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Hoping for a Miracle

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 2020
Original album - Hotspot
Producer - Stuart Price
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - (none)

The Boys present here a stark portrait of virtual hopelessness, including assorted situations that cause it and assorted reactions to it. Yet there remains one final thing to grasp onto, one final hope: for a miracle.

In what seems at first a somewhat challenging lyric, but one that clarifies itself with repeated reading/hearing, Neil paints a portrait of a person (or multiple portraits of several people) for whom life has not gone as planned. He sings of how this can leave you feeling "disqualified, with no room for manoeuvre," with nowhere to turn and nowhere to go. Only there's still the possibility of a "miracle"—a positive turn of circumstances and events that can't be explained except through divine intervention, or at least what seems like it.

Neil's lyric alludes in turn to loneliness, lack of love, joblessness (or at least a bad job), professional failure, obscurity, poverty, and homelessness, all situations that can very easily lead one to a sense of hopelessness:

When nobody loves you
Nobody needs you
You're out here on your own
Who can you turn to?
Where can you run to?

After all other avenues are exhausted, all you're left with is the possibility of that miracle to turn your life around:

Everyone loves you
Everyone needs you
You've got what it takes
You're everywhere now
You have the know-how
And all the money it makes

In a spoken aside at the end of the song, Neil asserts, "It's been this way since life began / The child lives on inside the man," suggesting bleakly—though perhaps wisely as constructive criticism—that such miracle-longing is ultimately childish.

At least, that's my interpretation. Neil, however, had other ideas in mind. Although he has said that the lyrics were initially triggered by the sight of a homeless man on a bridge in London, it evolved into something else. "It's about Tony Blair," Neil told interviewer Will Hodgkinson for The Sunday Times. "He won three elections and yet he has become reviled for making a mistake over the Iraq war. He puts a brave face on it, but he must hope for a miracle that perceptions will change." So it thereby joins "I Get Along," "I'm with Stupid," and "Legacy" in the list of PSB songs avowedly inspired by the former Prime Minister and Labour Party leader.

Annotations

So far, at least as far as I know, the Pet Shop Boys haven't revealed what the "synth voice" near the beginning of the song (starting at about the 0:08 mark), recurring a few other times later on, is singing. It's quite distorted and uncertain. But fans, based on their own hearing, have offered various "interpretations" of what the voice is singing, among them:
- "Dog eat dog world"
- "Falling out of luck"
- "Stop me going on"
- "Can't keep going on"

Mind you, these are just guesses. But until we hear from Neil and/or Chris about it, guesses are all we have.

The final words of the song, beginning "It's been this way since life began" and ending "… you're in too deep," are chanted, not sung, by Neil in a sing-songy rhythm, rather distorted and deeply buried in the mix, but clearly audible. I had long wondered why the official lyrics on the PSB website also starts with that segment when it's not clearly audible at all. But just because it's not clearly audible doesn't mean it's not there. One of my long-time site visitors, Danny Edmunds, pointed out to me that it's there right at the very beginning, during the first seven seconds of the track, only even more distorted and more deeply buried to the point that it's all but completely inaudible. I doubted what he told me until he shared an audio clip from that part of the song that he had digitally enhanced—and there it was! I could hear it! This, of course, begs the question of why recording artists even do this sort of thing, inserting content that requires "special treatment" for most (if not all) people to hear. After all, the Pet Shop Boys are hardly the first. (Remember backward-masking?) Are they simply toying with their listeners? Is it a sort of "Easter egg" for their most dedicated fans? Just don't get me started on the whole "subliminal messaging" thing….
"On Waterloo Bridge you got lost in the fog" – Crossing the River Thames in London, Waterloo Bridge is a near-legendary venue for suicides who hurl themselves into the waters below. This fact likely accounts for it being referenced in a song about near-hopelessness. (Also, as noted above, this song was partly inspired by Neil seeing a homeless man on a London bridge—quite possibly this one.) The "fog" mentioned in conjunction with it might be viewed both literally as London's famous weather phenemonon and figuratively as the confused state of mind of a potential victim of suicide. It's well worth noting that Waterloo Bridge has an earlier "PSB connection" in that it was while crossing Waterloo Bridge one evening in early 2005 that Chris came up with part of "I Made My Excuses and Left" and sang it into his Nokia phone so as not to forget it. One of my site visitors has suggested an even "deeper" connection between these two songs, discerning a similarity in their openings, primarily the "distorted and low-quality voice" heard in both. There may be something to it but, if that's indeed the case, I don't know what to make of it. It's also worth noting that Waterloo Bridge is located close to the Houses of Parliament. Since (as also stated above) Neil has said that "Hoping for a Miracle" is about Tony Blair, another of my site visitors has observed that this line could be a metaphor for Blair losing his principles upon becoming a member of Parliament or, eventually, Prime Minister.
"A meadow in Oxford where you sat in the sun" – This line, followed by "Those were the days, you had just begun," indicates that the person Neil is addressing did at one time have high prospects, the Oxford locale pointing to the University of Oxford, one of the world's most prestigious universities. Even such promising individuals can face turnabouts in their lives that leave them, too, hopeless. Harkening back to Neil's statement that this song is about Tony Blair, this line could refer to when Blair studied at Oxford. In addition, one of my site visitors has noted that this line echoes a scene from Evelyn Waugh's famed 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited in which the narrator, Charles Ryder, and his doomed (eventually alcoholic) friend Sebastian Flyte (later in the novel described as being "in love with his own childhood") sit in an Oxford meadow drinking white wine and eating strawberries. Whether this is an intentional or accidental echo is anyone's guess.
"Firing verbal shots like a Tommy Gun" – Invented by John T. Thompson in the eaerly 1900s, the Thompson submachine gun became popularly known as a "Tommy Gun." The imagery of "firing verbal shots like a Tommy Gun" suggests the aimless, scattershot approach of using a submachine gun, desperately hoping to hit something. Or it might just as readily suggest a very intelligtent person who spits out ideas so rapidly that for the listener it's like being on the receiving end of machine-gun fire.
"A child of the sun" – A possible allusion to an ancient myth explaining the origin of sexual orientation as articulated by the Greek philospher Plato in his Symposium, written circa 380 B.C. According to this myth, prehistoric human beings were divided into three genders: androgynes (Children of the Moon), male (Children of the Sun), and female (Children of the Earth). But because of their arrogance and impiety, the gods punished them by splitting them all in two, dooming them all perpetually to seek their former "other half." The former Children of the Sun became homosexual men ("male halves" searching for their other "male halves"); the former Children of the Earth became lesbians ("female halves" searching for their other "female halves'); and the former Children of the Moon became heterosexuals ("male halves" and "female halves" searching for each other). If Neil is indeed drawing from Plato's Symposium for this reference, could the "child of the sun" in this song be therefore interpreted as a gay man? To be sure, this may not necessarily be the case; "child of the sun" might simply be a poetic way of describing the protagonist of the song, or at least what he or she would like to be, and any connection to Plato could be purely coincidental.

One site visitor has suggested that "A child of the sun" could also be a pun alluding to the fact that the usually conservative U.K. newspaper The Sun switched sides for the 1997 general election and threw its support behind Tony Blair, the Labour candidate. Following Labour's victory in the election, elevating Blair to the position of Prime Minister, many observers cited the suppport of The Sun as a major contributing factor. In this way, Blair might indeed be "a child of The Sun."
"Could they beam you out of here?" – An application of the "future slang" terminology used in the science-fiction "Star Trek universe" to refer to transporter technology, which enables people to be transported across vast distances almost instantaneously. As an example of sci-fi technology, it qualifes as "miraculous" in accordance with the writer Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In the context of the song, of course, it describes in a somewhat flippant way a desire for a miraculous escape from a dire situation—which, not coincidentally, is precisely how transporter technology was frequently used on Star Trek.
There's a difference between the lyrics as heard in the recording and as they appear in the printed lyrics on the official Pet Shop Boys' website. The final quatrain (or pair of couplets, depending on how you "scan" it) as printed includes the line "You have to eat, you need to sleep" (my emphasis). But Neil actually sing-speaks "You have to eat, you have to sleep" (again, my emphasis) near the end of the recording as released on Hotspot. Then again, that's not the only difference between the printed lyrics and the recording. That same quatrain (or pair of couplets) also appears at the beginning of the song in the printed lyrics, but it's not audible (if it's even there at all) at the start of the recorded track, appearing only at the end.
It's possible—but by no means necessarily true—that the Boys may in this song be drawing upon or alluding to the pop standard "A Foggy Day (in London Town)" by George and Ira Gershwin, introduced in the 1937 film A Damsel in Distress, in which it was sung by Fred Astaire. It was subsequently covered by numerous artists, including Frank Sinatra and, perhaps significantly, David Bowie on the 1998 AIDS-charity Gershwin tribute album Red Hot + Rhapsody: The Gershwin Groove. In the Gershwin song, the narrator sings of feeling down in the dumps, his mood only exacerbated by the gloominess of London's notorious fog, all the while hoping that "the age of miracles hadn't passed." As it so happens, however, it hadn't: "For suddenly I saw you there / And through foggy London town / The sun was shining everywhere."

Mixes/versions

Officially released

Mixer: Stuart Price
- Album version (5:00)
- Instrumental (5:00)

List cross-references

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