In a sudden turn of events, it appears that Pet Shop Boys will, in fact, include a new song on "Ultimate", their forthcoming retrospective. Our dreams have come true!There's a little more meat on these bones now. Neil and Chris mentioned the release of "Ultimate" is timed to celebrate the 25th anniversary of "West End Girls" becoming a hit.
The full tracklisting for the CD includes the following.
1. West End Girls
2. Suburbia
3. It's A Sin
4. What Have I Done To Deserve This?
5. Always On My Mind
6. Heart
7. Domino Dancing
8. Left To My Own Devices
9. Being Boring
10. Where The Streets Have No Name (I Can't Take My Eyes Off You)
11. Go West
12. Before
13. Se A Vida É (That's The Way Life Is)
14. New York City Boy
15. Home And Dry
16. Miracles
17. I'm With Stupid
18. Love Etc.
19. Together
With 19 tracks covering all ten of their elpees, it's a perfect, pocket sized edition of PSB hits for the casual fan. It also gives die hards a reason to purchase the collection. It's no easy task to pull together eighteen hits when they've released over forty singles.
Some sacrifices have to be made when you have a such an extensive body of work from which to choose. For instance, "Very", arguably PSB's high water mark, is represented by a solitary track. I hear and completely understand your collective gay gasp.
"Rent", "It's Alright", "Can You Forgive Her?" and "So Hard", all top 10 hits, didn't make the cut. Interesting to see "Before" in the line up. Not one you hear often.
So what about the new tune? "Together" was written and produced with former Xenomania staff member Tim Powell and will also be released as a single. Huzzah! Ver Pets have come through for us yet again.
So what about the new tune? "Together" was written and produced with former Xenomania staff member Tim Powell and will also be released as a single. Huzzah! Ver Pets have come through for us yet again.
If that wasn't enough, Neil and Chris are scheduled to release the score to their ballet, "The Most Incredible Thing", in March. Poptastic!
Hi Vinny (btw, great blog!),
ReplyDeleteyes - this is the first time PSB "had" to make a choice out of their singles collection, as Discography, PopArt (and Alternative too, while we're at it) merely included all A-sides (or B-sides for Alternative), bar Was It Worth It? in PopArt, as it was their only non-Top20 hit at PopArt's time.
Before the tracklisting was made public (incidentally, we didn't know that an unreleased track was to be included) I wrote a tentative one based on chart position and album representation (sorry for abbreviations - PSB aren't truly famous for short song titles, n'est-ce pas?):
WEG, IAS, AOMM, Heart, WHIDTDT?, GW, LTMOD, SH, WTSHNN(CTMEOY), IA, DD, CYFH?, Before, Suburbia, SAVE, YOTMYLMWYD, HAD, IWS, LE
17 Top10 hits, plus HAD and LE.
I also picked five alternative tracks to make it closer to the Pets' and their fans' hearts (although EMI's idea of this collection is focused on the casual buyer):
Rent, BB, Jealousy, NYCB, Numb
with, from the first list,
IA, Heart, CYFH?, SAVE, YOTMYLMWYD
as candidates for the cutting room floor.
after Together, the 18 available slots were filled with 17 tracks out of these 24 - the only surprise is Miracles, that is included in PopArt only. But that's a great track, so we're going to excuse them for throwing So Hard (a #4 hit!) out of the window, aren't we? And much more so, as they didn't bother including DJ Culture.
All in all, a very good tracklisting. IMHO, of course.
Cheers,
Paolo M