Pet Shop Boys at dead of night, between the lines

Between the lines

Behaviour

Being Boring

Chris: "We wrote it in Scotland. Neil bought a guitar."
Neil: "We decided to go to 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 so I 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 - Axl Rose, for instance - complained. The version which opens Behaviour started off as the twelve-inch mix. We got Julian Mendelsohn to do a twelve-inch mix because the track didn't sound vibey 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 Faltermeyer took for ages doing it, because the Synclavier wouldn't quantize 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. I 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'."

This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave

Neil: "It was originally written in the studio in Wandsworth in 1986. At the time it had been intimated to us that we might be asked to write the theme song for the James Bond film, The Living Daylights, so as a musical exercise we decided to write something that sounded, in our opinion, like a James Bond theme. That's why you have the guitar at the start, which is a Stratocaster sample I'm playing. It has my trademark pitch-bend at the end. I love twang. I've always liked twang. Since I was a child and we used to go to the Royalty cinema in Gosforth for children's matinees and they used to play 'Wonderful Land' by the The Shadows, a track that can still bring tears to my eyes, I've always loved twang guitar. We never heard anything from the James Bond people - A-ha did the theme in the end."
Chris: "But that's why 'This must be the place...' sounds so filmic."
Neil: "The words are about a dream I used to have that I was back in school doing exams in the sixth form, and thinking 'how can I possibly be back at school?'. And then I get told to get on with what I'm doing. After I wrote the words I never had the dream again. The title is a play on time - the first part present tense, the second past tense. It's a bit like a verbal version of one of those Escher drawings that goes round and you can't work out how you got there. You wonder where you are and you realise you're in the place you couldn't wait to get out of. But I did wait years to leave school. I absolutely bloody hated it. It refers to how we used to have Benediction on Wednesday afternoons, which is a Catholic service. The litany of names of saints is part of the mass. And to how I used to hate playing football and I didn't want to be part of the whole thing. And I'm just saying I hated school, and I'm also getting revenge on my school, St Cuthbert's, for slagging me off in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle when 'It's a sin' came out. There was a front-page story about how I'd defamed the school and they were quite hurtful about me, and had anonymous quotes from teachers at the school. Johnny Marr came in to Sarm West and played guitar on this - he does this fantastic controlled backwards feedback, and he does a great thing at the end, right on the fade, playing this great ascending tune. I wish there was more of that. There's Chris's voice going 'everybody e-e-everybody'."
Chris: "The rhythm was from 'Jack Your Body'. I also say 'everybody jump to attention'."
Neil: "At the end there's a sample from the Moscow trials of 1936 where the prosecutor Vyshinsky is saying 'they must be shot like dogs'. When we were in the studio there was a television documentary about Russia on and we took it from that. Because the song is meant to be about the end of communism as well. Schools are kind of authoritarian places with strange rituals and I just imagined that dreaming you were back in a communist state would be as bizarre as being back in your school days. The album was made just after the Berlin Wall came down, someone looking back on communism, having a dream about it after it finished. At the end of the middle bit, after the guitar solo, you can hear a choir chant 'Lenin', at 3.24, which is from Shostakovitch's Second Symphony."

To Face The Truth

Neil: "This song started off as a track written one Sunday morning on the guitar in the early Eighties. I was lying in bed. I thought it sounded a bit like Everything But The Girl, and I took this half-written song into the studio at Camden Town and Chris changed the timing of it, playing on Ray Roberts' Rhodes piano, and it immediately sounded soulful rather than acoustic folky. The high vocals and the piano were all on the original demo."
Chris: "The middle bit was added later. It used to sound like 'Juicy Fruit' by Mtume."
Neil: "On the album it has a backwards start - we were experimenting with these things. Also, in this song, for the first time ever - something I'd learned from Dusty - I don't sing the third verse in exactly the same melody. I started to think about singing with this album. It's the normal love-gone-wrong song. The middle bit - 'you are the only one' - comes from the first X-rated film I ever saw, just before I was 16, which was Midnight Cowboy. And they keep on having flashbacks of the Texan boy back in Texas with his girlfriend and she's going, 'You're the only one, Joe. You're the only one.' And for some reason that made a huge impact on me, so much so that twenty years later I put it in this song."
Chris: "So what is the truth?"
Neil: "It's a heterosexual story. Some guy's girlfriend is going out, screwing around, and he suspects she's having it off with someone. It's about lying in bed and your lover's somewhere else. The truth to be faced is that the person you're in love with is not in love with you. But you can't face up to it. It's just a story. Or at least it was at that time."

How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?

Neil: "In 1990 Bobby Brown was very popular, particularly the song 'Every Little Step'. Chris used to be able to do the dance."
Chris: "I'd like to have been able to do it."
Neil: "He used to do it backstage. So we decided to do a swingbeat song. This was the song which made an American friend of mine take this album back to the shop. He was so shocked we'd done a swingbeat song - he was absolutely appalled. There's also a guitar solo by me, actually played on the guitar. I'm also playing the power chords. We wrote this in Scotland. I'd just got a distortion box. I think if I was really being honest the idea for the lyric started with Bros. We'd had the same manager and we were always rather fascinated by Bros. Bros came back with their second album and they said to Terry Wogan on Wogan that they were 'about longevity'. Chris and I just loved this so much - we used to go on and on talking about longevity. The idea that you could be 'about longevity', not that you would achieve longevity... it just seemed like a really weird way of thinking. And of course, as it happened, Bros only had about three months to go. The words are about the aspirations and pomposity of pop stars and it just lists all these things that pop stars do and then says, 'how can you expect to be taken seriously?' There's the normal attack on any number of rock stars supporting humanitarian causes. We'd ranted on about this for the second half of the Eighties. 1990 was kind of rainforest time, and the ozone layer. My point always was that these were, and are, very serious issues and they were trivialised by pop stars going on and on about them, and I predicted that pop stars would very quickly lose interest in them and therefore the issues themselves would seem to be tired early Nineties issues and no one would take them seriously. I think I was right. There's also an attack on the Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame. When you think of how rock started as this amazing rebellious thing, this fusion of country'n'western and r'n'b and some wild white trash called Elvis Presley... and it ends up in an annual dinner in the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York with a lot of people in dinner suits nominating each other to the a Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame. It always seemed sort of ridiculous to me to have institutionalised the whole thing. The bit where I ask, 'Do you have a message for your fans?' was a boy band thing - people hadn't had a message for their fans for decades, since the Sixties, and suddenly people were doing it again. When I was writing the song Chris said, 'Do you think you should make the words nastier?', because actually the words at the start were a bit airy-fairy. It hadn't occurred to me, and suddenly I thought, 'oh, it should be really horrible'. It's a bit of a 'You're So Vain' concept, really."

Only The Wind

Neil: "We'd rented a studio in Notting Hill belonging to one of Ultravox, and we worked on 'So hard' and 'Only the wind' there, and did a rough demo of 'Maybe This Time' from Cabaret, which Liza Minnelli turned down."
Chris: "Let's not forget we had an office in Notting Hill before the All Saints had even got their name."
Neil: "And before the film came out. Chris started playing the piano and I thought, 'wow, that is a fantastic tune'."
Chris: "I'd already written it on my piano at home in Highbury."
Neil: "I wrote the words on the spot, and the reason it's called 'Only the wind' is because in fact there was a hurricane outside, and there were bins blowing down the road. You weren't supposed to go outside because there were dustbins flying through the air in Notting Hill Gate, and corrugated iron flying about. The wind made me think of anger. So the idea of the song was someone's gone round to see some couple... you know when you arrive at someone's house and there's obviously a major row going on and one of them's not there. It's a couple, and he's a wife-beater. Everything he says is a lie. 'No one's been lying...' - he thinks she's been lying to her so he's whacked her. It's a very violent song, and the wind is a metaphor for the domestic violence, and for a huge row. He keeps denying you can hear anyone crying, stuff like that. The whole song builds up to him saying sorry, because he knows that he has done wrong. But, listening to him, we think that he is absolutely pathetic and she should leave him. Angelo Badalamenti did the strings."
Chris: "It's a very fragile vocal."
Neil: "Robbie Williams once sang the whole song to me in the Groucho Club upstairs bar. It was in his drinking days."

My October Symphony

Neil: "My favourite song on the album. The beginning, where they're shouting 'October' in Russian, is also taken from Shostakovitch's Second Symphony."
Chris: "It's very ravey. House piano."
Neil: "We wrote the music for this in Glasgow, hence the guitar. I'd also bought a wah-wah pedal. On the finished record we had Johnny Marr playing the guitar. We faffed around for ages with the song because we couldn't work out how to make it work. Originally it had more words - the lines were longer - and I thought it sounded naff. I also tried to do a rap. Then I realised I could make it shorter and we could use the 'ooo's. We had a copy of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On in the studio - we always have a point in the album where we say, 'let's make it like Marvin Gaye'. We realised there was something really good about having two voices doing different things at the same time, but I have never been very good at doing the other thing, so we got Jay Henry who had sung on the previous tour to sing on it. I'm also singing all the way through in low and high octaves together. We got the Banalescu Quartet to play on it. During our Derek Jarman tour they were the support act and at the first concert they played, astonishingly, Shostakovitch's Eighth String Quartet to the whole bemused audience."
Chris: "It wasn't my idea."
Neil: "This is one of my songs about Russia. I had been reading this book by Ian MacDonald about Shostovokitch and I was just fascinated by the idea that all artists in the Soviet Union used to produce official works of art to commemorate the October Revolution, and therefore that all composers had written an October Symphony, celebrating the great achievements of the October Revolution. And then when the whole thing collapsed, and those values were regarded as worthless, people were left with these works of art that were valueless. Shostakovitch's were revealed as actually being in opposition to the regime and all having a subtext of opposition to communism in them. I was just thinking of some composer looking at their October Symphony and wondering how they could salvage it. The verses are explaining what's happening in Russia: it's all very confusing, because they used to march in October, 'so shall I rewrite or revise my October Symphony - change the dedication from revolution to revelation?' The composer is wondering whether, by just changing two letters, you could sort of claim that you'd never believed in the revolution anyway. He's someone who has compromised to survive. The song mentions different revolutionary periods in Russian history. It asks, 'Shall we worry about February?' because the February Revolution was the first revolution in 1917, the middle class parliamentary democracy revolution which was overturned by the Bolsheviks. November was the end of the First World War. December was when there was the famous Decembrist Conspiracy. The October Revolution - which happened in November because the Russian calendar is different - was the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Or, as we now say, the Bolshevik coup d'etat. In a way, the song is really about confusion. When three generations have been brought up to believe in a strict ideology and suddenly the ideology is abolished, you don't really know what to think to any more. I always felt that pop songs should be able to be about contemporary life, and these changes in Russia were a very powerful thing that was happening, that was changing the world at the time. But also it's a song about music. Consequently in it we have quite an interesting mix of musical styles: it's quite rave, it has this Marvin Gaye thing going on, and at the same time it has this very classically-arranged string quartet. The end always reminds me of Yellow Submarine, where they go to Pepperland."

So Hard

Chris: "I don't like 'So hard'. It's a blot on this album."
Neil: "I like the lyrics. The song is a true story, about two friends who lived together. One of them came home and found that his boyfriend was in bed alone, and there was an ashtray beside the bed, and he didn't smoke."
Chris: "Make of that what you will."
Neil: "And he finds out his boyfriend has loads of letters from contact magazines."
Chris: "It's a Donna Summer Giorgio Morodor kind of thing. Actually, it's got some good bits, and the David Morales Red Zone remix is one of our best twelve-inches."
Neil: "This has got very analogue-y synths. And at the beginning there's a sample saying 'kiss'. It's quite a different vocal style for me - like whispering in your ear again."
Chris: "Is 'So hard' a Carry On-style double entendre?"
Neil: "As with most of my innuendo, it wasn't intended, but obviously I very quickly realised it would be perceived as that. I quite like the fact that it's there. The 'so hard' element is actually that it's so hard for them to give up their affairs. People get caught, I think, very much between their desire to have a permanent relationship and their desire to play around or whatever. It was released as a single before the album came out. I remember we really liked the very electronic sequencery quality and we wanted to bring that out in our twelve-inch version. That old-fashioned Patrick Cowley or Bobby 'O'-ish sequencer thing that we never get sick of."

Nervously

Neil: "This was written by me, primarily, before I knew Chris, but I could never finish the end of the song. I'd written it on acoustic guitar. I was going out with a woman when I wrote it. I wonder what she thought of it."
Chris: "Maybe it was fantasy."
Neil: "I think maybe it was fantasy. Chris worked out the chords at the end of the chorus. He said, 'Isn't it this?' and I said, 'Oh, I've been trying to work that out for the last ten years.' This is such a gay song. It's a bit like a show tune. We went through a phase with Harold Faltemeyer trying to make it into what he calls 'an LA ballad', as though Whitney Houston was going to sing it. But then we did the arrangement which ended up on the album, very stripped down, which was also Harold's idea. It starts off just with synthesisers, and it gradually builds up and finally drums come in right at the end. The lyric is about two gay boys meeting each other and being too shy to have sex. I think I denied that at the time. It's sort of about sexual trepidation. It's all nervous and jittery, and it's got sexy breathing in it as well. And, actually, listening back to it now I think they do get together at the end of the song. Because he smiles."

The End Of The World

Neil: "You can hear the influence of Violator on the guitar on this. Hello, 'Enjoy The Silence'. This song was nearly a b-side."
Chris: "It sounds good now. I think we thought it sounded a bit weak then."
Neil: "I don't think my vocal's very good."
Chris: "Julian Mendelsohn couldn't relate to how this sounded. He was so used to the Eighties when we had clicky bass drums and thumping great big snares, and then of course that all went out the window, to be replaced by squishy little sounds, and Julian couldn't get his head around them - he thought they were crap. This was when house music was still about tunes."
Neil: "We originally started this song when we were recording 'I get excited (You get excited too)' at the beginning of 1988. Originally it was called 'If there was more', and then that idea became 'If there was love' on Liza Minnelli's album. Then I had the idea of 'The end of the world' as the title. In the middle bit there's my second guitar solo on the album. We should have got Johnny to do that, maybe. It's just a story of teenage trauma: a girl whose boyfriend hasn't phoned her up, or someone whose boyfriend or girlfriend hasn't phoned them up, and they're having a teenage trauma about it. She's arguing with her parents and slamming doors. Also, people were starting to get apocalyptic at the beginning of the Nineties, so it was also looking at the idea of the actual end of the world. I think I read some book about it at the time. The girl at the end of the song is hoping the world will end."

Neil: "It's also about how people say the 1990s are going to be the end of the world."
Chris "I've never heard anyone say that."
Neil: "Haven't you? Some people predict that the end of the world is going to be in 1997. Or 1999 - they're a bit undecided. And also what the Virgin Mary said in Fatima - where she appeared to three children - that the world is giong to end unless it becomes a better place."
(Literally 5, 1991)

Jealousy

Chris: "It's got cobwebs on, this song."
Neil: "It's the first proper song we wrote. Chris wrote the music for this in his parents' house in Blackpool. It was about 1982."
Chris: "That year I was at college in Liverpool and I used to go home quite often. There was a piano at home, in the dining room, and I'd sit playing it. I would doodle, normally, and not be able to remember anything I'd done, and I'd think: I'm just wasting creative juices here - what I need is a computer that's going to be able to save it all for posterity. But one day I sat down at the piano and this just came out. It was probably meant to be a bit like that big ballad in the Seventies, 'You're A Lady' by Peter Skellern - 'you're a lady, I'm a man' - which was very popular with the Lowe family."
Neil: "Chris actually liked it so much he made a cassette - he was bubbling with excitement - and it was the moment when I realised we were actually quite serious about writing songs together, because he actually did that. There was a sort of commitment. I knew I was quite serious about it, but I didn't really know whether Chris was. This was before we'd ever been in a studio. I was amazed at the sophistication of the music. He said, 'Why don't you write some words for that?'"
Chris: "It was probably the first time I'd ever constructed a song."
Neil: "The structure has never changed since he recorded it in Blackpool. The first time we went into the demo studio - we hired it with my redundancy money from Macdonald Educational - we did three songs, 'Bubadubadubadum', 'Jealousy' and 'Oh dear'. Chris just played it on the piano and I sang it live, and I think maybe he overdubbed strings. Chris had said he wanted it to be very intense, so I wrote about jealousy. When I first met Chris, my other friend called Chris was very jealous, and that inspired the song. My friend and I had an argument once where he said, about Chris Lowe, 'You see a lot of him, don't you?' because the other Chris was my official best friend and this wasn't a part of his life. I turned it into a story. It's about unrequited love. The 'strangers roaming the street' was about the King's Road at night."
Chris: "There's some good lyrics in there, like 'you didn't phone when you said you would'. You know when you stay in and they say they're going to phone at eight o'clock and they don't phone all night and you go absolutely bonkers?"
Neil: "We considered doing 'Jealousy' on Please, and again on Actually; in 1986 we did another demo of it in Wandsworth. But I think we didn't record it then because we didn't want to have too many old songs on Actually. On Behaviour we just remade the Wandsworth demo. The orchestra is all samples played by Harold Faltermeyer, but on the single version - it was the final single from Behaviour - we used a real orchestra. I think we re-did that because of Musicians' Union rules - we'd had a problem with them, and we thought it would be easier if we were going to play the song on TV shows. We also remixed it so that it sounded slightly more electronic, and there's an extra sequencer line it. The twelve-inch version has a long introduction over which I quote a Shakespeare speech about jealousy from Othello. I only knew it because I did Othello for A-level, by the way. It's Iago, who has put the idea into Othello's head that his wife is being unfaithful to him, and so Iago says to the audience, as an aside, 'not poppy nor mandragora nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owedst yesterday'. I always loved that line at school. When we were recording the twelve-inch I didn't know how you pronounced 'mandragora' so I phoned up our foremost Shakespearean actor, Ian MacKellen, and he told me."