Heating up the soup - the Pet Shop Boys’ Hotspot

In my mum’s kitchen lurks a book which, I suspect, can be found lurking in many a British kitchen. It is The Dairy Book Of Home Management, a hefty tome containing all sorts of practical guidance on home life - from cookery tips to DIY. Its ‘general editor’ is one Neil Tennant, pre-Smash Hits, and better known to the rest of us for almost the last 40 years as one half of the Pet Shop Boys. Now, I’m not suggesting that Tennant, as the duo's chief lyricist, has taken the banality of domestic living into his pop career, but for all the giant silver hats, circus dancers and other emblems of arch ironic camp that the PSBs have displayed over the years, there has always been a marked understatement about them.

Indeed, think of the Pet Shop Boys and immediately you have a profile image of the tall, languid Tennant, standing in front of the shorter Chris Lowe, “the quiet one”, who has seemingly and quite happily taken a step back from his elder bandmate, stabbing away at a keyboard. And thus, 39 years after Tennant met Lowe in a Chelsea hi-fi shop and decided to make electronic music together, the Pet Shop Boys are back with their 14th album, Hotspot, and from one perspective you could argue that it’s more of the same: pulsating rhythms, a couple of cosy synth ballads, and Tennant’s distinctive vocals, set some way back in the mix, almost acting as a keyboard layer in themselves (and don’t just think of PSB material for this - Tennant’s voice was instrumental in Electronic’s Getting Away With It and Robbie Williams’ No Regrets). But such a statement belies two things: one, Tennant’s gift for lyrics that can be as matter-of-fact as guidance on putting up shelves earlier in his career, but at the same time convey wit, emotion and pathos; and two, Lowe’s gift for creating a vibe, be it a HiNRGhe club pulse or the soothing washes that first drew me to West End Girls.

With any music genre - be it rock, funk, R&B, whatever - repetition is inevitable. Signature cues, once established, come easily. It would be hard to receive a new album by the Rolling Stones anonymously and not know who you were listening too. Thus, the Pet Shop Boys provide the same familiarity with Hotspot, opening with Will O The Wisp’s immediately recognisable Euro disco and mildly saucy lyric. To be honest, I could do with fewer of these electronic anthems from the PSBs. They’ve done them for years and today musically they bring little new to their canon, even as perfectly good as they are, and as lyrically sharp. More interesting, more appealing, even, are the subtle shifts to something else. Burning The Heather - a song, simply, about a summer heath blaze Tennant witnessed - adds Bernard Butler’s guitars to give it a folky treatment; You Are The One is a ballad as lush as Rent, in which Tennant and Lowe apply their best combination of assets, Tennant’s voice as an instrument and Lowe’s orchestrated keyboard pads.

With Tennant now almost 66 and Lowe 60, there is a temptation to view some of Hotspot as nostalgic, but given the duo's historic anger at perceived ageism, lyrically, there is plenty on the album to be considered forward looking and fresh. Dreamland, a collaboration with Years & Years, is a bright and breezy piece of sumptuous pop music, while Monkey Business takes an electronic turn into Nile Rodgers territory. Irony, a word that surprises me has never been used in the PSBs’ history of single-word album titles, continues to run lasciviously through this album, with wry (and subtle) statements about the state of things, from Brexit to same-sex marriage. Indeed, now I think of it, much of this band’s 35 years of recorded music has been notably ironic. Ever-so gently, they’ve not taken themselves too seriously while producing some joyous music. Hotspot may not be their best, but on the other hand, there’s plenty on it to slot nicely into the overall library of 14 studio albums, most of which contribute justifiably to Tennant and Lowe being afforded national treasure status. And, while it might appear incongruous to see two men in their 60s still, effectively, mounting further celebration of the dancefloor, a brief aside: last week the 79-year-old ‘Godfather of Disco’, Georgio Moroder, was pictured DJing at a corporate event in Las Vegas. You’re never too old to boogie.

Watts app - Ben Watt's Fever Dream

Pressing play for the first time on Ben Watt's last album, Hendra, when it was released almost two years ago to the day, summer seemed to begin almost immediately.

Even though it covered heavy personal subjects, such as his mother's dementia and the death of his father, the record offered an antidote to the-then receding winter months. It's laid-back warmth - augmented by Bernard Butler's guitar and even on one song, a guest appearance by David Gilmour and his trippy pedal steel - became my go-to listen for the subsequent months. Pure sunshine in a CD, or whatever format it came on.

24 months on, Watt has, to a certain extent, repeated the experience with Fever Dream. And that, believe me, is a very good thing indeed. From start to finish, musically at least, another revitalising, Vitamin D-infused first blast of sun on the face after months of cold, wet, grey misery. Long may Watt, his writing and recording schedule, and his record company, keep these albums appearing in April.

Now, in positioning Fever Dream in this manner, don't think that it's all about, you know, just vibe. This certainly isn't one of those Buddha Bar compilations piped through the lobby of a hip boutique hotel. It is, though, as with its predecessor - and, actually, all the best material Watt and wife Tracey Thorn produced in Everything But The Girl - a highly accessible, automatically familiar, and totally agreeable collection of wonderfully dreamy songs, albeit with an edge. "We kept Hendra’s sonic template of open-tuned folk-jazz and distorted string-bent rock, and went for a new grainy intensity," Watt himself explains on his website. "We just did most of it live. Small room, small band. A harder edge. Instruments spilling into each other."

With Hendra separated from its predecessor North Marine Drive by almost 31 years (in mitigation he had been busy in the interim with EBTG and, like Thorn, becoming a very distinguished author) it, he says, opened up his creativity. Fever Dream is the result of that fertility: "I was simply deeply inspired by the Hendra experience, the reception, the months of touring, the rediscovery of my voice," Watt says. "I felt compelled to write more. They came in a burst at the beginning of last year. I feel I have somehow tapped into a nucleus of myself again lately. It feels urgent. From the source."

That source is, clearly, an urge to examine relationships, those to cherish, those to question and those to forget, encased in varying pitch of jazz and folk influences and even a West Coast, Laurel Canyon timbre. As Watt says, there are obvious tonal similarities to the previous album, with Butler once more deftly applying grungy, Neil Young-like guitar flourishes.

The mood is set by the woozily luscious opener Gradually and its line "Something about your love just got to me gradually/Like an autumn fire/A growing intensity" which comes pretty close for an intimate declaration to John Martyn's seminal "You curl around me like a fern in the spring". The next two songs, the title track and Between Two Fires (not to be confused with Zach Galifianakis and Between Two Ferns, hem hem...) clip along at a sprightly pace, the former comparable with the gentle pop of, say, Christopher Cross (not to be dismissed as merely AOR, either), with the latter musing on how "Sometimes love can last a lifetime/Other times it tires/I can not blame you now it's gone/We were caught between two fires", Butler's guitar squawking in the background to add a sense of unsettlement to the track. Both could enrich the soundtrack to driving a convertible up to Big Sur. But there is a ponderous undercurrent from which a darker hue emerges, calling into question the integrity of relationships and, perhaps, simply asking, in the words of this very blog, "Where are we now?".

This is not, however, a break-up record, or the precursor to one. The examination of relationships is observational and questioning, rather than cathartic or confessional, but it's to Watt's strength that he can lay such examinational lyrics over relatively simple, relaxing arrangements, themselves the result of uncomplicated interplay between Watt, Butler, bassist Rex Horan (to be heard on Laura Marling's work) and prolific session drummer Martin Ditcham, whose working relationship with Watt goes back to EBTG. Ditcham, in particular, provides the sort of cold, faded rhythms he contributed to Talk Talk's The Colour Of Spring - on Winter's Eve, mallets beat out a muted pattern on tom toms, but not to express a sad, year's end reflection, rather one of uplifting positivity at odds with the music behind it.

Mentioning John Martyn earlier (those who know me well will attest that I'll mention him at any opportunity...), part of my supreme enjoyment of this album stems from tracks like Faces Of My Friends, a combination of grace and danger and on which Watt could so easily be supplanted by the big man's whisky-soured drawl. On that front, it's worth noting how good Watt's vocals are on this album. He has never been blessed with a traditional lead singer's depth and spectrum - and that did show on Hendra. Maybe with confidence drawn from the previous album, throughout Fever Dream Watt conveys more heft, complimenting the music rather than trying to fit into it, blending into the bluesier aspects of Butler's guitar work as well.

That said, on the closing track, New Year Of Grace, he brings in Bostonian vocalist Marissa Nadler to add a vocal layer to a beautiful, sparse song that Watt's natural range might not have otherwise carried so well alone. Again, another example of tone and lyric providing reversible contrast, on this occasion the barely-there instrumentation delicately mixed into the background of a wistful lyric that cleverly and subtly acknowledges enduring love. And in being so unspectacular, it actually provides a spectacular ending to the album.

It's hard not to compare Fever Dream to its predecessor, if only because Watt invites such comparison. There is, though a clear progress between them, though. Whereas Hendra seemed to be an exploration of styles, its follow-up brims with even greater conviction, purpose and direction. It is the album that I can assure you, you'll want to be playing all summer long.