Do you talk about the Pet Shop Boys in Rock on the Wild Side?
I certainly do: pages 164-168 (well, the first half of that last page) are devoted to them. But I wasn't as big a fan of theirs back then, nor as nearly as knowledgeable about them as I am now. In fact, as I note elsewhere, it was actually the process of conducting research for that book that got me interested in the Boys in the first place.
I can't quote here at length what I have to say about them in Rock on the Wild Side, but I pay particular attention to the songs "Rent," "Left to My Own Devices," "Being Boring," and "Liberation," with very short asides about a few other songs as well. But what I would say about most of those songs today would be quite different from what I wrote back in 1994.
Incidentally, in case you're wondering, I had included PSB in my book (which was published in April 1994) a few months before Neil famously, officially, and publicly "came out" as gay in the August 1994 issue of the U.K. magazine Attitude. To be sure, not all the artists I wrote about in Rock on the Wild Side are gay—many are heterosexuals who had released songs about gay people or of particular interest to them in one way or another—but I guess this was one case where I happened to hit the target spot-on.
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