90’s – dance music exploded and I got lost in 'The White Room'.

In the new millennium I delved into the electronic music that influenced me and the dance music I had become enamoured with. Yet Heaven 17's more recent work seem to have remain at arms length and “Before After” went un-purchased. It turns out it was my loss.

A recent buying spree (yes, CD’s not mp3s) saw me purchase the missing albums from Heaven 17's back catalogue. Ironically, the album "Before After" consists largely of dance music that sounds ten years out of date for 2005 but is actually pretty damn good when I put my rose tinted spectacles on in 2012. There are many good tracks on this album but I am consistently drawn to “Into the Blue” like a moth to a flame. It's difficult to define what draws us to one song in particular. I'm sure some will listen to the track and wonder why I would become so obsessed by it. I could see why you may think it is a one trick pony and is nothing without Glenn's sampled "doo wap" refrain. But I don't care: it's my new "You Grow More Beautiful". Bliss.

Good but not gold

Some posts are easy; they just seem to write themselves. You get a thought in your head and it simply flows onto the screen. This isn't one of those posts.

Opinions amongst Pet Shop Boys fans regarding the new single `Winner` are divided. Initial reactions labelled the song `worthless chart fodder` and a shameless Olympics cash in. Others have pronounced the song to be ‘soaring’ or even ethereal. Yet almost everyone agrees that it isn’t the sort of track one would normally expect for a ‘first single’ from a new album. Winner is not a dance track and is more akin to ‘Home and Dry’ (I just hope to god the album won’t be like Release).

The first thought I had when listening to the track was ‘This is a shameless tie in for the Olympics’. Like others who have posted on the internet I can already hear it playing during a BBC Olympics montage and I’m not entirely comfortable with that. It’s one thing to find your song used on such occasions but to write a song almost for this purpose seems a bit cheap. Maybe its just coincidence that Neil and Chris wrote this song and decided it would be fun to release it at this time. Who knows?

I like the song but also think that it makes a poor choice as a ‘first single’. At the end of the day the ‘Olympics tie in’ aspect of its release leaves me somewhat repulsed and smacks of a commercialism that I wouldn’t normally associate with PSB.