Doing Diddly Squat: Misha Singer has chosen her five favourite Pet Shop Boys singles

She’s a Singer. Doo-doo-doo-who? If you haven’t heard of her before, Misha Singer is her name, and her vocation. Not only that, but she’s just released a Pet Shop Boys song you almost certainly haven’t heard before. It’s a cracker.

Misha Stradějová was born in “the mid 1980s” in what is now the Czech Republic, moved to the outskirts of Stuttgart in Southern Germany as a child and, like her mother, married a local fellow, hence her married name Singer. Though the singing came way before wedlock, having turned professional when she was 15, her first English language record arrived in 2019 with a gutsy cover of Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born showstopper, Shallow.

Talking of voices, Celine Dion “is a huge idol”, and Misha’s a bit of a big lunged diva sort herself — though rather than an endless stream of power ballads she prefers to operate within the realms of dance music, a genre she knows all too well. She likes to listen to Cascada, Snap, Lasgo and La Bouche… and her brand new single, Diddly Squat, has been co-written by none other than electronic pop royalty the Pet Shop Boys.

In the English vernacular, if you want to use a quaint and dismissive slang expression to describe a small, worthless or non existent amount, you would say “diddly-squat”, I kid you not.

Getting titular, as renowned lovers of idioms, the celebrated pop twosome used Diddly Squat as an off the cuff placeholder name for an unfinished track they had begun at Fawnlees Hall, Neil Tennant’s then home studio in County Durham, during sessions for their guitar-based Release album in March 2001. It’s a virtually instrumental track with no lyrics aside from a single refrain sung by Neil, “And there she goes.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0OilYvnZIohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41phDMy040khttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKCy9pTv65w