“End” seems to be the word that most accurately sums up the motif of Pet Shop Boys’ forthcoming fourteenth studio album. For it’s even the end of an enduring partnership that began in 2013 with Electric, which found PSB teaming with producer Stuart Price (who first rose to prominence as Les Rhytmes Digitales and then as a key producer on Madonna’s 2005 Confessions on a Dance Floor). Lending his beat expertise to what would turn out to be a trilogy (with 2016’s Super in between) of albums, culminating in what will be 2020’s Hotspot, Price has naturally produced their second single from the record (following the border-free fantasy called “Dreamland” featuring Years & Years), “Burning the Heather.”
With its lamenting pace and baleful syncopations, a rueing Neil Tennant provides vocals that seem to cast a glance not only to the fact that he and Chris Lowe cannot ignore that the sands of time are quickly sieving through the hourglass (the former being sixty-five, the latter sixty), but also to the apogee of Brexit, and all it would (and will–surely, at some point, when it actually happens) entail for those not in the “rich remainers” category. Thus, the evocative image of what it means to burn the heather, a ritual that comes with the advent of a shifting season, provides a close-up lens on the end of an era, and the dawning of a new one (in which some from the old won’t live to see).
Also present on the track is Suede alum Bernard Butler on guitar, offering an added layer to the notion of aging men yearning for a time when the heather was still new and fresh, not ready to soon be burned for a fresh batch of shrubbery to grow and flourish (though how can anything really flourish in the present climate?). One that the animals of Europe’s–nay, England’s–moorlands can feast from so as to obtain a higher level of nutrients than that which can be gleaned from day old bread, so to speak. With a tinge of ominousness, so it is that Tennant semi-drones, “Seasons are changing/Time’s moving along/Give me a drink and I’ll be gone.”
Seeming to speak also for a nation that can no longer recognize itself, its ideals or where it’s supposed to be headed with such rudderlessness, Tennant adds, “Waking from a nightmare/Hoping I could find the middle of nowhere/I’m a stranger in this town/But that’s as far as it goes, and where I am bound no one knows.” A large bulk of English denizens would tend to agree as they watch their own government burn the heather that’s, to be honest, still perfectly viable in favor of not knowing quite what’s going to crop up in the place of the old canopy.
Well, the rich know that one way or the other, they’ll profit, leaving Britain’s largely working class population nary even an extra shilling for their necessary drinking habit. In contrast to, say, Boris Johnson, Tennant asserts, “I’m not one of those bread-heads/Always pounds, shillings and pence-ing/There’s a few things I need.” One of them, perhaps, being, as stated in 1986, a lover. But there are so few of those left anymore when it’s all scrounging and scavenging to turn some money into a little more, giving way to the scapegoat mentality of anti-immigration sentiment. Hence, Tennant’s final mournful and overtly cutting line, “And if you’ve enough room I’ll consider staying.” He’d likely be among the few still willing when it comes to that fuddy-duddy island, where all the heather is about to be burned in 2020.
