My Favourite Song - The Pet Shop Boys and ‘Being Boring’

'And we were never holding back or worried that time would come to an end.' 

*

A flurry of social media posts celebrating the latest shows by the Pet Shop Boys have brought on a feeling of regret that I didn’t book tickets and see them again. That feeling has intensified with the knowledge that these shows closed with what may well be my favourite song ever, ‘Being Boring’. It’s a song that I’ve tried to write about a number of times, but I’ve always failed to capture the essence of why I regard it so highly. Let me try again.

From the tentative faded-in intro, one that always strikes me as a drumming up of courage - those final nervy steps, perhaps, before you leap into the unknown - we are suddenly bowled over by the dazzle of an harp glissando. We are about to set off on a journey, one that will bring its fair share of sadness and joy. There will be invitations to parties, opportunities to pursue and decisions to make, and good friends will die or get left behind. And it’s a journey in the literal sense too. The details, like the decades, glide past you. Neil standing on the platform of Newcastle station, haversack on his back, nervously waiting for the train to London and university. I love that word ‘haversack’ and find in it a distant, less dramatic cousin of ‘Smalltown Boy’ and its ‘little black case’, with Jimmy Somerville making his own incredibly necessary journey from north to south, from small town to big city.   

And of course there’s the chorus itself. Inspired by a remark of Zelda Fitzgerald’s about a dead friend - “She was never bored because she was never boring” - it’s a wonderfully understated call-to-arms. It urges you to live in the moment and to ignore the passing of time, the gorgeous irony being that the song is an elegy to the passing of time and a lost friend. I love that contradiction. 

It’s full of lines that only Neil Tennant could write. ‘I came across a cache of old photos’ always makes me smile and I’m not quite sure why. I’ve tried to analyse it. Is it because Neil eschews the obvious near-rhyme of ‘cache’ and ‘graph’ and plumps instead for the lovely bathos of ‘photos’? Is it because ‘cache’ is such a Neil Tennant ‘word’? You can find one of them in every single Pet Shop Boys song, words that no other pop lyricist would contemplate. I think of random tracks on Behaviour - it is, just about, my favourite Pet Shop Boys album - and these words leap out at me: ‘double-cross’, ‘approved’ and - as a verb - ‘phone’.

My favourite lines, though, and for me the emotional core of the song, come towards the end:  

I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be

Those are lines that are as deceptively tricky as Marcel Proust’s opening to his great novel (duffer in French that I am, here they are rendered in Scott Moncrieff’s translation): ‘For a long time I would go to bed early’. They look both forwards and backwards at the same time, and in doing that somehow remain intent on the present. Incidentally, of time passing backwards and forwards, according to Tennant the already mentioned harp glissando is meant to signify the way in which the song’s narrative arc bends backwards and forwards. Written down, that sounds rather tacky; in practise it is spellbinding. Indeed, despite Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu being my favourite novel, perhaps it too might benefit from the occasional harp glissando.

When I went I left from the station

But none of this is capturing, in objective terms, why I love the song. Yesterday, another conversation provoked a different way to approach it. Whilst discussing the need to nurture our ‘inner resources’ I had cause to revisit the poem from which I had plucked that phrase: John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 14’. As a work of art it is the absolute antithesis to ‘Being Boring’, and although I’d wager, with the poet's biography in mind, that Berryman was suffering from depression rather than ennui, it makes it all too apparent that being bored is not always easy to elude.

*

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

*

Curiously, although I love Berryman and this poem, I’ve always come down firmly on the side of the poet's mother. And what are our ‘inner resources’ other than the things we culturally consume, keeping them safe inside and ready to hand, bringing them out when we most need them? And so it was that ‘Being Boring’ found a place inside my mind’s haversack. 

With a haversack and some trepidation

For a song that shifts through the decades, it is apt that I can attach it to some of my own specific memories. For instance, in the middle of the 1990s, a Navy acquaintance, annoyed that I didn’t find myself in the mood to go clubbing - the thought of another faux hoedown to ‘Cotton Eyed Joe’ was too much to bear - flung the accusation at me, with real venom and contempt, of ‘being boring’. This stayed with me for a number of weeks - I was young! - and it rankled me much more than it should have done. But eventually I tunnelled out of that funk with the formulation that if I wasn’t bored, how on earth could I be boring? The trick was simply to practise amour de soi rather than amour-propre, and to do the things that brought me joy rather than what was expected of me. And whilst my ‘closing door’ would take years to fully shut, it was touch and go for a while as to whether or not I would make it before it slammed tight.

Of course, that’s all well and good, and whilst adding up to an argument for why I adore this song, it still doesn’t capture the peerless wonder of it. Maybe, like other pieces of great art, its power lies in its elusiveness. If something is elusive - and I’m thinking here of some of my other inner resources - Keats and his ‘Nightingale’ and Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, or Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Cello Suites, I can listen to ‘Being Boring’ through a gamut of moods and it will strike me in many different ways, some at the same time: melancholy and joy, motivation and balm, nostalgia and urgency. It’s a song about life and how it has been lived, about the choices you’ve made and what you’ve lost and found on the way. It’s a song that can make you smile, and one that can catch you out and leave you tearful. And if that doesn't sell it, it's a favourite of Axl Rose too. Finally, it’s a song that doesn’t need analysis (not that I’ve felt that this was a waste of time). Let’s be as objective as possible then, and declare it as seven minutes of the most sublime and unutterably wonderful pop music.