They prepare to meet the gathering in the hospitality area. (...) Outside—to the sound of Erasure, which is someone’s idea of suitable music for Pet Shop Boys party—they walk straight into Axl Rose, who turns out to be unfailingly friendly and sweet. They had assumed that he couldn’t have known much about them, but the first thing he says is, “Gorgeous show—why didn’t you do Being boring?”

(...)

He proceeds to rave about the show—“that was so cool, My October symphony, when they don’t ever sing”—and says that liking them is becoming a shared secret in his world. “I phoned up the singer of Nine Inch Nails and I said, ‘What’s that you’re listening to?’ and he said, ‘Oh, er, it’s the Pet Shop Boys.’” He tells me he plays Behaviour in the car and his friends say, “What are you trying to make me like now...?” Then he tells me that there’s something in common between My October symphony and this song he’s struggling with in the studio at the moment, a song called November rain. But his favourite song on Behaviour is Being boring. “That bit about the seventies and the nineties. I can certainly relate to that, because I left home too...”

In fact, Axl wasn’t the only one requesting Being boring, as evidenced on another page of the book:

And then when I was singing Being boring I suddenly felt quite... almost tearful, singing the bit about “all the people I was kissing, some are here and some are missing” because of course Rosemary was in the audience. Actually I always find that song... actually Katie Kissoon said afterwards “that song always makes me want to cry,” and Abbey says that she’s always nearly in tears listening to it from the lighting desk. But that night, for some reason, because Rosemary was there... It made me think of Christopher being dead and... I don’t know, I find it very sad, singing it.

“Shall we play Being boring?”, suggests Neil.

“Let’s,” Chris agrees.

“That’s in the show,” Neil points out, “in a controversial new version.”

“It’s a pretty song,” she says.

“It was a pretty song,” Chris says. “We’ve done it in the style of Limp Bizkit.”

She looks somewhat surprised.

“No, we haven’t really,” he adds.

Backstage, before encores, they discuss whether they should perform Being boring.

“We don’t want to do Being boring, do we?” Chris persuades Neil. “Leave them on a high.”

Neil agrees. Instead, they do West End girls. Then Neil says: “When we came here tonight we were Glastonbury virgins, so we want to thank you for being kind to us. This song is called Go West.” Which, quite triumphantly, it is.