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"Being Boring" is a single by the British pop group Pet Shop Boys, released on 12 November 1990.
As the second single from the 1990 album Behaviour, after "So Hard" which was released before the album, "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".
The track was originally pieced together in a studio in West Glasgow, where the music for "My October Symphony," "The End Of The World" and the unreleased "Love And War" were also done.
Despite the moderate success of the track on album charts, "Being Boring" has been a regularly-played song at concerts and it's widely considered one of the best and most beautiful "Pet's songs" by the fans. Ironically, due to various factors, including it being hard to sing, it wasn't performed on the Performance Tour in 1991. This led to many fans, including Axl Rose, complaining of its omission.
The song (not the group) is one of the few ones to have an entire website dedicated to it, with around 150 pages of commentaries, research, quotations, compilations of interviews, etc.
The song has been quoted as being one of the Pet Shop Boys' more personal and favourite ones and Chris Lowe has voiced his disappointment about this song not performing well in an interview to "The World" on Channel 4. The Lyrics deal with the devastation brought on by the loss of a close friend to AIDS, Chris Dowell, the memories of friendship in one's youth and the experiences of being away from home while touring. The Pet Shop Boys have repeatedly stated that this song is "kind of charged with tons of emotion". (Chris Lowe on "About the Pet Shop Boys", BBC Radio One)
The video, the first by fashion-photographer Bruce Weber, totally in black and white, shows a house party and begins with a nude swimmer and a message: "I came from Newcastle in the North of England. We used to have lots of parties where everyone got dressed up and on one party invitation was the quote 'she was never bored because she was never boring'. The song is about growing up - the ideals that you have when you're young and how they turn out".
The b-side, "We All Feel Better In The Dark" was written around a piece of music Chris Lowe had composed. As he explains, "The idea came from a tape I bought from a health food shop round the corner from the studio:The Secrets Of Sexual Attraction. The words are terrible. Awful. Embarrassing."
The track proved to be a fan favourite and was performed live during their Performance Tour in 1991. The remix 12" includes two mixes of the track by Brothers In Rhythm.
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