Absolutely Pet Shop Boys Unoffical web site - Interviews Behaviour Being Boring

Interviews Behaviour Being Boring

Chris We wrote it in Scotland. Neil bought a guitar.

Neil We decided to got o Glasgow because we'd been there on tour in 1989 and liked it. We hired a little studio in a grim part of West Glasgow and there was a guitar shop next to the studio where a man made guitars sol bought this electric guitar. We did the music for 'My October symphony', 'The end of the world', 'Being boring' and a rock song which has never materialised called 'Love and war', which I always imagined Bryan Adams singing: 'now you know the score! That all is fair in love and war! and this is a war.' But the one plan we had when we went there was to write a song called 'Being boring' and we wrote it very quickly. I can remember Chris deciding that the song itself should go up into the chorus like a Stock Aitken Waterman record - it's actually very influenced by them in the way it changes key completely, going up a semitone. The verse resolves on G and then it goes up to A flat for the chorus which is a very Stock Aitken Waterman thing to do. We were quite impressed by the way they'd always just shift up for the chorus. I'd got the idea of writing a song called 'Being boring' after someone in Japan said something about us being boring; it just seemed to be a very musical phrase and I wrote it down. And I liked the idea of confronting this image of the Pet Shop Boys being boring by actually writing a song called that. I thought only we could write a song called 'Being boring'.

And then it gave me the idea of writing about this friend of mine from Newcastle who'd died and whose funeral was written about in 'Your funny uncle'. It's just about our lives together. He threw a party in Newcastle in 1972 where you had to dress in white, and it was called The Great Urban Dionysia, and it had a quotation on the invitation from 1922, from Zelda Fitzgerald, F Scott Fitzgerald's wife, which the phrase 'being boring' had made me think of. The quote was: she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn't need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.' It just made me think about the way our lives had gone. It's three verses, in three different decades. When we were recording it, we thought at one point of having musical references to the different decades, but in the end we didn't. The first verse is set in the 1920s, when the woman writes the invitation, then we move forward to the hedonistic 1970s when I'm moving to London to seek my fame and fortune. Someone said to us, 'the trouble with you lot is that you'll have experienced everything by the time you're 18 - you'll have nothing left to experience'. And then it moves to the start of the 1990s, when my friend has just died. It's just the sadness of having a close friend die, because I always thought he'd be somewhere there with me. When we were teenagers we would always discuss that we weren't going to settle for boring lives, we were always going to do something different. And then when it came down to it, I did become a pop star and at exactly that time he became very ill.

Chris We had loads of problems with this song getting the key right.

Neil The vocals are almost hushed. It's recorded very very quietly, and I wanted it to sound like it was someone whispering in your ear. It's hard to sing. That's why we didn't do it on the tour in 1991, though eventually we added it as an encore because people Axis Rose, for instance - complained. The version which opens Behaviour started off as the twelve-inch mix [CD2, track 4]. We got Julian Mendelsohn to do a twelve-inch mix because the track didn't sound vibe enough, and as we often do we hope that a twelve-inch mix will give us ideas which we can use on the original version, as it did in this case. You've got J.J. Belle playing the guitar forwards and backwards on it, and Dominic Clarke played this plastic tube - that's the noise you can hear at the beginning. We were just

Having a laugh in the studio.

Chris The faster you spin it, the higher the note.

Neil The instrumental section at the beginning was actually recorded at the end of the track, and then edited onto the start. You can also hear the influence of rave. The 'Funky Drummer' sample is on 'Being boring', except that it was replayed.

Chris Harold Faitermeyer took for ages doing it, because the Synclavier wouldn't quartile to what it needed so he had to do it all mathematically.

Neil 'Being boring' was released as the second single from Behaviour. We were in our office one Sunday afternoon doing a photo session and it went into the charts at number 36.1 remember looking at each other. The following week it did go up, and it limped into the top 20. But it's one of those songs -it took on a life of its own, and suddenly everyone really really liked it. Now it's one of people's favourite songs by us.

Chris It just shows that chart positions aren't the be all and end all. 'Heart' isn't in the same league as 'Being boring'.

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