John Topley's Weblog

Disco 3 by Pet Shop Boys

Friday, 30 May 2003

This is the third album in the Pet Shop Boys' occasional Disco series, following on from 1986's Disco and 1994's patchy Disco 2. This time around the boys have broken with tradition and included previously unreleased tracks on the album. There are five songs here which get an official outing for the first time.

First up is new song Time on my hands, which although unlikely to win any greatest PSB song prizes, gets things moving nicely and features the extensive use of vocoders which appear throughout the album. The Barry White sampling Positive role model will be familiar to fans, having first made an appearance in a different form at Glastonbury, then as a bootleg MP3 on the Internet and most recently, as a song from the musical Closer to Heaven. A great lost single. Try it (I'm in love with a married man) is a cover version of an old song by former disco producer and early PSB collaborator Bobby Orlando. The song makes me think of Giorgio Moroder with its minimalist electro production.

New song Somebody else's business is a classic PSB pop song of the sort which many fans thought lost forever after the guitar–dominated sound of the Release album. The boys close the song by cleverly sampling one of their own earlier records. The new PSB extended mix of the song Here at last turns the song into the four–on–the–floor stomper that it should have been all along.

If looks could kill was featured in a different form when the boys did a John Peel session. It's an old song that features a simple repeating hook typical of Tennant and Lowe's early songwriting together.

The album closes with my favourite track, a Genuine Piano mix of stillborn British single London, which gives the song a totally different feel, evocative of late nights in the city with its descending chord change. I think this treatment really makes the song shine.

The album features a stunning cover photograph of London at night by Wolfgang Tillmans. It also features copy protection which means that the CD isn't allowed to feature the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo because the copy protection method actually introduces deliberate errors into the disc. I've had occasional difficulty playing the disc on my hi-fi and have been unable to create MP3s of the songs for my personal stereo. Unfortunately Parlophone don't presently allow me to buy MP3s from them, so Disco 3 on the move is a no go for me. It's a thumbs up for Disco 3 and a thumbs down for their record company. 4/5.

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