Pazzo!
Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 2016
Original album - Super
Producer - Stuart Price
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - (none)
This is one of three tracks on Super that the Boys describe as "almost instrumental," the others being "Happiness" and "Inner Sanctum." As Neil told interviewer Nicola Meighan of BBC Radio Scotland, Chris has some Italian friends in London who sometimes call him "Pazzo," which means "crazy" in Italian.
There have been mixed reports regarding the origin of this track in relation to another. On the one hand, early reports from around the time of the album's release are that they created "Pazzo!" as an "aside" while working on a song that wouldn't be released until much later, "Monkey Business," assembling it from "leftover" pieces from other tracks. On the other hand, Neil later said that when he first heard Chris's early work on "Monkey Business," he thought it was a remix of the presumably then already completed (or at least nearly complete) "Pazzo!" Whatever the case, the end result for "Pazzo!" was an admitted "throwaway thing" that they nevertheless ended up liking well enough to include in the final Super track lineup. In fact, they had originally envisioned it as the album's opening track, only changing their minds about it quite late in the process.
What we have is a strange, rather experimental dance track—at root an instrumental with scattered, often distorted vocal interjections: “Do you want to?” “You’re crazy!” “That’s insane!” All of the voices, by the way, are Neil's, though often electronically processed beyond recognition. An especially experimental aspect of the track is the fact that it very deliberately employs a single chord throughout—E minor, with no chord changes—something that Chris in particular had long sought. As Neil has said, "I think it's very difficult to do and keep it interesting, and I think we've done that."
Aside from those experimental aspects, there doesn't seem to be anything terribly deep going on here—just an instance of the Boys having some fun and sharing their fun with the rest of us.
Annotations
- One of my site visitors has pointed out that there's a distinct similarity, most noticeable in the instrumental openings, between "Pazzo!" and the earlier (1996) "How I Learned to Hate Rock and Roll," particularly with regard to rhythm, bassline, and chord structure, though in different keys. The arrangements of the two songs aren't very much alike at all, but the similarities are sufficient to make one wonder whether "Pazzo!" may have grown initiality out of a conscious reworking of the earlier track. The Boys, however, have never mentioned anything along these lines.
List cross-references
- PSB lyrics that include non-English words and phrases
- The key signatures of selected PSB songs
- PSB songs that have been used in films and "non-musical" TV shows
- Early titles for Pet Shop Boys songs
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