Home > Behaviour >

This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 1990
Original album - Behaviour
Producer - Harold Faltermeyer, Pet Shop Boys
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - (none)

Lyrically, this song is a recollection of Neil's Catholic school days and the sense of isolation and intense dissatisfaction he felt there. It's a "dream narrative"—as revealed in the last verse, "I dreamt I was back in uniform"—in which he apparently at first doesn't realize where he is; hence the title line at the end of each rendition of the chorus, signaling that ultimate realization. (It's worth noting that after this song was released, the masters at Neil's old school went so far as to express publicly their dismay at their former pupil's stated sentiments.)

One email correspondent has also pointed out a possible connection between the great Irish author James Joyce's semi-autobiographical 1916 novella A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—particularly its opening scene of its protagonist watching a school football match from the sidelines while trying to keep his hands warm—and the lyric "… we shiver in the rain by the touchline," and perhaps with other parts of the song as well. It's a fascinating possibility, though I'm not aware of any commentary by Neil or Chris along these lines.

Musically, the backing track was originally recorded as part of the Pet Shop Boys' thoughts about scoring the James Bond film The Living Daylights in 1987. Contrary to common belief—at least among those who know anything about it at all—their music wasn't "rejected" by the Bond franchise. Rather, the Boys had, according to Neil, never actually been asked to record music for the film, but had heard that they might be asked and recorded this music with that in mind. As it turned out, the task of providing the title song fell to the Norwegian band A-ha, best known for their huge 1985 international hit "Take On Me."

That's Chris, his voice distorted via vocoder, intoning the repeated line, "Everybody jump to attention"—a device that according to the Boys bears the influence of Steve "Silk" Hurley's 1986 house music hit "Jack Your Body."

Annotations

"Each morning after Sunblest" – Sunblest is a brand of baked goods popular in the U.K. The Sunblest product line includes many products specifically meant for breakfast, including muffins, hot cross buns, and pancakes. In response to a question posed on their official website back in 2000, Neil said that he was referring specifically to Sunblest bread, which he used to eat for breakfast each morning before classes. Apparently less popular today as a brand than it was during Neil's childhood, Sunblest is used in the song as a rather poetic, synecdochical metaphor for breakfast itself, in much the same way that an American might say something like, "Each morning after Kellogg's." (Kellogg's being among the most popular brands of breakfast cereal). As one of my site visitors has noted, "Sunblest" also offers an interesting juxtaposition with the words "benefit" and "benediction" in the same verse, all of them words that suggest "blessings" in one form or another.
"… in time for benediction" – The benediction is the portion of a religious service in which the congregation is blessed ("benediction" being derived from Latin roots meaning "to bless" and "to speak"; that is, "to speak the blessing"). At Catholic schools, very often the day begins with a benediction service—ostensibly to get the day off to a good start.
"When we fall in love there's confusion" – It's a Catholic boys' school. That pretty much sums the source of confusion in a nutshell.
The lyrics are replete with references to disillusionment with the standards and beliefs of the environment in which young Neil finds himself, such as "Living a law just short of delusion" and "To our voices nobody's listening," the latter of which may refer both to the schoolmasters who don't pay attention to the ideas and feelings of the boys in their charge and to a God in whom he's finding it increasingly difficult to believe.
"We shiver in the rain by the touchline" – A touchline a primarily British term for one of the sidelines that serve as the boundaries of a sports playing field, such as in football (soccer) or rugby. (See the text above for a speculative theory about a possible relationship between this line and the opening scene of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.)
"A litany of saints and other ordinary men" – Although Neil sings about "a litany of saints," using an indefinite article (and without any capitalization in the official lyrics), this phrase is surely an intentional allusion to The Litany of Saints (my emphasis), a particular formulaic set of recited petitions used in the Roman Catholic Church that lists literally dozens of saints by name. Neil very pointedly, however, refers to saints as "other ordinary men," thereby denying that they're exceptional in any way—or at least in any ways other than those in which "ordinary" unsainted people might themselves be exceptional.
"Kneeling on the parquet" – A parquet is a wooden floor made of blocks forming a mosaic-like pattern. But one of my site visitors wrote to point out that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "parquet" can also refer to "the branch of the administration of the law that deals with the prosecution of crime." In view of this, it's possible that this line could allude to the enforcement of discipline at the school—especially considering the immediately following words, "Whatever has gone wrong?"
"History, someone had blundered" – Neil has acknowledged that these words are a meaningful echo of the fourth line in the second stanza of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's famous, fatalistic, and quite historical 1854 poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade":

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"And a voice rapped 'knuckle under!'" – To "knuckle under" is a common English-languge slang phrase meaning to submit to authority. In addition, the specific use of the verb "rapped"—hardly a casual or haphazard choice of word in the context of the song—quite likely makes this line a bit of word-play on the phrase "a rap on the knuckles," which can refer either literally or figuratively to a mild punishment applied to someone who has done something wrong.
Just before the start of the third verse, "Lenin" is shouted out by a choir, excerpted from a recording of Dmitri Shostakovitch's Second Symphony.
The sampled Russian during the track's fadeout comes from a speech made by the Soviet state prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky during one of the infamous Stalinist show trials of 1938. Vyshinsky is saying, "Требует наш народ одного: раздавите проклятую гадину" (translated, "Our people demand only one thing: to crush this vermin!") That last part is a paraphrase of the great French writer Voltaire's famous phrase "Écrasez l'infâme!" ("Crush the infamy!" often idiomatically translated as "Crush the vermin!"), used often in his essays and letters. These come across as curious insertions given the "non-Russian" context of the song. It's seemed quite possible, however, that the Boys were implicitly comparing the authoritarian regimen of a Catholic school (at least of Neil's youth) to communist totalitarianism. As it turns out, Neil confirmed this comparison as their intention in an interview with a French journalist around the time Behaviour was released. And as Neil pointed out decades later in his book One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem, he "intended the title in particular could also refer to the communist past of the central and eastern European countries recently liberated from Soviet domination…."

Mixes/Versions

Officially released

Mixer: Julian Mendelsohn
- Album version (5:31)
  - Available on Behaviour
- 3" Extended Mix (9:28)
  - Available on the 3-inch CD bonus disc accompanying the Japanese special edition of the Behaviour
- 5" Extended Mix (7:24)

Official but unreleased

Mixer(s): unknown
- 7-inch version (3:48)
  - Appears on an official EMI reference CD by Abbey Road Studios designed for client review before determing the tracks for the 2001 reissues bonus Further Listening discs.

List cross-references

All text on this website aside from direct quotations (such as of lyrics and of other nonoriginal content) is copyright © 2001-2024 by Wayne Studer. All Rights Reserved. All lyrics and images are copyright © their respective dates by their respective owners. Brief quotations and small, low-resolution images are used for identification and critical commentary, thereby constituting Fair Use under U.S. copyright law. Billboard chart data are copyright © their respective dates by Nielsen Business Media, Inc.