Cover me!

[imomus]

The Pet Shop Boys have a new single, Flamboyant, which is their best in a while. The lyric seems to be a piece of sniping at fellow celebrities (I imagine Elton John as the snubbed queen, since the last time I met Neil Tennant Elton was also present), but it might also be an internal critique of homosexual theatricality. The arrangement is a nice return to the PSBs' 80s sound, with chugging bass sequencers and orchestral hits. The song isn't a great one -- it wouldn't have stood out on their last good album, 1993's Very -- and the melody veers dangerously close to 'Cruel Summer' by Bananarama. But the video is pretty cool. It juxtaposes scenes from Japanese TV game show Kaso Taisho (including a wonderful sequence in which people with coloured hats stand in for billiard balls) with fake -- and absurd -- commercials starring Neil and Chris, in an obvious nod to Lost In Translation.



The so-so-ness of the song made me wonder why nobody ever covers my songs. In the west, anyway. It would never happen, but I dream of an entire album of Pet Shop Boys covers of my songs. It would be called Pet Shop Boys: Platinum and the track-listing would be:

Platinum
London 1888
The Hairstyle of the Devil
Shoesize of the Angel
A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17-24)
Red Pyjamas
A Lapdog
Bishonen
Miles Franklin
The Symphonies of Beethoven
Folk Me Amadeus
I Want You But I Don't Need You
Pygmalism
The Animal That Desires
Song In Contravention
The End of History

It would certainly go platinum all over the world and would be the best album the Pet Shop Boys never made. What's more, I would be able to move into a much nicer house on the proceeds. The Boys could take over my flat on the Karl Marx Allee (in an i-D magazine interview recently Neil expressed a wish to move his office to this very street.)

Thinking about this in the bath, I wondered why the Japanese have been the only ones to appreciate my songs to the extent of covering and commercializing them. In the west, weirdly enough, I've had more success as a vocalist, invited to sing on records by Hypo, Kreidler, The 6ths, Anne Laplantine... Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I was not 'born with the gift of a golden voice'. The reason I've persisted in the music industry for so long is that my songs are good. As for the reasons people in the west don't cover them, I can only hazard guesses.

The songs are gently deviant in a world where the thing to be is aggressively normal. The songs are too 'intellectual' or 'difficult' or 'subversive' or 'silly' for the mass market. Artists in the west tend to write their own material, and if they do cover versions it tends to be classics from the past, or songs that have already been hits or become standards. Few artists do covers 'to expose new talent' or 'to encourage lesser-known artists' or 'to give something back to the people who influenced us'. (I guess Kurt Cobain was one of the exceptions.) The trouble with covering artists who are working now, and working close to your own style, is that if they're better than you it's going to make your own work look bad, and if they're worse, why would you do it? If they sound like you, what's the point in covering them? The only artist who covers his own soundalikes is David Bowie, who almost makes a knowing self-tribute when he covers people like Morrissey and Metro. But even he gives the impression, when he does it, of having run out of ideas.

Well, I guess this all goes without saying. We live in a world where the big fish eat the little fish, the big countries invade the little countries, David Beckham wins a book award while I go unpublished, the wicked flourish like the green bay tree, I cover the Pet Shop Boys but the Pet Shop Boys never ever cover me. It's the natural order of things. I should count myself lucky they haven't sued me.