“In writing the lyrics I was imagining myself being a woman. I always find political scandals a good source for songs. At the time Edward Kennedy had a mistress in a shared apartment in New York. That song was written from the point of view of that woman: whether it was a love affair, whether it was a sex thing. What her motive is, how she feels about it now. That’s why there’s no conjunction, because it’s ambivalent whether she loves him or not.”Neil Tenant (351)

“I have another lyric writing scheme which is to read a book and condense the book into a song. I read a short story by Arthur Koestler, a Viennese novelist. I had an idea for a song title, “Casanova in Hell”, and what it would be like if he couldn’t shag anymore, because it was so much of his life. And of course that’s what did happen at the end of his life. He was exiled in his castle in the Czech Republic and he was a libertarian.”Neil Tenant (352)

“I’d read this book called “The Italian Boy”. It’s about the people who used to dig up graves and sell the bodies. They were called resurrectionists.”Neil Tenant (352)

“Is all about Shostakovich.”Neil Tenant (352)

“I’d read this book about Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler’s pimp. It’s rather a sad story because broadly speaking he was innocent and he ends up killing himself because he’s going to go down.”Neil Tenant (352)

“We loved Eminem on the first and second album. That’s why we wrote this song for him. He said he wasn’t homophobic so we portrayed him as gay. I’m just playing a character, a gay Eminem.”Neil Tenant (353)

“In ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ that line [‘You dance to disco and you don’t like rock’ – Ed] gives the idea that the girl sees the guy as a closet queen and she thinks that if he dances to disco, he’s not really a man and he hasn’t faced up to this. The title actually comes from a book by Trollope, the first of the Pallister novels. I was reading it on holiday and a friend of mine said ‘That’s a good title, isn’t it? Sounds really modern!’ [The whole lyric is quite disturbing, the notion of someone enduring endless humiliation at the hands of someone they love – Ed]. That’s exactly what it’s about, humiliation. It’s also about someone not facing up to something about themselves, about sexuality. There’s the bit about the cricket pavilion and the bicycle shed, thinking back to first sexual experiences. I actually think it’s a bit Soft Cell-ish that bit, it’s a bit pervy.”Neil Tenant (790)

“It’s just a happy song, it’s just meant to be a love song. Actually, it is from an unusual point of view. We always get this thing where people go on about how English and reserved we are, so it’s meant to be a reserved person falling in love. There’s something rather middle-aged about it, like some kind of librarian falling in love and going mad. It’s got that line in it about taking off all my clothes and dancing to the rite of spring, and, you know, I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing. It’s funny.”Neil Tenant (790)

“Well, the song itself is an anxiety dream. I read somewhere that it’s a very common dream for people to have in Britain where the Queen comes for tea, that’s where I got the idea from. And a very, very common anxiety dream for people to have is that they’re walking down the street with no clothes on. I know I quite often have that dream. I just put those two dreams together and then linked it with anxieties about AIDS. The Queen is complaining that Lady Di’s marriage has broken up and that love never seems to last, and then Lady Di chips in that she’s thinking of AIDS. Then the person having the dream wakes in a sweat terrified by this idea that there is no more love in the world. But it’s a sort of funny song too, I think.”Neil Tenant (790)

“We always have done, maybe because I had a friend who had AIDS, one of my closest friends from Newcastle. When we were doing Actually, it was against the background of a close friend being in a hospital bed. I think as time goes on people get more and more hardened to AIDS, but at that time it was rather traumatic. ‘It Couldn’t Happen Here’ from Actually is about AIDS, and of course ‘Being Boring’ is after this friend of mine had died. Today I find myself knowing quite a few people who have AIDS, and I think it’s good to write about it.”Neil Tenant (790)

“We always have done, maybe because I had a friend who had AIDS, one of my closest friends from Newcastle. When we were doing Actually, it was against the background of a close friend being in a hospital bed. I think as time goes on people get more and more hardened to AIDS, but at that time it was rather traumatic. ‘It Couldn’t Happen Here’ from Actually is about AIDS, and of course ‘Being Boring’ is after this friend of mine had died. Today I find myself knowing quite a few people who have AIDS, and I think it’s good to write about it.”Neil Tenant (790)

“The general characterization of Bush around the world is that he’s sort of a moron and that Blair is a more thoughtful, European liberal politician. We took a satirical look at their relationship by comparing them to lovers. I sing the song as Tony Blair, who slowly realizes that Bush is actually smarter than he is. When he sings ‘Is stupid really stupid or a different kind of smart?,’ he’s beginning to see he’s been taken for a ride. There’s a peculiar style in America where politicians present themselves in an apolitical way. Reagan pretends to be an everyman who isn’t political and Bush says he’s an outsider, but they can’t be that clueless because they get everyone to follow their agenda. I’m a great believer in taking them seriously and not saying they’re idiots, because somehow they’ve got us to where we are now.”Neil Tenant (791)

“Newspapers and TV stations are crafting news stories to make them sound exciting, with exciting music behind the images, to create another kind of stimulating distraction. The 24-hour news channels are especially thoughtless. They have so much time to fill that they present stories of tragedy in a cynical, brutal way, where death and destruction become another form of entertainment.”Neil Tenant (791)