Neil It’s become one, I notice. I've seen it used. I think we wrote this at the beginning of 1990, during the shoe-gazing period, when Morrissey was huge as a solo artist. It's another song sort of written from the point of view of being Morrissey-the first song like That being 'Getting away with it', the Electronic single, which I wrote most of the words of. 'Getting away with it' is looking at Morrissey's persona of being miserable and all the rest of it, and saying that he's been getting away with it for years. It's meant to be humorous. 'Miserablism' is a satire, a little like 'How can you expect to be taken seriously?' What bugged me about the stargazers always looking really miserable is that people think someone like that is really serious. It's something that endlessly bugs me in pop music -that someone with the style of being serious is always accepted as being serious. And also that anyone being playful is then not taken seriously, whereas actually being playful is actually more difficult than being 'serious', and possibly can end up being a lot more serious at the same time.

The words to this song were inspired by someone telling me that they asked their father on his deathbed what it was like, and he said: 'is is, isn't isn't'. And I thought that was a great quote, and a very kind of Miserablism way of looking at the world. There's no romance -the only thing that exists is what really exists. And of course it was quoted by Clinton only a couple of years ago. 'That depends what the definition of "is" is'.

A direct reference to the lyrics of Neil Tennant. Anyway, as quite often with us, in the middle bit you get the real sentiment. It sounds a bit pretentious, but it says: 'if "is" wasn't and" isn't" were/ you can't be sure/but you might find ecstasy'. We recorded it in Germany for the album. It was meant to sound Giorgic Moroder-ish. Harold Faltermeyer thought it should be a single when we were doing it, and it was on the album until very late in the day. Doing these reissues, we found all the Behaviour half-inch mixes together on one huge reel, and you can see where Miserablism' has been cut out. We decided that it was too jocular. It was mostly Chris who didn't want it. I think it's a really good song.

Chris It's alright