�Being Boring�: the Path to a Pop Elegy - Wall Street Journal

[Don Ackerman]

‘Being Boring’: the Path to a Pop Elegy
A teenage invitation and a Zelda Fitzgerald quote inspired Pet Shop Boys’ nostalgic memorial to a friend
https://www.wsj.com/articles/being-boring-the-path-to-a-pop-elegy-1519741800

By Marc Myers
Feb. 27, 2018 9:30 a.m. ET

The Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring” was released in November 1990 but never became a Billboard pop hit in the U.S. Yet the song had a significant influence on electronic dance music and today is considered a cult classic.

Recently, the song’s co-writer, Pet Shop Boys’ lead singer Neil Tennant, and the song’s producer-arranger Harold Faltermeyer discussed its evolution.

Three of the band’s remastered albums—“Please,” “Actually” and “Introspective” (Parlophone)—will be reissued on Friday. Edited from interviews.

Neil Tennant: My feelings weren’t hurt. After [Pet Shop Boys co-founder] Chris Lowe and I performed at Tokyo’s Budokan arena in early July 1989, a Japanese reviewer wrote, “The Pet Shop Boys are often accused of being boring.”

The words “being boring” took me back to the early ’70s and an invitation I had received to the Great Urban Dionysia Party in Newcastle, England, where I grew up.

On the invitation was this adaptation of a 1922 Zelda Fitzgerald quote about a flapper friend who had died: “She was never bored because she was never boring.”

Thinking of the invitation and quotation reminded me of a close friend who had died of AIDS four months earlier at age 34. He had organized that teenage party.

I immediately began writing lyrics to a song I called “Being Boring.” 

“’Cause we were never being boring / We had too much time to find for ourselves / And we were never being boring / We dressed up and fought, then thought: ‘Make amends’ / And we were never holding back / or worried that / time would come to an end.”

The first verse was about those parties and finding the invitation with the Fitzgerald quote: “From someone’s wife, a famous writer / in the 1920s / When you’re young you find inspiration / in anyone who’s ever gone / and opened up a closing door.”

The second verse was about me leaving Newcastle on the train to study in London in the early 1970s. I assumed I was never going to move back: “I’d bolted through a closing door / I would never find myself feeling bored.”

By then, Chris and I had sufficient lyrics to begin writing the music in a little studio in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1989. The third verse would have to wait until we were closer to recording the song.

Chris and I shared a love for songs by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. They’re a British songwriting team who wrote dozens of huge pop dance hits, including Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” and Kylie Minogue’s “I Should Be So Lucky.”

When Chris and I wrote the music for our chorus, we used a variation of a satisfying chord sequence that Stock, Aitken and Waterman sometimes used: A-flat, B-flat, G-minor 7 and C-minor.

We also wanted our song to be elegiac rather than a rave, but we didn’t want it to be a dirge. Elegiac music is more effecting when it’s uplifting, creating a happy-sad feeling.

In May 1990, we began to record our album, “Behaviour.” While we were at producer Harold Faltermeyer’s Red Deer Studios in Munich, Germany, I wrote the last verse on a typewriter.

It was about traveling the world in the 1980s as the Pet Shop Boys, recording in Munich and wishing my friend who had died was still here: “I never dreamt that I would get to be / the creature that I always meant to be / But I thought in spite of dreams / you’d be sitting somewhere here with me.”

The demo Chris and I created on our synthesizer was our rehearsal for the recording session. We brought the reel to Harold at his studio.

Harold Faltermeyer: When Neil and Chris first came to me, they played me their demo. Neil was a great lyricist and Chris was highly informed about trends in cutting-edge music and fashion. They said, “We want your expertise in analog synthesizers.”

To the average ear, a synthesizer is a synthesizer, especially back in the late ‘80s. But there are big differences. Early digital synthesizers had a simple sequence of operations to emulate various sounds.

Analog synthesizers give you much more flexibility to experiment and customize what you want. The results also are much warmer.

>From their demo, I could hear where the musical journey was supposed to go.

The first thing I did with Chris was create a drum loop. We used classic analog drum machines—the Roland TR-909, the TR-808 and TB-303, which had great bass sounds.

I started the song with a strings pad that opened faint and grew louder. I created this sound with a Roland Jupiter-8 analog synthesizer. I added five or six layers for a dense texture.

Mr. Tennant: I recorded my vocal on two separate tracks, an octave apart—one high and the other low. Then we took those and double-tracked them so there were four voices of me singing. I recorded my vocal softly, to give it a confidential and dreamy quality. My four tracks became a single ethereal vocal.

Mr. Faltermeyer: For the song’s melody played throughout the song, we used a combination of FM synthesizers—an Oberheim OB-8 and a Jupiter-8.

Then we used the Synclavier II for the harp glissando. It was a sample from a real harp. We used it in several places to signify when the song’s narrative was moving backward or forward in time.

Mr. Tennant: Chris and I returned to London. At SARM West Studios, we mixed the song and overdubbed additional elements with engineer and producer Julian Mendelsohn. Dominic Clarke, our programmer, began fooling around with a plastic tube he found in the studio. When he swung it around over his head, the wind caught the plastic lip and made a hypnotic sound that went up a fifth as he swung it faster.

Julian recorded Dominic swinging the tube and we added the results to the song’s synth intro.

I’ve always loved the guitar’s wah-wah effect made famous on Isaac Hayes’s “Theme From ‘Shaft.” At SARM, Julian brought in J.J. Belle to play guitar. His “wakka-wakka” sound made the song sort of funky.

Mr. Faltermeyer: Once we had J.J. Belle’s wah-wah guitar recorded, I took one of his licks and used it playing backward just after the drum loop starts during the introduction.

I kept Belle’s reverse lick subliminal throughout the song for coloration. My goal was to integrate a weird sound that was difficult for the listener to identify.

Throughout the song, I had the synth texture grow denser behind each verse so that by the third verse, it feels like a full orchestra

Mr. Tennant: When we finished the album, we asked Bruce Weber to direct our “Being Boring” video. When we met with Bruce, Chris and I had some complicated idea about Latin gangs in New York filmed in black and white. To his credit, Bruce listened patiently. Then he came up with the idea of renting an empty house in the Hamptons on New York’s Long Island and filming fashion models preparing for a party and the party itself. It sounded about right to us.

Blimey, the record company hated the video. I don’t think they were pleased with the naked guy in the beginning or flashes of the couple having sex at the end. But the video looked very beautiful and had the right atmosphere for the song.

“Being Boring” was never a huge hit but somehow people either discovered the song or heard about it from people who already loved it.

During our tour in 1991, when we performed in L.A., our manager told us Axl Rose, the lead singer of Guns N’ Roses, was outside our dressing room. When Axl came in, he said, “Man, why didn’t you play ‘Boring’?” We thought it was too gentle a song to be performed live in the States. We obviously were wrong.

I think Christopher Dowell, my friend who died of AIDS, would have liked the song and the video. Christopher was larger than life. He studied drama and dominated our group of friends. He was gay but we weren’t lovers. I admired his self-confidence. “Being Boring” is a memorial to him and our friendship.


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