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I Didn't Get Where I Am Today

Writers - Tennant/Lowe/Lambert
First released - 2003
Original album - Format
Producer - Pet Shop Boys
Subsequent albums - Release 2017 reissue Further Listening 2001-2004 bonus disc
Other releases - bonus track with single "Flamboyant"

Rock and roll! Originally recorded during the Release sessions (and, like so many of the songs on that album, with Johnny Marr on guitar), this has been described by Neil as a "Sixties-ish sounding song" inspired by watching the Strokes perform at the famous nightclub Heaven. He has also noted that it took a very long time to write because he was "always changing the lyrics."

The Boys had originally planned to include it on Release—it was slated to be the ninth track, situated between "Here" and "The Night I Fell in Love"—but they changed their minds because they felt it didn't fit with the rest of the album. To be sure, the sunny, rollicking, upbeat sound might have seemed somewhat out of place. On the other hand, its "rock guitar sound" certainly wouldn't have been inappropriate, and it would at least have provided a refreshing contrast to the rest of the album's rather somber mood. I personally think it would have made a terrific album closer—not to mention an equally terrific single. In fact, Neil has since stated on more than one occasion that he, too, now regrets having removed it from Release. There's simply no other recording in the entire PSB catalog quite like it.

The aforementioned "sixties-ish" style (which reminds me more of the Monkees than anything else) is no accident. The track features a sample from an obscure 1968 pop record titled "Father's Name Is Dad" by the band Fire. This explains the authoring co-credit for Dave Lambert, the writer of that song. The lyrics, which take the form of a morose reverie arising from hearing some unidentifed music, sound intensely autobiographical, including such lines as—

I live my life on a stage
Put it down on the page
I didn’t get where I am today
Without writing a résumé

—that "résumé" presumably being his body of work. In marked contrast to the happy sound of the music, the overall mood of the lyrics is one of profound regret ("deep inside you’re sinking without a trace"), largely the result of missing chances for personal happiness while pursuing and gaining worldly success. In other words, it's the familiar story—and the lyrics recognize it as "that old cliché"—of someone who appears wildly successful to the outside world but who's actually miserable inside. But, cliché or not, he seems as surprised at this incongruity as anyone else.

The narrator is, in Neil's words, "an exaggeration of me" that's meant to be "jokey." Regardless, it's a fascinating study in contrasts—downbeat words juxtaposed against such upbeat music—that practically begs for an ironic interpretation.

Annotations

The title line is a common English-language clichéd expression—though often in its slight variation, "I didn't get to where I am today"—that's generally used just as it is in the song, to preface a statement about something the speaker did or didn't do in order to achieve his status in life. (It would be something he did do if it's "I didn't get to where I am today without…," while it would be something he didn't do if it's "I didn't get where I am today by…." As it turns out, "I didn't get where I am today without…" is how it's always used in the song.) By its very nature, which presumes certain qualities and experience on the part of the speaker, it's most commonly used by successful middle-aged people. Although it became a pop-culture catchphrase in the wake of its frequent use by just such a person (the central character's boss) on the popular late-1970s British sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, it didn't actually originate with that character, as is widely believed. Rather, it's the fact that it was already a cliché that lent much of the humor to his frequent use of it—that and the fact that he often followed it up with something utterly ridiculous, such as what is probably his single most famous utterance, "I didn't get where I am today by thinking."
Although the narrative persona in this song is Neil himself (or, as he put it, "an exaggeration of me"), it's possible that he may have been partly inspired, at least subconsciously, by a statement attributed to Madonna—"Honey, I didn't get where I am without being pushy"—when she reportedly spoke to the Boys backstage following one of her August 1987 "Who's That Girl?" tour shows at London's Wembley Stadium.
As already noted, this track makes recurring prominent use of an electric guitar riff sampled from the opening of "Father's Name Is Dad" (frequently mistitled, including by the Pet Shop Boys themselves, "Father's Name Was Dad"), a relatively little-known 1967 number (though it's been described as a "beat classic") by the British band Fire.
"I've quit this cul-de-sac" – The term cul-de-sac, now thoroughly entrenched in English to refer to a dead-end street (especially one found in a housing complex), comes originally from the Catalan language, in which it means "bottom of [the] bag."
"… the themes and variations" – An application of musical terminology to a non-musical concept. A "theme and variations" is a musical format (most commonly found in classical music and jazz) that begins with the statement of a melodic theme, which is then followed by a series of variations that develop or modify that melodic theme in different ways, such as by adding additional notes, changing its rhythm, tempo, harmonies, and/or key, and so on. In the lyric, however, it appears that Neil is using this term metaphorically to describe how he has "explored situations" of various types in his life.
"On the Street of Shame" – Street of Shame is the title of a 1956 Japanese film about a struggling group of Tokyo prostitutes. Whether Neil had this film and/or prostitution in mind when he wrote of "losing it on the way" and "looking for someone to blame" is questionable, although the fact that "Street of Shame" is capitalized in the lyrics (at least as they're printed on the official PSB website) distinctly raises the possibility. A much more likely reference, however, is to Fleet Street, the London thoroughfare that for many decades served as the address for much of the British national press. Up until the 1980s, virtually every major U.K. national newspaper—including the notorious British tabloid press—had offices on Fleet Street, earning the street the popular nickname "the Street of Shame." Neil in fact confirmed this second interpretation of these words in his book One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem.

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