Being boring
The second single taken off Behaviour is ‘Being Boring’ released on November 12, 1990. The song is inspired by a party invitation from Neil’s Newcastle days which quoted Zelda Fitzgerald’s line “She was never bored, mainly because she was never boring”. Its video was the first to be made by photographer and film-maker Bruce Weber, “I loved the lyrics”, he explained “and really felt it was something I wanted to be part of… in it there’s the feeling that times are different today, and the feeling of abandoness we can’t have today because of the way the world is”. It was shot in one day at a house in Long Island, near New York, with a cast that included a selection of Weber’s beautiful friends, a horse and a chimpanzee on roller-skates. Though MTV in America, and several British TV shows refused to show it because of the nudity included, it won Music Week’s Best Video Of The Year Award. On the same day, a book about the Pet Shop Boys, ‘Pet Shop Boys Literally’, written with their consent and based around their 1989 concerts is published. At a London bookshop on November 23rd they sign over 800 copies before the police had to break up the waiting crowd.