Old pop stars don't retire, they go digital

The first generation to have grown up listening to pop music is getting on now, so it's no surprise pop stars are also entering old age. On 8 January, his 66th birthday, David Bowie announced his first album for more than a decade, The Next Day - released last month. Its first single, Where Are We Now?, sounds deliberately frail, which many critics linked to Bowie's heart surgery in 2004, and references to Berlin sites from the Low heydays add to its poignancy.

If anything, the rest of the album bristles with the vigour of late-'80s outing Tin Machine, and a similar vitality can be found on Delta Machine - the 13th studio album in 33 years from Depeche Mode, whose band members' average age is 51. Pet Shop Boys - Neil Tennant (58) and Chris Lowe (53) - have revealed they'll be releasing their 12th studio album, Electric, in June. And French pop icon Etienne Daho, 57, has just announced new work and a series of concerts in Paris for next February.

Unlike the visual arts or writing, pop music is not known for creative longevity - it is traditionally a youngster's game, though pop musicians may go onto innovate in other fields: David Byrne has worked in film and theatre for more than 30 years; Pet Shop Boys premiered ballet The Most Incredible Thing in 2011 and scored Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin back in 2004; Patti Smith is noted as a writer and photographer, now.

While older artists may sound stupid aping new genres (Paul McCartney's the Fireman, anyone?), musicians like Bowie and Radiohead have been quick to grasp the opportunities afforded by new technologies - notably digital release - which may go some way to explaining their current, prolific output. Secure of their fan base, Pet Shop Boys will release Electric through Kobalt Label Services - which released Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Push the Sky Away in February - barely nine months after their last, Elysium.

In the concert arena, however, women lead the way, as evidenced by Blondie, Joan Jett and Laurie Anderson - or take this year's Meltdown on the South Bank (14-23 June), tickets for which go on sale this week. The 80-year-old Yoko Ono has selected Siouxsie, Marianne Faithfull and Patti Smith among her line-up. Who said girl power's dead?

Five great pop b-sides

1. Pet Shop Boys - After the event (/Did you see me coming?, 2009)

I've written about this track before: it's one of the best things Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have ever recorded. One of many great moments for a group rightly lauded for their b-sides.

2. New Order - 1963 (/True Faith, 1987)

To a lovely the tune, the lyrics are said to posit a scenario in which John F Kennedy arranges for a hitman to kill his wife Jackie so he can continue his affair with Marilyn Monroe. The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, famously takes out the wrong target, provoking a further spiral of violence. Splendid, if bonkers.

3. Erasure - La La La (/Love to Hate You, 1991)

The peak of the British synth duo's art came with two consecutive albums in 1989 and 1991: Wild! and Chorus respectively. This song captures all the joy of the former with the analogue sounds of the latter - huge fun, it opens with a sample of what sounds like Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares.

4. Depeche Mode - Dangerous (/Personal Jesus, 1989)

The first single from the Basildon's foursome's best album had a suitably slinky companion - you can hear why it didn't fit into Violator's running order but it's great stuff nonetheless. Other b-sides from the album's singles veered towards the apocalyptic with portentous instrumentals Memphisto (/Enjoy the Silence) and Kaleid (/Policy of Truth).

5. The Divine Comedy - My Lovely Horse (/Gin Soaked Boy, 1999)

Neil Hannon had always given the impression this spoof Eurovision track written for Channel 4's hit comedy series Father Ted - to which The Divine Comedy contributed the theme tune - would never be released but, presumably when things got a bit desperate career-wise, out it came. Try delivering these lines with a straight face: 'My lovely horse, you're a pony no more/ Running around with a man on your back, like a train in the night'. Do also check out the band's splendid Michael Nyman covers on the back of singles Generation Sex and The Certainty of Chance (both 1998).

Related: the five best electropop albums ever

The five best electropop albums, ever

I thought about calling this post 'Was 1990 the best year for electropop, ever?' but two choices fluffed it up.

There used to be an argument that an era's defining music came at its midpoint - so, for the 1980s, that came with Live Aid, for the '90s some might say it was Definitely Maybe. Others, though, manage to be ahead of the curve, setting out to define a decade, and beyond, from its start…

1. Behaviour, Pet Shop Boys (1990)

You won't be surprised I've put this first. For their fourth album of original material, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant decided to return to working with a single producer for the first time since their debut, Please (1986). The duo decamped to Harold 'Axel F' Faltermeyer's Munich home studio, where afternoons were spent sampling the former Giorgio Moroder-programmer's draught beer; in contrast with much contemporary pop built on digital samples, they would use analogue synths. From opener Being boring through to closing number Jealousy (the first song the Boys wrote together) it's uniformly brilliant, with the sole exception of How can you expect to be taken seriously? (later paired as a single with their cover of Where the streets have no name/ Can't take my eyes off you). While Being boring was the group's lowest charting single up to that point it's become a live favourite, heralded by that funky, skittish intro; Behaviour also produced my favourite PSB single, So hard, and some of their best lyrics: 'Tell me why don't we try/ Not to break our hearts and make it so hard for ourselves?'

2. Violator, Depeche Mode (1990)

This is a remarkable album, most notable for singles Enjoy the Silence (with its iconic video) and Personal Jesus (covered by Johnny Cash) but boasting many other great tracks. I was intrigued to read that Pet Shop Boys used Violator as a benchmark for Behaviour. Like that album, Violator makes a lowkey start, with another single, World in My Eyes; producer Flood (who had previously worked on such electro classics as Erasure's The Circus and Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine) immediately sets out the album's very precise sound, typified on Halo, Waiting for the Night, Blue Dress and Clean. I wonder if it's a template the band have tried to replicate for their more recent albums, though without such strong songwriting (or bass, it can sometimes feel). It works best in its use of nuanced vocals and percussive noise, giving way to brushes and guitars for one of my favourite tracks, The Sweetest Perfection, the rockier Personal Jesus - and then there's Enjoy the Silence. The Mode have never been better.

3. Technique, New Order (1989)

Whereas a couple of the albums here

- Behaviour and Chorus -

sport a deliberately retro manifesto that means they still almost sound futurist, Technique was both ahead and very much of its time. I would have sworn it was released after Behaviour and Violator though it hasn't aged quite so well. Pet Shop Boys are well-known for underpinning great pop songs with contemporary club tropes (Can you forgive her? from 1993's Very album springs to mind, the only pop song I know whose title is taken from a novel by Trollope), but the only album other than Technique I can think of that so absorbs dance culture successfully in a pop idiom is The Beloved's Happiness (1990, natch). New Order harnessed the acid house boom and the Manchester foursome immersed themselves in the Balearic scene (the album was partly recorded in Ibiza), while managing to preserve Peter Hook's distinctive basslines (All the Way) and their own roots (Love Less). Round & Round prefigures True Faith while stand-out opener Fine Time includes those bleating sheep samples prevalent in the ambient scene. Great lines, too: 'Hey, sophisticated lady... You've got love technique'.

4. Chorus, Erasure (1991)

Erasure followed the massive success of the gloriously OTT Wild! (1989) - featuring Drama!, Blue Savannah and Star - with the back-to-basics approach espoused by Pet Shop Boys' Behaviour. The opening, title, track is all bleeps, bloops and burrs, in service of a tremendous pop song; catchier still is Love to Hate You, which has the audacity to open with a crowd going wild(!) and harks back to some of the greatest, campest, disco classics. All the artists here are fascinated with remixes but Erasure chose some of the oddest collaborators to rework the singles from this album, notably for the Am I Right EP (including The Grid, below, and tremendous Warp-ers LFO). Since then, the duo's output has been somewhat patchy, which may have lead critics to miss out on the unrivalled songcraft of I Say I Say I Say (1994), Erasure (1995) and Nightbird (2005).

5. Electric Head, The Grid (1990)

Another duo, making quite a different sound. I wouldn't say the debut album by Dave Ball (ex of Soft Cell) and Richard Norris is underrated, instead underknown. I hesitated between the aforementioned Happiness and Electronic's self-titled debut for this slot but Electric Head is hugely influential. The Grid did become more poppy in successive albums 456 (1992) and Evolver (1994) but this has many mindblowing, sampler-delic moments: A Beat Called Love, This Must Be Heaven, Intergalactica and Dr Celine. Floatation, their first single, is the band at its most blissed out and serene, and makes a fine pairing with The Beloved's The Sun Rising (the two bands shared a record label, EastWest).

Related: Three more great electro albums, 1994-2003

Probably the best pop group in the world?

I'm sure that most of my friends, if asked, would say that my favourite band is either Pet Shop Boys or Depeche Mode. There's something about the former's clever lyrics or the synthesiser sounds of the latter that represent all the things I look for in pop music.

But one of my favourite pop groups is a little-known bunch of Scandinavians that split up 10 years ago. My friends, if asked, would no doubt say this is typical of me, just me being difficult, and pretentious.

It was thanks to the Pet Shop Boys that Gangway first came to my attention – and maybe even yours. It was the summer of 1988 and the Pet Shop Boys were standing in for DJ Simon "Our Tune" Bates on his mid-morning Radio 1 show and most days they played a new single called My Girl and Me by a group called Gangway.

My Girl and Me is a jaunty three-minute number with an insistent, chugging beat, some very tight string arrangements, and what sounds like an oboe in the background. Fine, a rare but deservedly Top 20 tune, you might think. But the song is made all the more interesting by its unusual lyrics: instead of stage-show jollity, My Girl and Me is a rather bleak, abusive, alcoholic romance.

"At night you know that I will find you/It's been the same way for three years/I know every bar in this town/I just have to find the right one," sings an unadorned male voice. And this is the chorus: "My girl and me/We hang around in bars/And we're usually drunk/But never too drunk to fight/Like cats and dogs all night."

The only other group doing something similar lyrically at the time was Furniture (barely remembered for their own three-minute wonder, Beautiful Mind), who came up with such pearls as: "The one who wants me, I don't want/The one I want, don't want to know." Two years later Pet Shop Boys released my favourite single of theirs, So Hard, with the wonderful couplet: "I'm always hoping you'll be faithful/But you're not I suppose/We've both given up smoking/'cause it's fatal/So whose matches are those?"

That's not all, though. My Girl and Me manages to squeeze in a quote from the Bible, verbatim. That scans. With the full reference. "Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging/And whomsover is deceived thereby is not wise/Proverbs, Chapter 20, Part 4: Warnings and instructions." It's all there, I've checked.

I won't say the usual things about pearls before swine, media attention (though the NME was especially positive, describing the sound as Pet Shop Boys meets Madness!), the charts or their record company; the single tanked and that would have been the last I heard of Gangway but for a fortuitous trip to Paris one year later, in 1989. In the big, new Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysées I found the album from which My Girl and Me was taken. As far as I know, Sitting in the Park was never released in the UK, so this was a stroke of luck.

The album, which became the soundtrack for an 18-year-old's Parisian adventure, is notable for its inversion of the boy meets girl, girl and boy live happily ever after theme. Contrast simply the titles of Madness's bestselling It Must Be Love with This Can't Be Love ("And if you ever leave me/I would feel as sad and lonely/As Mr Carter when he arranged that mission in Iran/And everything that could go wrong went wrong"). Out on the Rebound from Love, a great putative radio single, could just as well be titled I've Finally Found Some Love – it scans – but isn't.

A perfunctory second attempt at success came a couple of years later with single Biology, alongside a positive reference to the album from which it came, The Quiet Boy Ate the Whole Cake (1991), in a review of another band in Time Out. It was only with the development of the internet that I was able to find out more about this band.

Cut forward a few years and a quick Lycos search calls up a rather wonderful (English-language, like the band) website: That's Gangway. And by then it was Gangway, as they had split up. But what a wealth of material they left behind: six other albums on top of the one I already had (including an earlier version of that same album), as well as a greatest hits compilation, Compendium. The FAQ section ("Everything you always wanted to know about Gangway but were afraid to ask") told me who the trio were (songwriter and guitarist Henrik Balling, lead singer Allan Jensen and keyboard player Torben Johansen), how many drummers they had (four), and how many record companies they had been with (again four).

There's a huge section of their lyrics, which became like prose poems to me. There are strange songs like Belgian Lovers, where the narrator, provoked to find out more about the horrors of war, is thwarted by petty bureaucracy: "Belgian lovers standing tall in the fields of Flanders/Belgian lovers take a fall in the house of horrors/I went straight to my local library/Read a book and asked for some help/No one seemed to really care/I got mad and I yelled at them/With no luck and that made me sad/'Cause we pay a lot of tax." He finishes: "Oh how it frightens me/How little we all know/Of Flemish history."

There's the dry humour of the stand-up at work here: "I really hate those pins/That they leave in new shirts/'Cause you never get them all" (Nothing's the Matter); "I think I'll buy some new CDs/And watches without warranties/'Cause they'll never break" (Think of Spain).

Among the whimsy is some lovely use of English idiom: "You make me sick/You're such a prick" (Don't Ask Yourself); "I'm a fairly quiet guy but I like to laugh and that's okay/But when I'm laughing I look just like a twat… Just the other day I went to a concert on my own/I forgot to read the programme and I felt so alone/All they played was an overture by some Russian git" (She Keeps Telling Jokes).

But what did these songs sound like? I already had a clue from the single Biology that since Sitting in the Park the band had moved further towards using synths and programming. I went to Boxman, a music site at the time that had a branch in Denmark, and ordered all seven albums.

According to the That's Gangway site, debut album The Twist (1984) was "the first Danish record with English lyrics that sold over 10,000 copies in Denmark". Surprisingly, considering the Pet Shop Boys/Madness comparisons, the album sounds more like The Smiths. The influence of Morrissey on the vocals is telling, though the first indication of the clear, unforced style Jensen takes up from then comes on a short, faux nightclub number, The Idiot. (The song's entire lyrics are: "I'm an idiot, I'm a fool/Because love has me wrapped around her little finger/And I don't know if that's good").

The group's most popular album, Happy Ever After, includes the surprisingly frivolous Mountain Song (Denmark's seventh bestselling single of that year); a near sell-out (domestic) tour followed and four Danish Grammys, in February 1993 (Best Danish Band, Best Danish Songwriter, Best Danish Rock Album and Best Danish Music Video). A darker fifth album confirms Balling's songwriting ability, as well as including some numbers by his bandmates, but seems surprisingly lacklustre. It's called Optimism.

The band saved the best for last. That's Life was recorded in four weeks in London during the winter of 1996 and features many songs I've already mentioned: Nothing's the Matter, Belgian Lovers, She Keeps Telling Jokes and Think of Spain. The other tracks are equally worthy of note; there's both a poignancy and almost viciousness at play here, a last throw of the dice – this is all and nothing.

The impression the band quit on a peak is confirmed by two new numbers on 1998's valedictory Compendium. Much as Gangway employed unexpected, heavy hip hop beats on The Quiet Boy… so on track Don't Trust Me Balling's lyrics are underpinned by drum'n'bass programming. You've got to love a band whose final track on their last album is called Goodbye. (The track is full of advice: "Leaving your girlfriend is always a pain/She'll be upset and you'll be just the same/But to make things more easy, don't say a thing/Just pack your bags, leave without saying goodbye." It's set to a disco beat.)

I now possessed their complete oeuvre and could gauge their full achievement: here were a very, very good band with a back catalogue to match any pop group you could name – sustained over a period of time – who stopped at the highpoint of their career, not commercially but certainly artistically. (Which begs a question: can a proper pop group ever separate success and artistic achievement?) There was only one thing for it: to go to Denmark and track down this band they called Gangway. But that's for another (hopefully shorter) post…