George Michael on the band who wrote “the most beautiful songs” of the 1980s
In the 1980s, there was an obsession surrounding George Michael. He was Britain’s biggest pop star, successfully steering the genre from total commercial oblivion with a voice that could hit notes with an accuracy akin to swatting flies with a chopstick, but that wasn’t where the obsession stopped. Up until he came out on live TV in 1998 as a homosexual, he was constantly under press scrutiny.
This pressure took a hefty toll on the star, but thankfully, he had fitting allies to share the artistic load when it came to ensuring pop was an inclusive, societally cognisant, and pioneering place with the Pet Shop Boys. He typified the brilliance of the band when he selected their anthem ‘Being Boring’ as one of his favourite songs of all time on Desert Island Discs.
The track arrived in 1990 after a decade that had been blighted by an AIDS epidemic. “No one wants to hear frightening, terrifying songs about AIDS. But they do, if they’re gay and they’ve lost friends, they do want to hear those people referred to and remembered and honoured,” Michael explained. “I think some of Neil [Tennant’s] work did that beautifully.”
Tennant himself offered up a very similar appraisal for the poignant song when he appeared on The South Bank Show in 1991. “A lot of songs come about personal experience,” he said. “The song ‘Being Boring,’ which I think is one of our best songs… I was reminded of a party we had when I was living in Newcastle as a teenager, and it quoted the Zelda Fitzgerald quote: ‘She was never bored mainly because she was never boring’.”
Continuing, he added: “A very good friend of my from that era, my best friend really, had died of AIDS. So it was a kind of an elegy for him, for the part of myself in Newcastle, all my friends in Newcastle when I went to London, then what I was doing then and he wasn’t there. And so it became a really elegiac song.”
This level of artistic honesty had a profound impact on society. In fact, much of their music transfigured the tragedy of the epidemic into a measure of communion, pride, love and defiance. This left Michael in awe, with the star commenting that Tennant and Chris Lowe of Pet Shop Boys were writing “the most beautiful” music of the decade.
The admiration between the two musical giants was mutual, too. During an interview with The Guardian, Tennant recalled a comical experience that his band had while waiting to perform at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics back in 2012. “We were in these Portakabin-y dressing rooms and the person next to us is playing music unbelievably loudly,” he said.
“I said to our tour manager: ‘Can you go and ask him to turn that down, please?’” he continued. “And suddenly the door flings open and George, who we hadn’t seen since he’d been in jail, comes in and says: ‘Did you just tell me to turn my music down?’ I said: ‘Yes, I did.’ And he says: ‘Give me a hug.’ And then he went back to his dressing room, put his stereo on and played ‘West End Girls’ – loudly.”
