> It’s neat that both PSB and this fan site are still going strong.
As legit bearers of the "great white-nerd hope" crown, Pet shop boys never where small in Europe, but they were clearly too much for US. not only gay, but (their worse sin) too much focused in politics and history (socialist history) to be accepted.
In the game of writing catchy songs that are well crafted and don't feel stupid, still can beat most of the current pop stars with both hands tied back. They still show the cool factor here and there.
I’ve seen them live both in the US and several times in Europe. In Europe they are completely mainstream playing large venues in front of evenly mixed gender audiences, whereas when I saw them in the US the venue was much smaller and the audience seemed to consist mostly of men.
I talked to a straight house DJ two decades ago who said that he felt compelled to throw in the occasional PSB remix, among a few other artists, just to maintain the gay following without which no DJ’s career would flourish in clubland. At a time when house music still had this “underground”, “play the music you love” aura, it definitely showed how mercenary set programming could be.
Is sad that they are tagged as a "gay group" now, when the first three albums were simply two nerds doing insanely catchy, state-of-the-art, electronic pop that everybody loved. This ruins the experience a little probably.
Is not a shame (currently, in the 80's it was a different history), but you can reduce your scope and alienate part of your potential audience.
Pet Shop Boys often write deceptively simple lyrics with a lot of hidden context. Without webs like this page, most of the context, can fly over the radar for non gay people, and the same song, referenced locations etc, will mean also different things to non UK people. Kings Cross is just a song about a train station, Right? If you force the context as gay by default, some songs turn much more clear, but also smaller, less universal, and less accessible to non gay people.
But we talk also about a group that have strong links with computers and nerd life. Computer graphics in the Liberation video for example were notable for a 90's videoclip. nobody was doing that in pop. They even appear in the Tetris film
As legit bearers of the "great white-nerd hope" crown, Pet shop boys never where small in Europe, but they were clearly too much for US. not only gay, but (their worse sin) too much focused in politics and history (socialist history) to be accepted.
In the game of writing catchy songs that are well crafted and don't feel stupid, still can beat most of the current pop stars with both hands tied back. They still show the cool factor here and there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooIWFjD-Y84
Or even better: the magnificient Love Comes Quickly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EuS9iJsdRw