Being Boring [7" Edit]

Being Boring [7" Edit]

Pet Shop Boys

“Being Boring” is a song by the British pop group Pet Shop Boys, the opening track from their fourth album Behaviour. As the second single release from the album, following “So Hard”, “Being Boring” was not particularly successful upon release, only reaching number twenty in the UK Singles Chart and being the first single released by the group not to get into the Top 10 since “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)” four years previously.

The song is concerned with the idea of growing up and how people’s perceptions and values change as they grow older. The title apparently materialised after someone in Japan accused the duo of being boring. The title is also derived from a Zelda Fitzgerald quotation, “she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring”. In an interview in 1993, Neil Tennant described “Being Boring” as “one of the best songs that we’ve written”, and said that “For me it is a personal song because it’s about a friend of mine who died of AIDS, and so it’s about our lives when we were teenagers and how we moved to London, and I suppose me becoming successful and him becoming ill.”