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Pet Shop Boys Stand Up Against ID Cards The Pet Shop Boys unveiled details of their ultra-high tech futuristic video for new single Integral this week, which includes QR codes through which camera phones can pick up subliminal messages and links to websites including Liberty, political comedian Mark Thomas, and Skrufff.com. “The idea is that it’s sung from the point of view of the authoritarian New Labour-style government,” said PSB lead singer Neil Tennant on the inspiration behind the lyrics and the song’s accompanying Orwellian video. “’If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear’ is always used as a justification for ID cards. What we object to about ID cards is that they’re intelligent cards with a data strip that can link to a central database containing personal information, which may be shared with America; when you say you don’t want that, they always say that if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to hide. But I think we all have a right to privacy,” he suggested. “I feel it’s a move that suggests we have to justify ourselves to the state before the state will trust us, and I think it’s for us to trust the state and not the other way round. I think the government has to win our trust, not us win their trust,” Neil added. Film-makers the Rumpus Room revealed how they attracted the unwanted attention of British secret police when shooting ‘guerilla style’
footage for the video, at one point even being briefly detained. “We felt the tremendous pressure of being constantly watched and monitored; this just highlighted the issues that we were addressing within the narrative,” said Jeff Wood, one of the video’s three directors. “We were continually questioned and asked not to shoot using tripods during filming. Our growing paranoia climaxed when we were at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, the UK’s primary satellite spy station. After shooting for about twenty minutes, actually miles away from the station itself, we were stopped, apprehended, searched and photographed by special forces police. In the process of going through our car they helped themselves to the Jelly Babies that were stashed in the glove box. Apparently it’s ‘one of the perks of the job’,” he said. “We found ourselves staring directly into the face of the questions we were asking. When does state protection go too far?,” Jeff added, “What are we being protected from? And considering that we were never more then a crew of three why would our presence cause any fuss at all?” http://www.therumpusroom.tv/integral (see the video in full here) http://youtube.com/group/psbintegral (‘Create your own version of the Pet Shop Boys' new video, Integral . . .’) http://www.petshopboys.co.uk Article by Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com) Subscribe to Skrufff music newsletter at www.Skrufff.com
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