With “Always on My Mind”, Elvis Presley, in 1972, and the Pet Shop Boys, in 1987, make their mea culpa in love

2023-08-16 17:00:09
RCA VICTOR (SOURCE : DISCOGS.COM)

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Ten years after the death of Elvis Presley, the British channel ITV program, in 1987, a tribute show, “Love Me Tender”, inviting artists to cover one of the King’s successes. Synth-pop sensation of the time, the Pet Shop Boys are invited to choose their interpretation. The duo formed by singer Neil Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe was first tempted by a cover of Baby Let’s Play Houseessentially for the nod to house music that the title allows.

But this rockabilly, taken from the “fifties” repertoire of Elvis, is really too far from their aesthetic, combining dance and melancholy. The English then fell back on a hit from 1972, Always on My Mind, sentimental ballad from the Las Vegas period of the “king of rock’n’roll”, which, to the hopping rhythm of the machines, made such a strong impression on the show that the group released it as a single, soon to be number one in Great Britain. Brittany, but also in Germany, Spain and Sweden, before triumphing in the United States.

Co-written by Wayne Carson (composer of the hit The Lettersung by The Box Tops in 1967), Johnny Christopher and Mark James (who had previously provided Suspicious Minds to Presley), the song was first performed, in 1972, by two women: Brenda Lee, pioneer of women’s rock, and soul singer Gwen McCrae.

Piano languissant et dance music

But it is indeed Elvis who, the same year, will transform for the first time this mea culpa in love (of which we know today more than 300 versions) into an international success. Accompanied by a languid piano, strings and plaintive choirs, the power of incarnation of its crooning, regretting not having loved and treated as it should be the one to whom, however, « [il] kept thinking”, didn’t she vibrate from the experience of her marital disappointments? The singer actually records Always on My Mind in March 1972, a few weeks after his separation from his wife, Priscilla Presley.

Read our archive (2013): Article reserved for our subscribers Elvis Presley, the misunderstanding of America

Women or men (the title will become a hit again, in 1982, sung by Willie Nelson), the performers have until then highlighted their heterosexuality, specifying the sex – « girl » or « boy » – of their partner. Carried by the beats and synthesizers of the hi-NRG, a style then all the rage in European gay clubs, the version of the Pet Shop Boys plays with more ambiguity by saying nothing about the genre of the loved one.

As for the songs that had released its success in the mid-1980s (West End Girls, It’s a Sin…), the duo plays here on the contrast between festive dance music and distanced spleen. The melodramatic material and the “vegassian” kitsch of Elvis seventies are regenerated by the shrill frenzy of this neo-disco.

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