An excerpt from ‘Being Boring’, an interview between musicians Neil Tennant of the ‘Pet Shop Boys’ and James Righton of ‘The Klaxons’ featured within A Magazine Curated By Erdem.
James Righton: ‘Being Boring’ is my favourite song of yours. Is it autobiographical?
Neil Tennant: Yes, it is. When I was a teenager, I had a close group of friends in Newcastle centred on the People’s Theatre, a big amateur theatre which had a youth group that I was a member of. My first musical collaboration was a folk group called Dust, inspired by the Incredible String Band, which a friend and I started and wrote songs for. ‘Being Boring’ tells the story of this friendship and how we moved to London, and our lives evolved with me becoming one of the Pet Shop Boys at the same time as he was diagnosed with AIDS and then died. So it’s really an autobiographical elegy based on our mission statement from the early 1970s that we never wanted to live boring lives in routine jobs which we felt our education was pushing us towards.
JR: ‘Being Boring’ was from a Zelda Fitzgerald quote that was written on an invitation to a party when you were 17. What party was it? You were in Newcastle?
NT: Yes, it was a party in I think 1973 which my friend organised. He called it The Great Urban Dionysia which sounds very grand when actually it was a house party in a suburb of Gateshead! But we were fascinated by the Bright Young Things of the 1920s, and they had thrown a party with this name. The invitation indeed quoted Zelda Fitzgerald: ‘She was never bored, mainly because she was never boring.’ And that quote partly inspired the lyrics of the song.
JR: What would a 17-year-old you make of you today?
NT: The 17-year-old me used to go around Newcastle telling people that he was going to become a pop star, so I think he’d be delighted with how things turned out. It seemed both very unlikely but also possible. I never gave up on writing songs, and then when I met Chris Lowe, everything fell into place.
JR: Zelda was never boring… In life, what do you find utterly boring?
NT: Pointless polite social occasions.