Tim: The third single, and second best track, from their latest album, with one of the most pretentious titles a song has ever had.
Tom: That is an astounding title. And bloody hell – is that a “6” I see in the “minutes” on the video?
Tim: Oh yes – strap yourself in.
Tom: Oh my word, that opening. That first minute. And then… oh wow. This is classic Pet Shop Boys. It’s amazing. And as I write this, I’m only three minutes into it.
Tim: What I like about this is the way it goes pretty much everywhere, with long, slow introduction than standard synth pop in the way that they do it, heavy beats later on through the chorus, and a breakdown near the end that sticks way out from the rest of the song.
It never really settles down into one thing in particular – even when you think the heavy chanting at the end is a fabulous way to end it, it suddenly goes all dreamy and elsewhere.
Tom: I do wonder if that’s there deliberately to make it “loop” in folks’ heads. After that outro, I want the main hook to come back… and so I hit play again.
Tim: Wonderful consequence of that: even at nearly seven minutes, the song doesn’t sound like its going on too long.
Tom: In a song like this, there are always going to be sections that don’t seem to work as well — and for me, they’re generally the bits where it deviates from “normality”. That glitchy middle eight seems wrong to me — but then, it does make that final chorus just glorious.
Tim: It also helps that the hook is fantastic. It seems really familiar – I don’t know if I’ve heard it before elsewhere or if I’ve just been listening to this a stupid number of times, but either way I like it.
Tom: You’ve almost certainly heard it before, although never quite in this form.
Tim: Ah, there it is.
Tom: Also, I have to mention the ludicrously pretentious lyrics. I’m not sure what else you could put there, though; somehow, I think generic lyrics about love would be worse. The fact the song works as an instrumental, though, is a testament to its strength.
Tim: Fans will be pleased to know that it’s been put right at the top of the Radio 2 playlist – quite how they’ll chop it down into a sensible-length radio edit I have no idea – so it’ll hopefully get quite a bit more attention than their other recent ones have, because it really deserves to.