Another Life Begins Today

When I was... well, old enough to make it relatively shameful... I was in a Transformers fan club called TransMasters UK. A guy called Matt Dallas used to write and draw a comic book called Transtrip and after a while I started contributing a back-up strip to the comic and so we corresponded quite frequently.

I was just starting to take music seriously at the time and so talk soon moved on from whether or not the Autobots and Decepticons were able to transform when they still lived on Cybertron, or whether Jeff Senior or Will Simpson was the best Marvel UK artist, to the kind of music we liked. Eventually we traded compilation tapes. I made him one featuring, if I can remember, a great number of MOR classics such as Don Henley’s Boys of Summer and Hard Habit To Break by Chicago.

He made me a best of the Pet Shop Boys.

I don’t have the tape anymore, I think it probably got chewed up or I might have left it in someone’s car stereo and they never gave it back; but it’s still stayed with me as one of the best compilations I’ve ever been given. I also swear there was a different more laid back version of Suburbia on it that I’ve tried to track down to no avail ever since and the memory of which prompted me to recreate it in a version that even out-gayed the Pet Shop Boys.

A good deal of the tracks on Matt’s tape were b-sides and it led me to buy Alternative, a compilation of their rarities.

I consider it to be the best thing they’ve released.

You’re familiar with the big poppy Pet Shop Boys, which I love also, but I’ve always preferred their more laid back introspective songs where Neil Tennant suddenly becomes Morrissey with a prettier voice and starts singing about jaded Headmasters (Hey Headmaster), a friend’s funeral (Your Funny Uncle – the lyric of which may even top Being Boring as Tennant’s greatest) and love that dare not speak its name (It Must Be Obvious)

Everyone knows when they look at us
Of course they do it must be obvious
I never told you now I suppose
You’re the only one who didn’t know

To really hammer home the comparison to Morrissey, in one of the album’s many highlights, Johnny Marr even turns up on the track Decadence.

Due to the nature of the beast, the compilation is, shall we say, inconsistent. As well as the above it also features some quite bad Euro House; big, gay, pop stompers; the odd show tune; and, on Sound Of The Atom Splitting, arguably the campest vocal ever foisted upon the music buying public.

Pretty much perfect then.

Pet Shop Boys - Hey Headmaster

Pet Shop Boys - Your Funny Uncle

Pet Shop Boys - It Must Be Obvious


Ricky Stardust