Oh Behave! (Patreon)

It struck me that if I write something chunky about music I really should put it here, so here's a (one-draft) thing I wrote in an hour or two about the Pet Shop Boys' 1990 LP for a Twitter poll that isn't my Twitter poll. Hope you like it!

The Pet Shop Boys got called “ironic” a lot in their early days - meaning too arch, too tongue-in-cheek, too distanced from the messy emotionality of real life and ‘real music’. Their stage presence felt like an elaborate kayfabe: two men, often in the latest haute couture, one drily announcing himself into a mic, the other slate-faced behind a bank of synths.

Behaviour is not ironic - it’s an album stuffed with romantic ballads and torch songs - but the band never were, really. What they were was intensely, intelligently, self-conscious. Tennant, the ex pop critic, is the pop star who came up with the notion of the “imperial phase” when everything goes right and the critics and public love you even when you overreach yourself.

He also knew, of course, how difficult the comedown from that can be, and how carefully it needs to be negotiated. Once their string of 1987-88 hits dried up, once they were no longer flavour of the pop month, the hard work had to be done to establish the Pet Shop Boys as a fixture, a serious proposition. In the 1990 words of another closeted gay pop star facing the same problem on an international scale, how do you get people to listen without prejudice?

So Behaviour is a deliberately low-key, post-Imperial, intimate record. Tennant is at his most vulnerable lyrically (the songs are full of self-doubt and lost love) but also vocally (the whole LP relies on his reedy high end). Lowe - fresh from arranging songs for Dusty Springfield and Liza Minelli - steps fully back from the NYC Hi-NRG template that underpinned their hits, integrates their sound with orchestration and coaxes everything from Moroder disco to beatbox minimalism to quiet storm balladry out of his synths. The LP opens with a wash of keyboard - so far so PSB - but it’s topped with a lick of wah-wah guitar, a sound so tied to the 70s it had been pretty much exiled from respectable pop for most of a decade.

The wah-wah leads into a song about the 70s and one of the group’s greatest songs. “Being Boring” is about being young, being alive, and how time passes after that: from wah-wah to bongos to Barry White twinkly strings to the flared guitar solo that closes the extended mix, it’s stuffed with nostalgic signifiers while the song itself wallows in and gently picks apart nostalgia.

Anthony Powell, in his Dance To The Music Of Time novel sequence, took 12 books to do what the Pet Shop Boys manage in 6 minutes - create a masterpiece about how the events of your youth ripple and transform their meaning across a life. “Being Boring” is fiercely proud of Tennant’s youth but also of his adulthood - he came through, he did what he wanted. And what makes it so quietly devastating at the same time is its unspoken context. Tennant wasn’t out in 1990 but his sexuality was hardly a secret either. When he sings, of his 70s friends and lovers, “some are here and some are missing in the 1990s”, it’s not because they’ve sold out and moved to the suburbs. On future records he’d address the AIDS pandemic a bit more directly, but “Being Boring” (with its uncompromising male-on-male gaze video) made its point powerfully. Our lives mattered. Our culture mattered. Our youth mattered. (And hey - so can yours)

Behaviour starts with its best song but it’s not a one-hit album. “Being Boring” does set the tone, though - this is the Pet Shop Boys record for late-night listening and self-contemplation. (Their previous LP, a collection of extended dance mixes, was the one they called Introspective - I didn’t say they were never ironic). “This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave” revisits Tennant’s boyhood, the same territory as “It’s A Sin” but a song of brooding, stifling gothic tradition not pop defiance. “How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously” is one of the record’s few attempts at a banger, and its weakest track, an attack on a pompous rock star, most likely Bono, which isn’t as venomous or specific as it needs to be (it works best if you imagine it as self-criticism, to be honest).

Side 1’s other songs establish Behaviour’s main theme - this is a record about growing up, yes, but you can be proud of the adult you’ve become while still completely unable to make relationships with other adults work. Behaviour is an LP whose songs sit in the cracks in relationships - full of the misunderstandings, mistrusts, and petty cruelties that breed in them. “To Face The Truth” is a pure sad ballad, Tennant’s voice quavering and naked as he outlines a one-sided relationship. “Only The Wind” is even starker, just beatbox and piano and Tennant singing about an affair in its terminal, exhausted stages.

The best terrible-relationship songs on Behaviour are its two other singles, “So Hard” and “Jealousy”. “So Hard” is the record’s only real concession to the dancefloor, but what a track it is - a pumping tribute to Moroder’s motorik rhythms on “I Feel Love” with Tennant back in his drily spiteful mode, pleading for relief in a chronically unfaithful relationship with lots of the LP’s most quotable lines. (It’s a very hard song to do at karaoke, by the way - the rhythms and the melodic jumps both catch you by surprise). “Jealousy” is the pull-all-the-stops-out finale, string-drenched production turning the humiliation of late-night paranoia into the desperate dignity of a torchy epic.

The imperial phase Pet Shop Boys would not have done “Jealousy”, or “Being Boring”, or “Only The Wind”. They would have done “So Hard”, and the enjoyable pop of “End Of The World”, a needed filler before “Jealousy”’s sturm und drang. They might have tried tender gay-awakening ballad “Nervously”, but they would never have attempted whatever the hell “My October Symphony” is (A swingers’ party soundtrack for the fall of the Berlin Wall? Fine, whatever)

Overall, though, Behavior is a band very deliberately expanding its range and saying “You thought we just did that stuff? Well, we also do this.” At the time - as a huge fan of ‘that stuff’ - I was a little baffled and disappointed by it. Now, with my own teenage parties far behind me, I absolutely love it. A tip, though: listen to the “Further Listening 1990-1991” version of the LP - the decision to make a sad ballad LP means that some absolutely killer uptempo tracks landed on the era’s B-Sides.

And the great thing is, it worked! Behaviour got terrific reviews, was immediately established as the Mature Pet Shop Boys LP (an un-fun reputation to have, but true to the material) and killed any lingering sense that this was a flash-in-the-pan group rather than one of Britain’s great songwriting partnerships. By doing Behaviour, the Pet Shop Boys created space for themselves to do anything, and so it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that next time they came back it was wearing ridiculous cone hats with the most aggressively pop sound of their career. But that’s another story.