Screaming
Writers - Tennant/Lowe/Stephan
First released - 1998
Original album - Psycho soundtrack (1998, various artists)
Producer - Pet Shop Boys
Subsequent albums - Format, Nightlife 2017 reissue Further Listening 1996-2000 bonus disc
Other releases - bonus track with single "I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Any More"; bonus disc with the U.S. "special edition" of Nightlife
The Pet Shop Boys offered this stomping ditty about obsessive infatuation—more specifically, according to Neil, "written from an obsessive fan's point of view"—for the soundtrack of Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake of Psycho without having seen the film itself. (It's "the easiest way to get a lot of money from Hollywood," as Neil told an interviewer for the German magazine Galore.) As a result, it first appeared on the 1998 Psycho soundtrack. It later resurfaced, in a very slightly altered version, on the "I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Any More" CD single.
Ordinarily one wouldn't look askance at the narrator's inability to get the object of his affection off his mind. It's actually rather run-of-the-mill stuff for pop music. But in the context of Psycho, it's downright disturbing. Equally odd is the break in the middle of the track, where the music and rhythm all but drop out altogether, leaving atonal, weirdly distorted vocalizations of the title. Innovative, to be sure, but it somehow doesn't come off very well.
Otherwise the music, co-written with keyboardist Tom Stephan (aka Superchumbo), is very much in the latter-day vein of "Shameless" and "Delusions of Grandeur," in which it would seem that Neil and Chris allow over-the-top production to serve as a shorthand for irony. This had been a terrific device previously, but by 1998 it was starting to get old. Still, it was great to see the Boys making a serious bid to reinstate themselves in the good graces of mainstream U.S. pop music, even it did prove somewhat futile.
In Issue 20 (July 1999) of the PSB fan-club publication Literally, the lyrics for an "unreleased version" of this song were provided along with those of the released version. Among these are lines ("I'd like to know … why when we're born underneath such a clear sky, we're lost in the forest at dusk when we die") that, in a slightly modified form, would shortly turn up in "Happiness Is an Option." Except for the identical chorus ("Guess there's no place to hide …"), these alternate lyrics are so radically different not only in wording but in rhythmic structure that it seems likely that this unreleased version has an altogether different melody, at least for the verses. It would be wonderful if the Boys could see fit to release this other version someday.
Annotations
- Director Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake of the classic 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho was extremely unusual in that it was virtually a shot-for-shot, word-for-word recreation of the original, the primary differences being of course a different cast, being reset in the modern day, and being filmed in color (the Hitchcock film was in black-and-white). Many film critics took it to task on this very score, deriding it as, at best, an interesting but failed experiment. The PSB song "Screaming," while conveying a sense of ominous threat that's not wholly inappropriate to the mood of the film, really has little else in relation to the plot. The character of Norman Bates—the homicidal "psycho" of the title—isn't an obsessive stalker of the sort described in the lyrics; the people he murders are those he only recently met. In fact, "Screaming" doesn't appear in the film at all. Its inclusion on the soundtrack album is justified by the album's subtitle: "Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture." (Whether "Screaming" was truly "inspired by" Psycho is perhaps a debatable point.) By the same token, some other tracks on the album also don't appear in the film. But this isn't unusual in the least; it's fairly common these days for soundtrack albums to include songs that don't actually appear in the films that allegedly "inspired" them.
- "Screaming" contains a brief "processed" sample of the voice of U.S. performance artist Karen Finley taken from the 1988 film Mondo New York.
Mixes/Versions
Officially released
- Mixer: Goetz Botzenhardt
- Psycho soundtrack version (4:54)
- Single b-side/Nightlife bonus CD version (4:55)
- Also available on one of the "Further Listening" bonus discs accompanying the 2017 Nightlife reissue
- Note: These two versions differ only slightly, the most noticeable variation being that the Psycho soundtrack version lacks the brief, distorted samples of dialogue from the film that appear during the instrumental break of the other version. (You'd think it would be the other way around—that the soundtrack version would include samples from the film—but that's not the case.)
List cross-references
- PSB songs that they themselves apparently dislike
- What it's about: Neil's succinct statements on what a song is "about"
All text on this website aside from direct quotations (such as of lyrics and of other nonoriginal content) is copyright © 2001-2020 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.