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You Are the One

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

The Boys wrote this song in January 2015 during the period leading up to Super. But they decided to hold it back for inclusion on the next album after that, which of course turned out to be Hotspot. Shortly after first composing it they changed its name to "The One I Want," but obviously they changed their mind about the title. They also originally arranged it as a dance track, but then decided to turn it into a ballad.

In Neil's words, it's "a love song to Berlin," but it's also a love song, period. With its tweeting-birds opening and dense, murky production, this intensely romantic number seems in some ways a more sophisticated rewrite of "The Only One" from 1999's Nightlife. It takes as its starting point a lovely summer afternoon in Berlin in which lovers (the narrator and his beloved) enjoy lounging by a lake, enjoying cake in a coffee house, and seeing a film, topped off with a visit to a favorite bar. The resulting refrain couldn't be much simpler:

You are the one I want
The one
You are the one I want
The one

Confident in their love, but acknowledging a certain sense of "unreality" ("It's like a drug, it's like a dream"), the narrator boldly asserts that they'll "live like this forever and we'll never be apart." He even compares it to "a European film we could have seen." In other words, they're the heroes of their own romance movie, with the sun, birds, and a "spluttering and splattering" fountain supporting players.

In short, "You Are the One" is unusually direct—and, it must be said, unusually optimistic—for a PSB song that wears its emotionalism on its metaphorical sleeve. If anyone ever drones on to you about the "coldness" and ceaseless irony of the Pet Shop Boys, play this one for them. (And you can throw in "It Always Comes as a Surprise" and the aforementioned "The Only One" for good measure.)

Annotations

Zehlendorf and Mitte – Locales in Berlin mentioned in the lyrics.
tingle-tangle – An intriguing expression that appears in the song apparently in reference to the behavior of and/or sounds made by "every bird in the sky." A German spelling of the phrase, Tingeltangel (one word), was a term used to refer to a type of cabaret/music hall variety show popular in Berlin in the 1920s and '30s, generally somewhat "sleazy" in nature, that employed song, dance, comedy, and drag, often for social and political commentary. It's currently being used in Berlin—but wasn't when this song was written—as the title of an ongoing series of (as described in its promotional literature) "alternative, electronic and pop concerts by German and international artists, alongside underground local Berlin artists, contemporary dance performances, drag shows, comedians, literary and podcast events." Given the "Berlin setting" and the fact that Neil sings "every bird in the sky's a performer" [my emphasis] just before the "tingle-tangle" line, it seems quite likely that he's drawing an implicit metaphorical comparison between the birds and Tingeltangel-style performances, Anglicized spelling notwithstanding.

Incidentally, there are a large number of other uses of the term "tingle tangle" (both in English and in its German translation), including the title of a 1992 song by The Lightning Seeds and an obscure perjorative slang term for "gay" (which possibly derives from its historical Berlin usage described above), but I really don't believe these have any bearing on the song.
Several site visitors have written to me to assert their belief that the lyrics as printed on the Pet Shop Boys' official website are "incorrect." What they're hearing is "You are the one / I was the one." And I must concede that the first few times I listened to this song, before I read the official lyrics, that's what I was hearing, too. That "alternate lyric" would suggest an entirely different interpretation of this song, making it a tale of lost love narrated by a man who still loves someone who, unfortunately, doesn't love him anymore. In fact, my very first analysis of this song, which I posted several hours before I read the official lyrics, stated precisely that. After I read the official lyrics, I had to drastically revise what I wrote about the song here.

Here's what I think is going on: Neil (like many of us) has a slight tendency sometimes to "slur" his consonants while singing. And the "murky" production of the song—the whole album, in fact, which the Boys have mentioned in interviews—makes it even "slurrier." This slurring makes "You are the one I want / The one" sound like "You are the one / I was the one." In other words, when Neil sings "I want, the one," he "slides" from the T sound at the end of "want" to the TH sound at the beginning of "the" in such a way that it comes across like an S sound. Thus "want, the" sounds like "was the."

In short, I believe that this is a classic example of misheard lyrics. It fooled me at first, that's for sure, and I believe it's still fooling a lot of listeners. But I do truly believe that the official printed lyrics are accurate.
On at least some (possibly all) preview copies of Hotspot distributed to journalists, sampled Italian dialogue between a man and a woman, concluding with a young woman saying in English "I'd like to meet you," occurs during an instrumental break in the song, and the line "I'd like to meet you" is repeated near the end. As Neil revealed in Annually 2020, these samples come from the 1963 film 8½ by Italian director Federico Fellini—a quite notable example of the sort of "European film we could have seen" mentioned in the lyrics, also reflecting the song's deeply romantic text and mood. These samples were, however, removed from the final released version of the album because the Boys were unable to obtain permission to use them in time for the album's release. They considered replacing them with samples taken from the 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, but again couldn't get permission in time for their use. Although permission was indeed granted for the Call Me by Your Name samples, that permission came too late, thereby ensuring they wouldn't be included, either.

Mixes/versions

Officially released

Mixer: Stuart Price
- Album version (3:35)
- Instrumental (3:35)

Official but unreleased

Mixer: Stuart Price
- Alternate version with sampled dialogue near the end (3:35)
  - Included on preview editions of the album distributed to journalists in advance of the official release

List cross-references

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