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Although not as commercially successful as many of their singles, “Being Boring” may well be the most beautiful thing the Pet Shop Boys ever recorded.Over a lush musical soundscape of warm basslines and sustained strings, Neil Tennant opens up lyrically,

Pet Shop Boys Song facts

Composer
Pet Shop Boys

Genre
Pop

Album
Behaviour

Year of release
1990

UK Chart Position
20 giving a simple chronological account of his life and times, with plenty of clever colour and insight into his 20s and 30s.
But it’s with the last of the three verses that “Being Boring” really makes its magic felt, as the tone shifts from one of gentle reminiscence to become a lament for friends lost: “All the people I was kissing/ Some are here and some are missing/ In the nineteen-nineties”.
That verse takes on extra poignancy with the knowledge that Tennant had recently lost a close friend to AIDS, but despite that the song retains an air of positivity: more a celebration of life than a mourning of death.
The title itself comes from the novelist F Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda, herself an author, who wrote: “She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.”

Neil Tennant on composing Being Boring

Neil Tennant

Neil Tennant reveals the story behind writing the song Being Boring - "Being Boring is about this friend of mine dying of AIDS when he was really quite young".
 
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Pet Shop Boys

  The Pet Shop Boys released a remixed version of Being Boring on their CD single in 1990.

I think time has proved that this was sorely under-rated and has gone on to be a classic track from the 1990's.

Anon
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