Some Speculation
Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 1994
Original album - Alternative
Producer - Pet Shop Boys
Subsequent albums - Very 2001 reissue Further Listening 1992-1994 bonus disc
Other releases - bonus track with single "Yesterday, When I Was Mad"
Neil, who sings the entire song in falsetto (fairly unusual for him), says this is simply "about someone being unfaithful." Interestingly, the narrator points out that he, too, has been where the person to whom he's speaking is going: "Going away with someone new—yesterday I went there, too." But is "there" an actual physical place, or is it a "state of mind," or even a "state of the soul"? In answering a question submitted (not by me) to the official PSB site in November 2003, Neil responded that it was indeed a "state of mind" to which the narrator has also gone, so to speak.
Neil concedes that this pulsating, almost ominous track with an extremely heavy bass line sounds "very, very eerie." It wouldn't at all have been out of place on Relentless, which boasts a few fairly eerie tracks of its own. In fact, both "Some Speculation" and "Euroboy" seem to share pretty much the same basic, predominantly instrumental aesthetic as Relentless. I suspect it was only their having been tapped as single b-sides/bonus tracks that kept them off that limited-edition release. With the benefit of hindsight, Neil has wished aloud that they had saved Relentless, fleshed out with "Some Speculation" and "Euroboy," and had released it as an album on its own (rather than as a bonus with the special edition of Very) in place of Disco 2.
List cross-references
- The key signatures of selected PSB songs
- What it's about: Neil's succinct statements on what a song is "about"
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