After what will probably go down as the worst week in the Bottom Feeders series, we crank it up a notch with some superstar artists and some really well-known songs. Here’s another week of artists whose names begin with the letter P, as we continue looking at songs that charted below #40 on the Billboard Hot 100 during the 1980s.
Pet Shop Boys
“Love Comes Quickly” — 1986, #62 (download)
“Suburbia” — 1986, #70 (download)
“Left to My Own Devices” — 1989, #84 (download)
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are awesome. If you’re unfamiliar with Pet Shop Boys, pick up PopArt: The Hits (2003) for a near-flawless retrospective of their career. What’s most amazing about that double album is that it’s not in sequential order, yet the ‘80s Pet Shop Boys sound still melds well with their new-millennium tunes. I admit, though, that I kind of lost track of them after their 1996 album Bilingual, even though I think that album is excellent. They are probably going to be my next “catalog” artist, where I have to own everything they put out (which can’t be easy with a dance-oriented duo like these guys, what with the million remixes and side projects). Both “Love Comes Quickly” and “Suburbia” are from their debut album, Please; “Left to My Own Devices” comes from their third studio album, Introspective.
