Being Boring

The song is about growing up and how perceptions and values change with age. The title began with a Japanese review that accused the duo of being boring. It reminded Tennant of a line by Zelda Fitzgerald, she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring, which his friend Christopher Dowell had paraphrased on a party invitation in the 1970s. As teenagers in Newcastle they had agreed they would not settle for boring lives. Tennant said in 1993 that it was one of the best songs they had written, and that it was personal because it was about a friend who had died of AIDS, about their teenage years, about moving to London, and about his own success and his friend's illness. Dowell died in 1989.

It was written between 1989 and 1990. They demoed it in a studio in West Glasgow, where the music for My October Symphony and The End of the World was also written. Lowe decided the music should imitate Stock Aitken Waterman by rising a semitone into the chorus, to give it an uplifting feel. Tennant wrote the last verse in a rented room in Munich in 1990, wishing his friend were still there.

Recording

Harold Faltermeyer worked on the demo at Red Deer Studios in Munich. The basis was a Roland TR-808 and TR-909, with a Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer, a Jupiter-8 and an Oberheim OB-8 on the melody, and a Synclavier for the harp glissandos. At Sarm West in London, Julian Mendelsohn helped record the wakka-wakka guitar of J. J. Belle, which was influenced by Isaac Hayes's Theme from Shaft. Dominic Clarke played a plastic tube.

Release and afterlife

Released on 12 November 1990 as the second single from Behaviour, it entered the British chart at 36 and peaked at 20 the next week. That ended a streak of ten consecutive top 10 hits. The video was the first by the photographer Bruce Weber, a black and white house party on Long Island shot in one day. Brief male nudity kept it off MTV, and it won Music Week's Best Video of the Year award.

The song was left out of the 1991 Performance Tour at first. Fans complained, and it was added late in the tour as an encore that the band said invariably got the best reception of the night. The Guardian's Alexis Petridis put it first in his 2023 ranking of their songs, calling it not just one of the greatest songs about the Aids epidemic but one of the greatest songs written about mortality and memory. Barry Walters of Pitchfork wrote that the lines about all the people I was kissing, some here and some missing, still reduce gay men who lived through the era to tears. BBC Radio 2's Sold on Song placed it at number 80 in its Top 100. George Michael chose it as one of his Desert Island Discs. In 2024 the duo released a new recording on the bonus EP Furthermore.