Being Boring.

one of the cleverest pop songs ever written, and most people miss it.

I drive a lot, so I listen a lot, and every so often a song I've known for years suddenly opens up. Being Boring by the Pet Shop Boys is that song for me. On the surface it's a lovely, slightly sad bit of early 90s pop. Underneath it's something else entirely.

The nerd in me loves how it's built. Every verse has a set-up, then what that moment meant to Neil Tennant, and then the chorus comes back as the refrain of how they wanted to live: never holding back, never settling for a boring life.

It's not the decades you think it is.

Listen casually and you'd swear it's about the 1920s, the 70s and the 90s. It isn't. It starts in the early 70s, with a teenage Neil in the North East finding old photos and a party invitation quoting Zelda Fitzgerald from 1922: "she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring." The 20s are just the spark. That spark convinces him there's a life out there beyond home, and he goes, despite everyone around him warning him he'll end up with nothing.

Then the song jumps straight to the 90s. Dreams achieved, sitting in rented rooms in foreign places, looking back.

And the main part of the story? The 80s. It's never actually sung about.

The gap is the whole song.

The 80s were Neil's breakout, his success and his most hedonistic years. They were also the years AIDS tore through the gay scene in London. What makes it even more difficult is the demonisation that came with it, from papers and politicians alike. People were going through the toughest challenges and grief of their lives while being made to feel they'd be shunned by everyone else for it.

Neil's point is simple. What he wanted was a full life: expression, joy and love. No different to most of us, but treated so differently because of who he loved.

The line that gets me every time.

…..but I thought, in spite of dreams, you’d be sitting somewhere here with me”

He never says why that person isn't there. He doesn't need to. The friend who threw that 70s party, the one with the Zelda quote on the invitation, died of AIDS in 1989, aged 34, just months before Neil wrote the song. It's personal experience written with beautiful subtlety.

Neil has since said it's the most gay song they ever wrote, and nobody noticed at the time. All in all it's an elegant and thoughtful way to write about a blunt and loaded topic.

Go back and give it another listen, with the gap in the middle in mind….. trust me, you'll hear a different song.