Music

You Need to Hear This Song #2

Being Boring, Pet Shop Boys (Behaviour, 1990)

Heavy Rotation was a music industry term for songs that one way or another got a lot of airplay. It referred to the large amount of rotation that a particular record got on turntables at radio stations. Since, until the 1980s, this was the only way to get new music into the ears and brains of listeners, heavy rotation meant increased sales. Increased sales were good for the record company and artist alike.

These days, some of us still put records on at home and give them a spin. Most of us don’t. However, the term still applies, though in a different way. Streaming services like Spotify sell subscriptions to listeners and then pay artists based on listens. At least, that’s the way I think it works.

For me, heavy rotation means a song that is in my head for some reason. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a day, maybe for longer. It’s a song that you come back to from time to time and still feels just as good. This series of articles is dedicated to these songs.

In this series, I am going to highlight a particular song by a particular band or singer. I think it’s important to know a bit about the band, to know a bit about where the song fits into its history and where the song fits into what was happening in music at that time. Then there’s the song itself. Who’s playing on it, what are the lyrics getting at and why is it so good? How does it still occupy sonic space in my life?

I’ll (try to) keep it short. It shouldn’t take you any longer to read than the song itself. To that end, I’ll put a Youtube clip of the original recording at the top of the article so you can listen as you read. Or not. And because a song is often much different live than in the recording studio, I’ll stick a live clip on at the end.

What song is in your head right now? Here’s one that won’t leave mine today:

#2 — Being Boring, Pet Shop Boys (Behaviour / 1990)

The first article of the series was about a song by an 80s hair metal band, full of debauchery, glitz and glam. For the second, I am sticking with the time period but going in a completely different direction in terms of music and public image.

The Pet Shop Boys arrived just at the right time for my young suburban ears and brain in 1986. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe weren’t putting out new wave or rock and roll for the masses — we’d had enough of each by then. The term synth pop would lump them in with lesser contemporaries and which would be a disservice to their talents. Sure, there were no actual instruments, aside from a synthesizer (Lowe) and vocals (Tennant), but there was a significant difference between their songs and what else was being presented at the time. They had talent — immense talent — but most importantly, despite the machines, it sounded like humans were making this music. The lyrics and the voice took care of that.

Behaviour (1990) was their fourth studio album. It was preceded by Please (1986), Actually (1987) and Introspective in 1988. Each was more successful than its predecessor and even casual listeners would be familiar with their first and biggest hit, West End Girls. True PSB enthusiasts never need to go online to look up the lyrics to Suburbia, Opportunities, What Have I Done to Deserve This, Rent, Heart, Domino Dancing, Left to My Own Devices and It’s a Sin.

Things were changing in the world and in music as the 80s turned into the 90s and the Pet Shop Boys changed with it. Synthesizer music had run its course and Grunge and Madchester were upon us and the attention of the listener was diverted. Possibly as a result, on Behaviour, now we can hear instruments added to the mix. Johnny Marr of the by then defunct Smiths was drafted to play on a number of songs and his unmistakable sound marks a subtle but key shift in direction for Tennant and Lowe. As a result their sound grew up, rounded out and started to sound more alive. On this album anyway. Future albums — they are still going, by the way — would go in many other directions.

So, then, the song. Being Boring is the first track on the album, and not by accident either. Before you open the CD or tape or LP or whatever you had, you knew this was going to be a bit different. A spare black and white cover, aside from a shock of red in the roses both being held and lying on the floor.

It essentially introduces the whole thing with a new and yet familiar bit of keyboardery before Marr’s distinctive guitar first arrives at 00:15. A baseline joins the mix at 00:31 and a drum machine at 00:41 and the song takes off in the jetstream of a harp at 1:30. You can imagine the roof coming off the place at this point in a live performance.

Neil Tennant’s spoken word voice, which he sometimes manages to turn into deadpan singing comes in at 1:50 with “I came across a cache of old photos” and you know this song is going to be about memory. He imagines someone’s fantastic life in the 1920s and tells us that “When you’re young, you find inspiration in anyone who’s ever gone and opened up a closing door”. Whether he is inspired by someone or now doing the inspiring himself is left up to us to decide.

Verse 2 puts us in Tennant’s young life in the 1970s, when he had so much to look forward to, “bolting through a closing door, I would never find myself feeling bored”. He and his friends were “never holding back, worried that time would come to an end”. Ahh, youth.

Things had changed by Verse 3 and the 1990s. Great sorrow has been caused by the AIDS epidemic and many of the people he loved are gone. Despite, or maybe because of success, Tennant has also lost the innocence of his youth and is a bit jaded. “Now I sit in with different faces, in rented rooms in foreign places” and after years of touring, one imagines it’s all become a bit old to him. “All the people I was kissing, some are here and some are missing” and hearts break everywhere.

“I never dreamt that I would get to be, the creature that I always meant to be”. He has gotten everything he wanted but there is still emptiness in his life on account of these absences.

A more slickly produced song or album, you’d struggle to find. I have always considered myself further to the rocknroll end of the spectrum than wherever this kind of music lies, but I have always reached for Tennant and Lowe when I am in a certain mood of melancholy and want to stay there for a while.

Here is a live performance, as legends on Jools Holland in 2002. (That’s not Johnny Marr on guitar.)