Host:
Now, why is this called Being boring? The piece of music we’re about to hear...

Neil Tennant:
Well, it was... ‘cause we saw a piece of press somewhere that said “the Pet Shop Boys are always being boring.”

Host:
Are you boring?

Neil Tennant:
No, I don’t know why it said we were boring, but it reminded me of a phrase, that was on a party invitation when I was about seventeen, and it quoted Zelda Fitzgerald, the writer. And it said “she was never bored mainly because she was never boring” and it was a great way of summing up someone’s wife. And so, we took that phrase and made the song.

Host:
Zelda’s life was far from boing?

Neil Tennant:
Zelda had far from boring life, that’s right.

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And a lot of songs come about personal experience. The song Being boring, which I think is one of our best songs... I was reminded of a party we had when I was living in Newcastle as a teenager, and it quoted the Zelda Fitzgerald quote: “She was never bored mainly because she was never boring.” And... a very good friend of my from that era, my best friend really, had died of AIDS. And... So it was a kind of an elegy for him... for the part of myself in Newcastle, all my friends in Newcastle when I went to London, then then what I was doing then and he wasn’t there... And so it became a really elegiac song.

People often talk about sense of melancholy in the Pet Shop Boys. This isn’t a kind of aimless sense... I think it was fueled quite directly by AIDS, which really, as far as I was concerned, came to providence in 1986.

It is grief, really, quite a lot of that. That is just it, you know. A lot of the uncertainty that the era of AIDS gave to sexual relationships and the possibility of relationships. I think maybe now, you know, we’ve come to terms with it all more...

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I still have the same approach that we always had once we got going which was to try and write about things so long as they have provocative titles, maybe. Like Being boring which is meant to be a provocative title and the very phrase itself had a musical intonation to it which almost suggested the melody, and all the sort of things we normally sing about.

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Chris Lowe:
After tour we started thinking about the next album, which was Behaviour.

Neil Tennant:
We didn’t set out to be mature. We set out as usual, to make an album where every track could be a single. I think we used to say that time we should try to make ten Kylie Minogue singles.

This was just the period where Kylie Minogue made her best records, you know, like Better the devil you know. To me, actually Being boring was also an attempt to do a Stock-Aitken-Waterman thing, believe it or not. We were always fascinated about the way Stock-Aitken-Waterman would change key for choruses. And so—to be musical about it—the verse of Being boring was in A minor or D minor, maybe, after we went up a semitone into A flat for the chorus. Which we would never done before. It wasn’t attempt to be mature, it was actually an attempt to be like Stock-Aitken-Waterman. (laughs)

This was the time of the Manchester rave thing, and I think there was an expectation that we would be making a sort of rave Manchester kind of album. In fact we were quite influenced by what was going on there, but with the songs we had, it made it sound mellow. The only really “stompy” Pet Shop Boys one was So hard, which was the first single and the biggest hit from the album.

Maybe one reason the album being melancholy was my friend, Chris Dowell, dying as well. He died in 1989 and Being boring was kind of about him. I don’t think he really cast the shadow on the whole album, maybe set a mood that we followed through.

Being boring was about three phrases of our life. The first verse is all my friends in Newcastle, and this friend of mine was one of them. It just described that what we and our aspirations were.

And then the second verse I moved to London with an idea to go to Polytechnic. And it describes an excitement of that.

And then the third verse is looking back at what’s happened and... I’m doing what I’m doing, and he’s dead. I mean, it’s quite simple. When you got your best friend you just know he’ll always be around, and that not being the case.

Chris and I were having a meeting in the office on Sunday afternoon, and we got the chart position phoned through, and it went in the charts at number 32 or something. We couldn’t believe it!

Chris Lowe:
Being boring is one of our favourite songs ever. It just goes to show that what you’d like yourself might not be the most commercial, which is constant dilemma we realised in this business. It’s such a moving song, so sad and everything...

Neil Tennant:
One of the nice things was about Being boring is that it got this reputation as one of our best songs, and people were always saying how much they loved it.

I remember being surprised when we played at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles in 1991, because Axl Rose from Guns’n Roses came backstage and said how much he liked the show, and he said “But why didn’t you play ‘boring’ man, I just love that song” and... (laughs) that’s a very bad imitation of him, and I thought “Wow, Axl Rose likes Being boring.”

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And we went to make a new album in Germany with Harold Faltermeyer, ‘cause we decided we wanted to... everyone was using samples by this point, we thought we wanted to go back at all the sounds programmed like people used to do in late 70’s and early 80’s... And Harold Faltermeyer worked with George Moroder on Donna Summer’s records.

And we made an album that many people thinks is the best album, called Behaviour. And in fact really what made the album very distinctive was the choice of songs we recorded, as usual more songs than we needed. And at the last minute we chose the songs for the album that seemed to have a similar mood to them.

And so suddenly people had a different idea of the Pet Shop Boys, cause we had these beautiful songs like Being boring and Jealousy, and Nervously... and basically, they’re all, I think they’re all love songs, and it’s sort of painly sincere sounding album. And I don’t think people expected that from us.

In fact it was released right at the end of that whole “Manchester thing” that happened and at the time it didn’t get very good reviews, because people thought “why, they’re doing dance music.” What we felt is we’ve sort of done all of that in the 80s and we were looking to branch out a bit more.

Being boring was a key song for us, since it was very, very autobiographical. It was about friend of mine—he became a teacher and then he contracted AIDS. And he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, just the time we’ve become very, very successful. We were sort of more or less childhood friends. And then he died in 1989. And so it was just an autobiographical song, just trying to look at our lives and—you know—what we wanted to do. When we were fifteen, we used to say “when I grow up, I’m not going to do anything boring, I’m going to do something special” and it was just looking at the way our lives have gone since then. And it was the first time I did a lyric that was completely autobiographical.

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