"Can You Forgive Her?" (1993)

[listen]

Let’s talk about Very, the fifth album by the Pet Shop Boys. It came along late in 1993, off the highs of their imperial phase in the late ‘80s, when they were giving away songs and producing albums by the likes of Liza Minnelli and Dusty Springfield. It’s the follow-up to what is actually probably their most introspective album, Behaviour. The Pet Shop Boys drolly claimed Very, and it was billed, all quite tongue in cheek, as their “disco” and/or “anti-rock” album. Indeed, there they are on this first song noticing someone rejected for love because “you dance to disco and you don’t like rock”—although that is also pretty much the last explicit note on the theme for the rest of the album. Very is the last album before slumping down into second-tier levels with Bilingual. But I say all their albums, even Fundamental and Elysium, are generally worth looking into, and please do. However it happened, Very turned out to be not just my favorite Pet Shop Boys album but one of my favorite albums of all time, particularly in the limited early release version that included an extra disc, a dance party EP dubbed Relentless, a raspberry-beret counterpart to the main album’s orange crush. This might be a good place to say I like the colorful, Fear of Music-style textured approach to the album packages almost as much as I don’t like the videos and their dunce cap themes. In the usual mysterious gossipy way, Relentless came to be considered in some circles as “the Chris Lowe album,” suggesting by implication that Very and maybe the other albums are Neil Tennant products. It’s all nonsense, probably a joke propagated by the Pet Shop Boys themselves, but we’ll get to that too. They called this collector’s edition release Very Relentless and I found it was a ride worth taking pretty much on a daily basis for a couple of years, even with grunge crashing and raining down all around me, dutifully listening track by track in sequence order all the way through. Some days, Relentless might lend itself to shuffle. What else can I say to tell you much I loved it and still do? Don’t make me go into the personal events of my life at the time. Let’s just take this thing track by track, in as cool and dispassionate a way as possible.

“Can You Forgive Her?” is the entry point of Very—for what it’s worth, one of their most distinct uses ever of gender-identifying pronouns. Their favorite dodge was a good one, with the singer tending to directly address “you.” But what else is to be done when you’re using the title of a 19th-century novel by Anthony Trollope to claim disco’s ascendancy over rock? (It turned out to be hip hop’s ascendancy, at least in the US, but I think they got the timing right.) The Pet Shop Boys had wanted to make “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing” the first single from the album but the label went for this instead—not sure how it affected the album sequencing, which was increasingly less important in 1993 anyway with CDs and the growing popularity of shuffle. “Go West,” the second single, turned out to be the biggest hit from the album, but “Can You Forgive Her?” did respectably too, reaching #1 in the US on a Billboard Dance Club Songs chart and #10 on a Billboard Alternative Airplay chart (note: the era of splintering senseless categories will never end). I loved “Can You Forgive Her?” just for being the start of the album, but it was also throwing certain darts on target, with interesting rhyme structures: “you’re in love and it feels like shame / because she’s gone and made a fool of you in public again / you’re in love and it feels like pain / because you know there’s too much truth in everything she claims.” You don’t have to be in the closet to make those words resonate although that is basically what the song is about. These lines are offset by one of the surprises of humor on Very in the line about disco and rock—“she's made you some kind of laughing stock / because you dance to disco and you don't like rock”—which still seems funny to me. In fact, humor is one of the secret weapons of this album, notably also seen in “Dreaming of the Queen” and “Go West.” On the Further Listening package, Tennant notes “Can You Forgive Her?” is in 6/8 time, which he says “makes it sneaky. It’s got a sneaky quality to it and that may have inspired some of the words.” “Sneaky” might be exactly right—the whole album sneaked up on me, actually, and this is where it starts. Tennant also notes, “It’s not an autobiographical song. I’ve never been in that situation, and I’ve never had sex behind a bicycle shed.”