Being boring: I am not blogging about the Pet Shop Boys, honest

After seeing them on their greatest hits tour, I decided to write another Pet Shop Boys blog post. Something about the best Pet Shop Boys singles. The greatest moments of the Pet Shop Boys, that kind of thing. Top 37 sexiest Pet Shop Boys deadpan glares.

And then the blog post lay in my drafts gathering dust. Because who cares about my opinions on the Pet pals? They're great. Of course I think they're great. Whoop-di-doo. And the Pope is catholic and Bear Grylls poops in the woods. Big deal.

The idea seemed as appealing as a live stream featuring Elon Musk talking about crypto. Or Elon Musk talking about woke. Or Elon Musk talking about anything.

So I deleted the whole thing. You won't be able to read my waffle about Steven Hague's extended remix of Love Comes Quickly, which lets the caramel smoothness of the original overflow like an exploded sweetshop.

And I binned my enthusings about the Always On My Mind / In My House mash-up that felt utterly subversive because I didn't think you were meant to do that to number one singles back then.

No will you get to appreciate my thesis about the 2021 Russell T Davies television series It’s A Sin, with Olly Alexander playing a troubled Tory-boy. What thesis? That if you really squint, like proper squint so your eyes look like bum holes, you can see that series as part of the extended PSB It's A Sin universe, as if it's an extension of the 1987 number one single itself.

I would have published something really inspirational about the tracks Vocal from their Electric album and The Pop Kids from their Super album offering a meta-narrative about the PSB musical universe. Or something about the rich place-building of Suburbia and West End Girls?, the latter full of shadows and shady street-life. 

And there's the financial cynicism connecting 1980s singles Rent and Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money), and how that kind of narrative is not present in their later singles. Or the geopolitics of It's Alright. Or the themes of love in the almost-but-very-much-not rhyming So Hard and Heart. And is Domino Dancing about love or lust?

Is Electronic's Getting Away With It a Pet Shop Boys single? Are we allowed to include that too? How about Eighth Wonder's PSB-penned pop banger I’m Not Scared? Dusty Springfield's Occupy Your Mind? Where does Neil-Chris end and the rest of the universe begin?

And you'll never get to read my ramblings about the singles in which vocals are secondary. Such as the Clothes Show theme tune In The Night (Arthur Baker remix) where people of a certain age remember the tune but not the words? Or the emotive instrumental Axis which provided such a thrilling opening to their 2013–2015 Electric live show?

Nah. You don't get to hear my bland blatherings about how important I think the Pet Shop Boys are. Can someone please press the 'delete draft' button? Thank you.

Further Fats: 14 'til I die: remembering the teenage me's music habits (2020)

Further Fats: Pet Shop Boys create their own magical dreamworld at Co-Op Live (2024)

Ten slices of shallow-fried Twitter whimsy

Twitter is a platform in which everyone can communicate with everyone else all of the time without any downsides whatsoever.

What follows are ten slices of shallow-fried whimsy lovingly copied-and-pasted from my Twitter account. Some if it reads as a useful self-help guide along the lines of The Power Of Now, How To Win Friends And Influence People or the Roland SH-101 Owner's Manual. Some of it reads like poetry along the lines of, er, poems and stuff.

I have given each tweet a header so you can perhaps make an index from it, like they do with proper books.

1. The food puns
Butter Living Through Chemistry. Meusli Has The Right To Children. Thymeless. Dubnobasswithmyheadman (where bass is a fish). Adventures Beyond The Ultrawurst. Endtrojuicing. Not sure where I'm going with this.

2. A question about 1996
Did the boy ever see his mom that weekend to tell her Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan?

3. Thoughts post-Brexit
Don't worry, everyone, we don't need Europe. Just stay in your towns, don't go anywhere, don't meet new people and don't buy anything. We didn't have the EU around the time of the Great Plague and everything was just fine.

4. Morning reflection 1
A grey morning in Manchester. Cold raindrops fall on puddled streets like polar bears in spandex, if polar bears were tiny and made of water, also forget the spandex, that's just a distraction tbh

5. A motivation
How to have a positive day:
- smile more
- do one kind thing
- pay a compliment
- open up the portal of d'ath krondor
- eat healthy
- live in the moment
- the tentacles, the tentacles, they burn
- be a good listener
- the void shall become all, ye wastrels of earth

6. A concern
I'm slightly worried that Antifa is short for Anti Fat Roland.

7. A dream for the future
It's splitting hairs, but I'd like to hear New Order's Mr Disco covered by Electronic.

8. Morning reflection 2
It is morning. The sun comes alive in the eastern sky and says its happy greetings. Hello trees. Hello fields. Hello squirrels. Hello sun! they call and wave. In the western sky, the moon dies a horrible death. Everyone laughs.

9. A simple wish
I wish Squarepusher was called Squidpusher and all of his promo shots were of him in back alleys selling squid.

10. The bird incident
Twitter, I forgot to tell you. A low-flying goose honked at me pretty aggressively the other day, so that's pretty much 2020 written off. How's YOUR week been?

Further Fats: Squarepusher's psychedelic number - could it send him (robert) miles off course? (2009)

Further Fats: Top ten ways to write a top ten music list (2012)

You'll enjoy these endearing FruityLoops versions of banging electronic music tunes

There's a knob-twiddler on YouTube who's been posting FruityLoops version of New Order songs.

"Knob-twiddler" is not a technical term, but instead is a nickname for people who like to experiment making electronic music. "FruityLoops" is indeed a proper term, in fact it's music-making software that's enjoyed something of a renaissance thanks to its users including Avicii, Basshunter and Timmy Mallett.

I lied about Timmy Mallett.

The YouTube user is called Mkaymufc and they are a New Order nut. Because they are using presets and some pretty basic plug-ins, their instrumental YouTube covers of Bernard & chums are not as well produced as the originals. That's like comparing a crayon drawing of a warthog stuck to your bathroom cabinet to a real warthog furiously trying to mate with your bathroom sink's overflow pipehole. You'll never get it in, Porkles. YOU'LL NEVER GET IT IN.

However, what is delightful is what Mkaymufc does with their limitations: there are some pretty detailed covers here, full of heart. There's something so comforting about a Midi-quality bass drum in a era of over-production. And like a cat following a laser along a carpet, you can watch it play along from start to finish in FruityLoops (now called FL Studio).

Sometimes it doesn't work: Electronic's Soviet doesn't come across well. But I loved Some Distant Memory (that Oboe's so cute!). New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle is brilliant, as is their take on Orbital's Kein Trink Wasser. It was an Orbital tweet that brought these videos to my attention. Sometimes the drawing is as enchanting as the real thing.

Here's Bizarre Love Triangle. Enjoy.

🔘 A PRODUCTION COVER OF OUR SONG KEIN TRINK WASSER BY MKAYMUFC 🔘 pic.twitter.com/fy9b1CDYXU

— Orbital (@orbitalband) December 27, 2019

Mixin' ma tunesies: Flying Lotus, Rustie and The Black Dog

I've had a strange mixture of two songs stabbing my eardrums all day. The first is Getting Away With It, the melancholic Pet Shop Boys-sprinkled pop song from Electronic. The second is My Humps, the paean to road calming measures by the Black Eyed Peas.

The result is an insistent and disturbing image of Johnny Marr rubbing me all over with his strangely misshapen mammaries. Like being tickled with rubber bags full of gerbils, only in a bad way.

All of which is distracting me from some important record releases about which you, my newly disturbed reader, should know. Each of these feature remixes and are 47% more successful than anything offered by an Electronic / Peas combo.

Last year, Flying Lotus was basking in the glory of his album Los Angeles when he offered us a 12" of strange remixes. If you're quick, you can still pick up copies of Shhhh! It includes, among others, a dirty snare-smacking version of Mr Oizo's Stunts ($tunt$ is the most immediate track here), a drastic scratch mix of J Dilla's Lightwork and a seriously widescreen bass-wobbling Promiscuous Girl by queenzilla of the perfect pout Nelly Furtado.

Rustie's Bad Science EP (Rustie pictured above) is further evidence this young whipperbleeper should be a lot more famous than he is. Bad Science offers up bubbly 8-bit hip hop mentalism, including a reconfiguration of one of the best tracks of 2008, Zig Zag, while still being breathy and prowling like a robot stalker. The whole thing pretty much sounds like Zig Zag, so if you've got that, get this.

And finally, there's an EP from The Black Dog called We Are Sheffield which pours remixes over your speakers until you'll be mopping up massive basslines, glitch techno and warm mellowness from your newly shampooed carpet. It's worth it alone (sadly alone, if I'm honest) for the epic yet moody Autechre remix.