The Boys comment about the tracks on Bilingual...

Single

Neil: The narrator is a very glib Our businessman, a glib Eurocrat who flies business class and likes all his privileges. He tries to pick up chicks at meet'n'greets. He's pretending to be a sophisticated ladies man: 'single! bilingual!'. But he's not really communicating either and he knows it. In actual fact he's a hopeless, tragic wreck. He's a bit like the person in 'Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)' who's never going to make any money. He's superficially got all the right things but he's just not getting there. He doesn't understand why, but he knows he's not.

Chris: He doesn't understand that business class is a rip-off on a short flight. You get no more leg room.

Neil: Exactly. That's why it ends with a reprise of 'Discoteca'. He could be literally going to a club, but it's also saying that he's a lost and frightened person.

Metamorphosis

Neil: This started out as a song we did with Mark and Trevor, the dancers and rappers on the Performance tour, using a backing track we'd written in Scotland when we were writing songs for 'Behavior'. We had Sylvia Mason-James sing the chorus bits and they did this incredibly fast rapping, but they didn't like the end result so it never got issued. We thought about recording our own version for 'Very', but it took me ages to decide what I was going to write about. I had the first lines for ages - 'please allow me to try and explain/I'm living proof that man can change' - and then it occurred to me it should be about being gay. About not wanting to be gay, and then being gay and all the rest of it. So it is completely autobiographical and more or less true.

Electricity

Neil: This was the last song we recorded. We thought we had finished the album then we did one more song. When we wrote it, we decided to break all of our rules.

Chris: We weren't allowed to do anything we normally do. So to start off with it's slow, 96 beats per minute, whereas we'd normally do it over 120. We used sounds we wouldn't normally use. I wasn't allowed a string pad. You just had to think was you would do... and then not do it.

Neil: After a while we lost interest in that, but that was how we started it.

Chris: I decided to put in a string pad anyway. I'd been in Los Angeles just before, and I'd been hearing the PAC record 'California Love', and records like that, so it's a bit influenced by them.

Neil: I had some words in my Passion organizer which I'd written in Jamaica in January 1996. I had a dream one night that we were making a record with David Bowie, and when I woke up I remembered the song we had written in the dream. It was called 'Friendly Fire' and it had lyrics like 'I'm an artist, honey...' which I used in this. At a separate time I'd had the 'since Disco Tex and the Sex-o-letter' idea, so I put them together.

Chris: When we were recording it we thought 'right, we need a sample on this' and we just flicked through what was on the telly right there and then, and there was this film with these really good bits: 'get out of here and take your cake with you', 'what are you doing here in San Francisco?' 'what does it all mean?'. If you flick through all the television channels you'll always get a great sample.

Neil: There's always some line that seems very profound, so I wrote the rest of the words as an answer to the question 'what are you doing here in San Francisco?'. The song is an interview with a drag queen. On the day I sang the vocal I had a really bad cold, so I sang quietly, and my voice had a funny texture to it. The chorus bits I sang about eight times and we put them together, this sinus-y chorus.

Se A Vida E (That's the Way Life Is)

Neil: I was listening to an album by Olodium that I'd bought in Sao Paolo. I was listening through for drum sounds, looking for samples and trying to work out what they did, thinking 'How do you do Brazilian music?'. Then I heard this bit in a song where they sang 'se a Vida e' which I liked, so I started doing a version of it in the studio. I was gaffing around, really, because I was on my own. I quite often go into the studio on my own, especially if I'm doing vocals. I prefer it if Chris isn't there when I'm doing vocals, because sometimes he laughs at me. The lyric was written to cheer up a depressed friend. It says: stop moping around at home, and come out and rejoin the world. I like the phrase 'gothic gloom' in the middle of it. It throws the rest of it into relief a bit, because the verses and choruses have such incredibly simple lyrics.

It Always Comes As A Surprise

Neil: We recorded the demo of this in Unique Studios. It sounded more like Phil Collins then. It didn't have a Latin rhythm until later. It's a love song, it's quite obvious what it's about; the excitement at the start of a love affair, when someone seems magical and different and you're thinking 'How amazing, I'm here with you'. The two characters are two different types of people - personality-wise, age-wise, culturally - so it's a surprising pair of people. It's autobiographical.

A Red Letter Day

Neil: The working title for this was 'C Major'. We were trying to write Something anthem. We had to change the key in the end because I couldn't sing it.

Chris: We were into this thing of the baseline not being the root note of the chord, which we'd learned off Danny Tenaglia.

Neil: Someone told me subsequently that that's the basic starting point for any bass player. It took us ten years to discover that. The other starting point for this - as part of our range of 'take the chord change of a famous piece of classical music and put it to a 4/4 beat and see what it sounds like - was The Song Of Joy by Beethoven. After we'd recorded the basic song I went to Moscow to record the choir from the Choral Academy of Moscow at the State Broadcasting House. There were about forty of them, quite young. The Ozone, (a British TV-programme) were there filming. They asked a couple of the musicians if they liked pop music, and they went 'No'. Do you know the Pet Shop Boys? 'No'. Do you like the song? 'No'. At the end, Victor Popov, the conductor, said 'work is work'. It was a bit unnerving, nonetheless we got it done. The words quote the Bible, I'm afraid - 'what on earth does it profit a man?' it's an old idea - what's the point of having material wealth if you haven't got love? It's about waiting for someone to tell you they love you.

Up Against It

Chris: I wrote the music for this at home at the beginning of 1995.

Neil: It was originally called 'I Will Love You' - that was Chris's title. I wanted something else, and I knew I needed four syllables, and I was looking at my bookcase in my sitting room and there it was: 'Up Against It' by Joe Orton. It was the screenplay he wrote for the Beatles which was never used. The song is nothing to do with that though. It's about postwar Britain; about how people, at the end of the Second World War, thought they were going to build a new Jerusalem, and about how, in every era that you can remember, everyone's being told to tighten their belts for some future reward. They were doing it in the 40's, in the 60's, in the 70's, in the 80's and they're obviously still doing it now. You're always marching, but you're never actually getting anywhere. The song is saying 'what a swizz'. Everything in the song is quite logical. The first verse refers to the legendary cold winter of 1947/48. The 'so deep in quicklime' part was written because, as I was writing the song, they dug up the bones of the Tsar in the woods in Russia. In a way the song is just saying politics is shit.

The Survivors

Chris: This was based on one of the backing tracks I'd done for Ian Wright.

Neil: I think I started writing the words on a train. It's about growing old. When you've reached a certain age you realize you've survived this far, you're still alive, and you know allot of people who aren't. It's a sort of feel bad, feel good song.

Before

Chris: We went to New York in June 1996 to record with Danny Tenaglia. I always think it's good to record in America. I like the sounds you get, and the musicians that are available. You get something you wouldn't necessarily produce yourself.

Neil: We were going to work with Frankie Knuckles again, then he canceled a couple of days before we were due to go, so a friend suggested Danny Tenaglia. We went there without a song, which I always find slightly terrifying and which Chris likes.

Chris: It's a good idea though. Because if you take along your own proxy song, you don't get anything fresh.

Neil: Though we did take a cassette of some of Chris's instrumental bits he's put together earlier in the year, and we put two of those together.

Chris: It was one of those things that sounded good from day one, I always thought. We played the chords, Danny Tenaglia put on a brilliant base part.

Neil: Then that evening I went back to the hotel and wrote a lot of words for it. In New York you tend to work quickly. You don't piss around. In the song I'm talking to someone else saying 'if you went long enough...'. It's the same message as 'Love Comes Quickly', really, but from a different point of view. When you're feeling down about love, when you're in a difficult situation, suddenly things can straighten out. The right person comes into your life.

Saturday Night Forever

Neil: I was thinking of it as the sort of song that Robbie William's would sing in Take That. The chords are very complicated and they don't naturally fit together. In the Eighties we were always fascinated by the way Stock Aitken Waterman songs would go into the choruses. Sometimes they would just go up a half step, like we did in 'Being Boring' in imitation of them. It always fascinated us how you could just go suddenly from one thing into another, and sometimes it just sounds natural. I wrote the words so quickly, I can't even remember what I was thinking about. It's about 'Isn't it great going to a disco on Saturday night?'. it's about picking somebody up in a club, the twist being that it has a cynicism about it. When we first did it I thought 'Oh, we'll have to write proper words for that', but Chris said 'No, it's great. It just goes forever! forever!...'

I would like to thank Sue Smith for finding this information, typing it out and E-mailing it to me.