Being Boring (4:49)

“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.