CLASSIC ALBUM
BEHAVIOUR
PET SHOP BOYS
IN 1990, THE PET SHOP BOYS DECAMPED TO MUNICH INTENDING TO MAKE AN ALBUM OF “10 KYLIE MINOGUE SINGLES”. INSTEAD, THEY CREATED A MELANCHOLY CLASSIC INFORMED BY DEATH, INFIDELITY… AND THE MAN WHO WROTE AXEL F
OLIVER HURLEY
Neil Tennant remembers the moment clearly: it was September 1988 when it unexpectedly came to an end. “In 1987-88, we had three No.1 singles within the space of a year,” he told Pet Shop Boys biographer Chris Heath in a 1996 documentary broadcast on Radio 1. “And then when Domino Dancing came out, I remember being in a car in Sussex and listening to the chart on the radio, and it came in at No.9. This is a record we thought would go to No.1. I thought, ‘Oh well, that’s it. That’s that over.’” And thus concluded what shall forever be referred to as the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘imperial phase’.
If the album from which Domino Dancing was taken, Introspective, reflected dance culture at the time – with its sprawling, house-inspired tracks – then its follow-up, Behaviour, reacted against it.
Long considered to be the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘mature’ record, Behaviour is in fact a more complex and multi-faceted collection of songs than such a reductive tag would suggest.
From their earliest days, the Pet Shop Boys were ambitious writers of pop classics. Their first demo, recorded when they were still known as West End, comprised three tracks. Alongside the never-to-be-released Oh Dear! and Bubadubadubadum, both of which bore the influence of Vince Clarke-era Depeche Mode, was an intense song about unrequited love called Jealousy. Chris Lowe had written the music for it, on the piano in his parents’ dining room in Blackpool, in the spring of 1982. Tennant later observed that “it’s the first proper song we wrote”. It would finally be released eight years later as the closing track on Behaviour.
Jealously wasn’t the only song from the PSB vaults to find a home on Behaviour. To Face The Truth was completed in 1984, during Tennant and Lowe’s productive three-year period of recording demos in an eight-track studio in Camden run by musician Ray Roberts, while Nervously was primarily written by Tennant, on acoustic guitar, before he met Lowe. The music for some of the other songs, including Being Boring, How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously? and My October Symphony, was put together in 1989 in a small studio in west Glasgow that the Pet Shop Boys had hired – for the simple reason that they’d been to Glasgow on tour and liked it.
As per Nervously years earlier, the songs were written mainly on guitar, and were coloured by a resolutely downbeat sensibility.
Although that wasn’t necessarily the plan.
“We didn’t set out to ‘go mature’,” said Tennant in the Radio 1 doc. “We set out, as usual, to make an album where every track could be a single. We used to say at the time we’d started to make 10 Kylie Minogue singles… I think there was an expectation that we would be making a sort of rave, Manchester kind of album. In fact, we were quite influenced by what was going on there but, with the songs we had, it made it sound mellow.”