A chart and some thoughts. That is all.
Pet Shop Boys have a new album out and it’s great. The cover feels very Gilbert and George (as well as…Colin Robertson?), and the video for the single Dancing Star (about Rudolf Nureyev) reminds me of the work of Eadweard Muybridge that visualised motion, with the broken down images of Nureyev’s beautiful, fluid dancing.
I love to listen to PSB. It reminds me of an age when we danced joyfully around the Hodern Pavillion in the late 80s and early 90s. I remember walking in to the sweaty hall on a wave of euphoria, as Left to my own Devices played, and every time I hear it now I can recall how cool the lyrics were to my young teenage brain. Debussy and Che Guevara to a disco beat, is still in my mind, one of the best lyrics of any pop song.
I read an article in the past few years about them, and they told the interviewer how they were going to a day club (in Berlin?) late on Sunday afternoons. They arrived all fresh and well rested from a nice weekend in, while everyone else is wrecked from clubbing all weekend. They get a bottle of prosecco and sit up on the balcony and watch everyone fucked up from the night before, dancing below them. Cheers to that!
This visualisation shows their complete discography right up until their most recent release. All data was sourced from Wikipedia. This again was a bit of a rush - 90% of the time was compiling the data, and most of the day I was at my kid’s school helping organise costumes for the upcoming musical. No day clubbing for me either. Just some desk dancing to Disco later in the afternoon.
(Did you know that they also did a soundtrack for Battleship Potemkin, which you can enjoy at your own leisure) https://youtu.be/n_tmE3baRF8?si=W9M90pjrd1lwpZAU
PDF attached so you can zoom right in and see all the details.
This newsletter was created on Gadigal Land. Just up the river from where I live, pictures and marks were made on rocks to share stories about the world with others, and they were put there tens of thousands of years ago. I want to acknowledge that this tradition of story telling and using images to communicate and pass on information is nothing new - and the Custodians of this unceded land were here, and doing it first.