Someone states the obvious.
Someone sneers at all you love.
Someone preaches ugly manners, excluding some (including me).
This is how I learned to hate Rock and Roll.
(Tennant/Lowe)

I was happily partaking of an internet forum the other day (one of a couple I frequent in fact) when a thread was started about a particular pop star – a vaguely diminutive Australian one actually – where a free and frank exchange of views about her last album was held.

But it was all pretty civil because at heart all those discussing it are basically fans.

Until of course the thread suddenly started to fill with killjoys. Now, I’m all for differences of opinion, but I do often wonder what it is that causes a person to join a thread where people are essentially espousing their love for something and feel the urge to just sneer and throw around insults.

Somehow seeing people enjoying themselves does seem to bring out the worst in people doesn’t it?

My favourite comment, by someone in defence of their general tone, was that “it’s the duty of rock to bite the arse of pop” which basically had me gaping in disbelief.

I couldn’t help but feel a little glad that my musical preferences are pop not rock if that’s how you define it. The minute words like “duty” start being bandied around about any form of art I tend to find myself thinking it rather a shame that, once again, people can only see a value in something if it isn’t just intended to entertain.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the creation of enjoyment in others is probably the greatest pinnacle of human achievement.

First heard of them on Popjustice with a song called “M.A.G.I.C.”, a nice optimistic little number which has been repeatedly in my iPhone’s current favourites playlist.

And now they’re back with a new single “Into the Clouds” which is another delightful optimistic little tune, with a stuning video to boot.

The Sound of Arrows – Into the Clouds (Music video) from The Sound of Arrows on Vimeo.

Ones to watch, I think.

As you might tell from the name it’s one which caters for pop-lovers of all ages, split into a more serious indie room and a more unashamedly chart/cheese sound in the other.

So, guess which room I spent most of my Saturday night in this weekend, huh?

All was marvellous. The set was a bit toothless to start but from the moment friend Helen demanded the Pet Shop Boys’ Go West things improved enormously.

Admittedly there was a wobbly section when a sequence of 2 Unlimited, Scatman John and Cotton Eyed Joe arrived (and I suddenly realised that dance music of that era was precisely why Britpop arose) but on the whole it was a fantastic night.

Aside from… well, the DJ himself. I’ve not encountered this phenomenon before in clubs – perhaps you have – but he did seem to love the sound of his own voice. Every now and then he’d talk over the music just when we were enjoying it the most and tell us the most unnecessary things.

Things like “This is Poptastic on a Saturday night” (we knew), “lots of pop classics still to come” (we had hoped) and “if you’ve got a request come over to the DJ booth” (well, there’s a relief: my psychic projection is a little rusty) and “if I’ve got it, I’ll play it” (well, that’s just excuses).

Basically I do think DJs shouldn’t talk to their audience by microphone. It’s invariably vapid stuff at best and just gets in the way of the tunes. I suppose he, like many of us who’ve done it, suffers from the vague awareness that he’s not really a DJ but more of a glorified CD changer and feels the need to build up his part.

But frankly the urge to dash over there and ask if he could give us “Shut the Fuck Up” by “the Poptastic DJ” was somewhat overwhelming. But since he was otherwise rather good (aside from three, count em three, Britney tracks in an hour and the Steps version of “Better the Devil You Know”) maybe that would have been a little bit churlish.

All good fun, anyhow. I can heartily recommend it as a night out if you’re up that way, and it certainly provided the kind of abs workout I haven’t had in a long while.

I really need to club more often.

So far they’ve just done the Kylie and Jason albums, all the Jason singles and the one attempt at a pop career by a scary Australian bodybuilder by the name of Carol Hitchcock (it’s a great track, mind) but I have a nasty feeling that in the long run this whole thing is going to bankrupt me.

Aside from the pleasure of listening to crisp, freshly remastered versions of tracks I’ve previously had from various hooky sources, they’re also including previously unreleased instrumentals and mixes as well. Which naturally I have to own too.

And, more amazingly, the Jason singles also contain the backing tracks used for PAs as well. And let me tell you, some of those backing vocals are just some of the most gorgeously melodic and harmonic things I’ve ever heard.

Kylie’s singles are likely to hit in a week or so and so I may be on the streets before you know it. (But with a very full iPhone.)

Of course when I am with the sadist I have to listen to him (not that he believes for one minute I do) so I get subjected to the music from time to time.

On Thursday though, to my delight and surprise, somehow someone had sneaked Kylie’s version of “the Locomotion” into what was otherwise a painfully hip LA TV playlist.

Not only did I laugh out loud when I first heard it, but it put a grin on my face for ages.

I raised how unusual such a track was with the sadist and how I was surprised to find something so out of character blasting through the club.

“I think,” he muttered, bitterly “we just have to face the scary fact that there are probably other people out there in the world who think like you.”

And, as if he could somehow punish the world through me for this, he set me up some deadlifts.

Poor chap. He has to listen to that station on repeat all day…

Bewildering as ever, huh?

But yet, it’s kind of everything I wanted from a PSB/Xenomania collaboration. Catchy, unusual, oddly structured and irritatingly pervasive.

“Don’t have to be beautiful, but it helps” is such a Neil line…

It’s only in recent years that I’ve come to appreciate how truly marvellous they are, and they have sort of snuck into the top spot of my list of favourite bands – even ahead of the Holy Trinity themselves, the Human League.

It’s probably shouldn’t be a surprise. As a bookish, reserved, melancholic, awkward, wannabe-intellectual gay it is somewhat inevitable that Neil Tennant should write the soundtrack to accompany my life. And my most significant relationships are echoed in so many of their songs it’s untrue. (When I was dating one for example, Jealousy and Domino Dancing chimed enormously with me, which in retrospect should have been a sign, and Nervously describes me in every single one I’ve had…)

It’s not entirely unfair that they get labelled as a gay band. It’s a frequent theme of theirs, touching on tragic gay bars (To Speak Is a Sin), failed gay utopias (Go West), the effect of Aids (the Being Boring trilogy, Dreaming of the Queen), closet homosexuals (Can You Forgive Her?, Bet She’s Not Your Girlfriend) and so on.

But to dismiss them as just a gay band is wrong as their subject matter ranges far and wide. They’ll have a pop at Morrissey (Miserabalism), fame-hungry nobodies (Shameless), Peter Mandelson (I Get Along), George W Bush (I’m With Stupid), ID Cards (Integral) and, amusingly, popstars who pronounce on politics (How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?). They’ll touch on Role-Strain, something I suffer from quite badly sometimes (Too Many People), fascism (Delusions of Grandeur), post-war difficulty (Up Against It) and deluded businessmen (Single) to name but a few.

Basically, they tackle more diverse subjects than most non-pop acts so it was about time they were recognised.

But I think what sets them apart is their bloody-minded refusal to do what people expect. It annoys people who just want them to put out another Very-esque album of disco stompers (even though that album isn’t actually that disco heavy), but it means they’ve a rich and varied catalogue which always sounds quintessentially them whilst regularly sounding like nothing you’ve heard them do before.

It also means that the claims of “a return to form” which have, bizarrely, been thrown at their last and next albums, are invariably wide of the mark. They can’t return to form, because they never actually left it, they just didn’t do what you expected.

And of course I love them because they’re not a rock act. They like dance music and they like pop music, like I do, and they manage to make both intellectually satisfying. “Depth through surface” is how they were once described, and I think that’s a fantastic result to achieve.

Here’s to more!

Now such accolades are usually guaranteed to make me roll my eyes and expect some standard dire singer-songwriter whose label is pretending is fresh and ungroomed and so on and will, therefore, be putting out miserable soul-lite or underproduced pap.

But blimey… she’s good. Stunningly pretty (both vocally and in aspect) and also impressively talented, she performed one of her songs on Later With Jools Holland by playing Stylophone, Piano and Tenori-on (see here) which is a feat I find quite impressive all told.

Frankly I would recommend downloading the whole Little Boots EP (currently ?Ǭ�1.58) because whilst the currently free “Stuck on Repeat” is good, and the Tenor-on/Piano version of “Meddle” is cool, the highlight is definitely her version of the Freddie Mercury/Giorgio Moroder classic “Love Kills”.

Originally from the electronic soundtrack Moroder did for the classic film Metropolis in 1984, the original is fantastic, but Little Boots’ version is bang up to date and astonishingly lovely.

I listened to practically nothing else on the way in to work today.

A good mix, in my opinion, builds up the track part by part, allowing you to see how intricately it was constructed, throws the song at you, then de-constructs it again. The golden age for such mixes was the late 80s and early 90s before mixes started having bugger all to do with the actual song (many of the Pet Shop Boys mixes of the mid-to-late 90s show off this problem in all its gory glory).

Which brings me to J. Donovan Esq’s 1990 single “When You Come Back To Me“. The extended mix of this is, I think, pretty much perfect – second only to the 12″ version of Betty Boo’s “Doin’ the Do”.

Part of it is the song, pretty much one of the best Mike Stock wrote, and one that actually evokes some Christmassy feelings in jaded old me for a change. And it’s a nice lyric too. (No “I Should Be So Lucky”, I’ll grant you but I believe I’m alone in loving that song too.)

But the extended mix just makes me appreciate it so much more. The thunderbirds-esque kettle drums, the dropped spanners (or chimes, probably), the soft pippy synths, the gentle stabby keyboards, the warm brass noises. But it’s the sheer amount of harmony that’s boggling. I’m no musical expert, clearly, but it’s awash with harmonics from the strings to the backing vocalists – the latter being a team of people (including Stock himself) who never got enough credit.

In many respects it’s the perfect culmination of the sound that SAW used for him. It’s not the standard Eurodisco of Kylies stuff, not the spiky cold feel of Sonia’s material, say, but a warm-sounding filled-out production with a walking-pace style song.

Frankly I love it to bits. The fact it’s also got a key change makes me almost cream.

(And it’s not just me that wanted that coat is it? It’s certainly a bit Doctory…)

And what’s it like?

Well, it’s lovely. Which, to be honest, is something of a mild disappointment to me, but hey. It basically lacks punch – I was hoping for a couple of tracks which were bold, brassy, punding statements of sass, but instead the whole album has taken its cue from “Call the Shots” and gone down that route instead.

You will find nothing as barkingly inventive as “Biology”. Nothing as poppers-o-clock as “Something Kinda Ooooh”, and – unlike their last effort – nothing remotely slap-in-the-face-brilliant as “Girl Overboard” or “Close to Love”.

So I’m a bit grumpy.

But… what you will find are a collection of (largely) solid, sophisticated mid-tempo pop songs. Their colaboration with the Pet Shop Boys “The Loving Kind” is an absolute gem. It’s gorgeous and it’s synthy and it features the word “disinclined” which already makes it stratospherically brilliant in my opinion.

Other highlights? Well… “Rolling Back the Rivers in Time” is about as close to a Springfield-esque 60’s soul number as they’re ever likely to get, the seven minute epic “Untouchable” is a majestic beauty, “Turn to Stone” and “Love is the Key” are gorgeous, and “Love is Pain” was an instant personal favourite (possibly for the title alone).

So that’s seven gems out of twelve tracks all told (“The Promise” benefits from the slightly longer album version by ending properly). But the rest can just cock off.

All involved in the reggae-infused limpness of “Revolution in the Head” should be ashamed of themselves. And a song with as brassy a title as “We Wanna Party” turns out surprisingly lacking in tooth.

So for all it’s brilliance – all the high spots are undoubted high spots in the Girls’ catalogue – “Out of Control” seems singularly badly named. It’s a mature, restrained album all told – not bad by any means but it’s sure wrong-footed me.