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.