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Burning the Heather

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 2019
Original album - Hotspot
Producer - Stuart Price
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - single

This song, the last completed for Hotspot and originally titled "You've Got Me All Wrong," was released in streaming format in November 2019, well in advance of its parent album. The album's second single, following "Dreamland" (described as such by the Pet Shop Boys themselves), it features former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler as a support musician.

Neil has described the lyric as telling the story of a lonely man who has "walked away from his life," placing him in a rural pub simply talking to the staff. (Note the concluding line of the chorus, "Give me a drink and I'll be gone.") It has been suggested that it may have been inspired by the case of "Neil Dovestone," the name assigned to an unknown elderly man found dead on Saddleworth Moor in northern England in December 2015. The body was, more than a year later, identified as that of David Lytton, a London native who apparently, at the age of 67 following prolonged bouts of depression, had committed suicide by taking strychnine. Before he had headed out on the moor and taken his own life, he had stopped in at a pub in the town of Greenfield and spent some time talking to people there. A relative later said that he had been "a bit of a loner."

With the title "Burning the Heather," the Boys invite us to regard that as the central, most important theme of the song. The chorus begins "Autumn is here and they're burning the heather." Heather is a common shrub native to Europe and western Asia, especially in "boggy" areas such as the moors of Britain. It has long been used for grazing by sheep and cattle. It benefits from periodic burning, after which the plant regenerates with fresh, nutritious growth. This is often done in autumn to encourage abundant new growth the following spring. Therefore we might consider the idea of regeneration through a seemingly destructive act as the lyric's core concept.

Perhaps Neil is suggesting that this may be what the narrator has in mind as a lonely, elderly man. Now in the autumn of his life, he has come to believe that it's time for him to be "burnt away," so to speak, to make room for new growth. He seems particularly put off by the modern world's obsession with money and finance, dominated by "bread-heads," people overly concerned with money. (See the corresponding annotations below.) He feels out of place—quite literally in that there's no place left for him in the world.

Neil's lyrics, however, are often multi-layered. I can help but think that, in light of the song's opening stanza—

You’ve got me all wrong
I'm not that guy
I'm just the singer of the song
in my mind's eye
If I thought what you think
I wouldn't even be here
I’ve just dropped in for a drink
before I disappear

—that Neil may also be also drawing upon his own experience as "the singer of the song." In asserting that the person(s) to whom he's speaking—which in the case of the song itself as a song, would be us, the listeners—have got him "all wrong" and that he's "not that guy," could he be commenting on fans misinterpreting his lyrics and reading things into them that he doesn't intend, especially in those frequent cases when he adopts the role of an altogether different character in the song? In effect, such a narrative persona simply "drops in" briefly to the listener's life before "disappearing" at the end of the song. Of course, there's a fundamental irony here in that this very interpretation of the lyric may be just such an example of reading "incorrectly" into a song. If that's the case, it's downright paradoxical.

Incidentally, "Burning the Heather" is one of the approximately half of the Hotspot songs for which Neil wrote the lyrics first, when Chris then put to music. As Neil has repeatedly observed, this has in recent years become a fairly common pattern for their songwriting, reversing the process followed early in their career, in which Neil would put lyrics to music that Chris had already composed.

Annotations

"In my mind's eye" – An old figure of speech in English, referring simply to visualizing something in one's imagination. It dates back at least to the late 14^th century, when the great Middle English poet Geoffrey Chaucer used it in The Canterbury Tales.
"I'm not on your grapevine" – Used in this way, "grapevine" is an English-language slang expression for a "rumor mill," a means by which rumors or other such information circulates among people, most often by word of mouth. This meaning is derived metaphorically from the seemingly random, chaotic manner in which an actual grapevine grows, branches out, and spreads. Its most famous usage in popular culture appears in the 1966 Motown song "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong and first recorded by The Miracles. Its first hit version came the following year by Gladys Knight & the Pips, but by far its biggest and most famous hit rendition was released by Marvin Gaye in 1968, commonly viewed as one of the greatest pop recordings of the Rock Era. In the lyrics of "Burning the Heather," it simply indicates the narrator's acknowledgment that he's a rather mysterious figure from the perspective of the person(s) to whom he's speaking—someone with whom they're not very familiar and about whom they haven't been gossiping, at least not up to this point.
"Unvarnished" – Used literally, this word refers to a piece of wood or some other such material that hasn't been coated with varnish to protect and/or color it. Here, of course, it's used in its familiar metaphorical sense, as in the common English expression "the unvarnished truth"—that is, a straightforward factual statement uncoated or uncolored by any potentially misleading embellishments.
"burning the heather" – As noted above, heather is a shrub native to Europe and western Asia, especially in "boggy" areas such as the moors of Britain. Long used for grazing, it benefits from periodic burning, after which it regenerates with fresh, nutritious growth. This is generally done in autumn to encourage abundant new growth the following spring.
"hell for leather" – An English expression meaning "extremely fast," derived from horseback riding. It's generally believed to have originated (at least in writing) with the British poet Rudyard Kipling, who used it in his 1889 story "The Valley of the Shadow." While "hell for leather" is the familiar phrasing in the British Isles, the more common American variant is "hell-bent for leather," meaning exactly the same thing.
"bread-heads" – People who are overly concerned with money. The expression derives from an old hipster term for money, "bread," which dates back at least to the 1930s and became particularly well-known in popular culture during the 1960s through its use by beatniks and hippies.
"always pounds, shillings and pence-ing" – Following on the previous line's reference to "bread-heads," this line spells out their preoccupation with money, expressing it in terms of units of English currency. Neil cleverly forms a rhyme with the word "sensing" from two lines before by conjugating the smallest unit of modern English currency, the "pence," as if it were the present participle of a verb. Therefore someone who is "pence-ing" (and, by implication, "pound-ing" and "shilling-ing") is presumably always thinking about money. Further, one of my site visitors pointed out to me that the reference to "pounds, shillings and pence" isn't just about money—"it's about old money." As he reminded me, "That method of counting English money was discontinued in 1971 when it all went decimal. So in addition to talking about people being obsessed with money, the fact that the lead character describes it that way speaks to his age in the same way that describing money as 'bread' does, and is another layer to why he might be feeling out of touch with the modern world." In other words, his language "dates" him.

Mixes/versions

Officially released

Mixer: Stuart Price
- Album version (5:27)
- Radio edit (4:03)
- Instrumental (5:27)

List cross-references

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