Pet Shop Boys - being boring two thousand and twenty-four version, 2024

"it’s with the last of the three verses that “Being Boring” really makes its magic felt, as the tone shifts from one of gentle reminiscence to become a lament for friends lost: “All the people I was kissing/ Some are here and some are missing/ In the nineteen-nineties”. That verse takes on extra poignancy with the knowledge that Tennant had recently lost a close friend to AIDS, but despite that the song retains an air of positivity: more a celebration of life than a mourning of death. The title itself comes from the novelist F Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda, herself an author, who wrote: “She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.”