Belgium: a state of mind

In 1995, actor, author and Twitter fiend Stephen Fry walked out of the West End production in which he was starring, Simon Gray’s Cell Mates. Nobody knew where he had gone but it turned out that he had taken a ferry to Belgium; on his return to the UK he was diagnosed as bipolar. A couple of years ago, Fry revealed that just before his disappearance he had tried to kill himself.

I'm off to Belgium this weekend and it occurs to me that the country conjures a particular mindset in English-language writers. The most recent manifestation of this is the brilliantly funny In Bruges, when two assassins, Ray (Colin Farrell, channelling Father Dougal) and Ken, hide out in the city after Ray accidently kills a child. "I didn't even know where Bruges fucking was," Ray notes in the film's introductory voiceover. "It's in Belgium." (Nor is he impressed when they get there: "If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn't, so it doesn't.")

David Mitchell's accordion-like 2004 masterpiece Cloud Atlas features in its six tales the correspondence of a young musician, Robert Frobisher, who has fled to work with a composer in the Belgian countryside. Thirtysomething Edward Manners is another gay character who flees to Flanders – in Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star (1994) – for escape and, possibly, redemption. There’s a sense that in Belgium a person may lose himself and become grounded; by ferry from England it's the first landfall of the European continent. None of these figures take Eurostar or the plane to Belgium (I don't think it's specified how Ken and Ray get there).

In Bruges's Ray contemplates killing himself to atone for his act: "I will have always have killed that little boy. That isn't ever going away. Unless, maybe, I go away." As Stephen Fry showed, in Belgium it needn't come to that. To misquote Virginia Woolf in The Hours: "If it is a choice between Belgium and death, I choose Belgium." I am taking Eurostar.

Dyer straits

It reads like a quote from the cover of one of his books: Geoff Dyer is the type of writer whose work you want to press onto loved ones or, better still, lovers. My best mate apparently gauges his friends by their response to John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany (LOTS OF UPPER CASE TEXT); you don't expect people to have read Dyer but you want to pass his books on, as a reflection of you, and so much the better if people like him.

Another friend recently received a signed copy of Dyer's latest, Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi, from her new boyfriend. I urged his books onto a girlfriend; I may have hoped that they would come back to me, in a sense, if our book collections were joined, as we were, but things didn't turn out that way.

As someone who has written on photography (The Ongoing Moment), war memorials (The Missing Of The Somme) and jazz and photography (But Beautiful), it's been a while since Dyer has produced what is nominally a novel. You'll have gathered that Dyer is not someone who sticks to one genre; he skips from one the subject to the next, usually finishing a book as he grasps its topic.

In his fiction, you can replace "subject" with "place": The Colour Of Memory, The Search and Paris Trance are all steeped in their setting, as is this latest. The punning of the title continues through its first half, which features a skinny art critic called Jeff who travels to Venice to cover the Biennale. The city defies original description, so Geoff describes the art, the art world (perhaps in a little too much detail) and the sex Jeff has there. Dyer's familiar foibles are here: U-boats (Paris Trance, I think), being pissed on (Paris Trance, again, I think) and women's anuses (erm, Paris Trance?).

As well as a great critique of Tom Hanks' movies, Dyer also offers a form of raison d'etre for his own unique voice: "People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened… It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories, case histories; what happened – what actually happened and what you thought happened – would be enough."

The book's second half, also familiarly, is essentially travelogue: an unnamed first person narrator travels to Varanasi in India, which has been namechecked as a possible destination in the first part. There are other connections as well as the watery settings (both starting with V) notwithstanding; both Jeff and this narrator are described as looking like monkeys when they eat bananas.

Breakdown is another familiar motif for Dyer, whether in Detroit (Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It) or on the beach in Mexico (Out Of Sheer Rage, his excellent DH Lawrence book). As in the latter, "I's" collapse here is brought on by drugs but it's probably the most consummate of Dyer's finales; it is, as a cover blurb might have it, a triumph.

Hamer time

Another new film that features an older man (see Il divine Sorrentino, below) as its subject is O'Horten, starring Baard Owe (The Kingdom I & II). Bent Hamer's film has touches of Roy Andersson, Aki Kaurismäki and Lasse Hallström's My Life As A Dog and is very highly recommended (it's out from May 8).

The best sequenced electropop album – ever!

Having mentioned the terrible track sequence on Pet Shop Boys' Fundamental album, I thought I'd put together a compilation of some of the best electropop songs with each track in the same spot as on the album from which it comes, if you see what I mean (beginning to regret this already)…

1 Fine Time, New Order (from Technique)

2 Your Love Takes Me Higher, The Beloved (Happiness)

3 I've Been Losing You, A-ha (Scoundrel Days)

4 Patience of a Saint, Electronic (Electronic)

5 Neon Lights, Kraftwerk (The Man Machine)

6 Enjoy the Silence, Depeche Mode (Violator)

7 So Hard, Pet Shop Boys (Behaviour)

8 L'enfer enfin, Etienne Daho (Eden)

9 Voyager, Momus (Voyager)

10 Yesterday, When I Was Drunk, Gangway (Sitting in the Park – Again)

Hmm, might be worth a listen/tweak.

Europop etc

Following on from the use of Trio's Da Da Da at the close of Il Divo, there's a lovely moment towards the end of In the City of Sylvia where the barmaid in the student theatre café at the centre of José Luis Guerín's beautiful film hums along to Desireless' Voyage Voyage. (One of the best uses of an '80s pop song on a film's soundtrack recently is OMD's Enola Gay in Waltz With Bashir, which is out now on DVD if you missed it.)

If there's a very minor revival of brilliant '80s Europop going on at the moment, it's confirmed by the best track on Pet Shop Boys' new album, Yes. The Way It Used To Be riffs on the same synth pipe sounds as Voyage Voyage, with some delicate guitar oddly not from collaborator Johnny Marr, creating a moment of real poignancy among the pop clichés of the rest of the album. It's up there with probably one of the best Europop tracks of two decades ago, Words, by FR David, who is commemorated in an eponymous art journal from bonkers Dutch publisher De Appel. It bears the epigram, "Words, don't come easy," of course.

The Way It Used To Be and the few other standout songs on Yes were all co-written with producers Xenomania (the others being single Love etc and the break in More Than a Dream that's pure Belinda Carlisle; to which I would add track Pandemonium, which has something of Xenomania's verve). The production team were either locked out of the studio for the other tracks, couldn't be bothered, or PSB's songwriting isn't up to the match (see Girls Aloud's dreary The Loving Kind, which is The Other Two's Tasty Fish but not as tasty).

The experiment does work, however, on double-CD release Yes etc, which features a second disc of instrumental remixes. PSB have released companion discs to albums before - Fundamentalism was a non-starter, Relentless a fire-starter. This kicks in with a great new track, This Used to Be the Future, featuring Phil Oakey, and bounces along very happily indeed for the following six dub versions.

On Yes etc, PSB do what they do best, something they don't do on Yes itself: create great pop using today's sounds without reverting to cliché ("I wanna live like beautiful people/Give like beautiful people"; "This is a song about boys and girls/You hear it playing all over the world"; "Do you believe heaven is a better place?/We'll be there in a heartbeat." Cripes). I'll forgive them if The Way It Used To Be does herald an '80s Europop revival, however small.

PS PSB quote themselves on that great moment in More Than a Dream: "Driving through the night…" Used to be so exciting, we might add.

UPDATE For another great Europop film finale, check out Jessica Hausner's Lourdes.

Il divine Sorrentino

I always thought director Paulo Sorrentino was an old – or middle-aged – man, mainly because the subjects of his films The Consequences of Love and The Family Friend are older men. His latest, Il Divo, about Italian politician Giulio Andreotti, is no different.

Il Divo opens with a swaggering sequence of assassinations that's up there with the boulder-rolling start to Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast. Anyone who thinks The Baader Meinhof Complex glamourises terrorist killing is in for a shock. The film finishes as one of the most stunning character assassinations you'll see in cinema.

No less stylish is Sorrentino's treatment of his ageing leading man Toni Servillo, who also starred in The Consequences (as well as last year's arthouse hit, Gomorrah). Sorrentino is something of a car fetishist – some of his best sequences feature autos in tunnels – and he films his star as if he were the subject of a car ad, or a new electric shaver in a commercial.

This is quite an accomplishment as Servillo plays Andreotti as Nosferatu, hunched and shrouded (in The Consequences he was more deadpan Bilko); Giacomo Rizzo was truly grotesque as moneylender Geremia de Geremei in The Family Friend. Not that Sorrentino doesn't like his beautiful women: Olivia Magnani in The Consequences; an entire girls volleyball team for the opening of The Family Friend, and Fanny Ardant in Il Divo.

Il Divo has those flashy captions favoured by JJ Abrams, as well as an astounding sound design. Amid a typically cool soundtrack, Sorrentino's use of a couple of Italo pop tracks at crucial moments stands out – as did those cheesy, emotive songs you're more likely to hear in an Italian seaside discotheque, or a particularly patriotic restaurant, in Gomorrah, where there was no other musical soundtrack. And then Sorrentino caps it with Trio's Da Da Da. You don't get that in many political biographies, especially ones that start with a glossary.

Anticipation

The campaign for Pet Shop Boys' new product is well underway and I can't wait. The Pet Shop Boys have a reputation as being top smart operators on the pop scene but if that were true, well, they wouldn't have produced the album Nightlife or single I get along.

What they are very good at is writing their own history; Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are so eloquent, so engaged in pop, that it is very easy for them to sell the latest version of themselves to journalists. (Has any other pop band annotated so many of their sleeves or collaborated on a couple of books?) It's perfectly acceptable to change your mind in life, but PSB are so doctrinal – try b-side How I learned to hate rock'n'roll; the same period produced another b-side, Disco potential – that they often leave themselves rewriting the past. (The debate over the use of guitars is something like the schism between Jean-Paul Sartre and his existentialist mates when Sartre supported Communism in the face of irrefutable evidence of Soviet penal camps. Sort of.)

They're pulling out all the stops for the release of Yes, their tenth studio album proper (though you might be tempted to throw in a couple of the Disco albums for good measure, namely Disco and Disco 3). There's been the Brits and the video for jaunty first single Love etc on YouTube as well as on the duo's official website, where there have been regular postings on release dates, formats, reviews, interviews and now a medley of the album. I even bought the Mail on Sunday to get a first hearing of another of the new album's tracks, Did you see me coming? (I suspect the band justify such a move not just in terms of reaching a large audience, but having slipped them a saucy, punny title.)

It's been a long time since I've been as excited by a new PSB single (lately its their b-sides that tend to kick loose); it reminds me of the anticipation I felt when Can you forgive her? was released. It would be quite something if Yes matches the album that followed that single, Very.

Pet Shop Boys work best with a single producer (or on their own); it's unlikely they – or anyone else for that matter – will better Behaviour, with Harold Faltermeyer. Very comes close and its successor Bilingual contains some of their best latterday songwriting but is often harshly overlooked (the odd tweak, most notably by Trouser Enthusiasts, was needed to brush the tunes up to best effect). Nightlife is best overlooked and Release is half good, if you remove the half with, eurgh, guitars.

I suspect that I, and others, championed the last album, Fundamental, because we wanted it to be good. It was produced by Trevor Horn (who also produced one of Pet Shop Boys' greatest single moments, Left to my own devices). Fundamental features Human League-style vocals, New Order basslines and, erm, Trevor's horns but, for some inexplicable reason, the band decided to change the tracklisting just before release. The songs on Fundamental sound better in any other order than the one they're in. Bloody Communists.

Love etc and Did you see me coming? hint at a band happy with the world, rather than at odds with it. Maybe that's why the album is called Yes. We'll see on March 23.