As the second single release from the album, following "So Hard", "Being Boring" was not particularly successful upon release, only reaching number twenty in the UK Singles Chart and being the first single released by the group not to get into the Top 10 since "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" four years previously.

The song is concerned with the idea of growing up and how people's perceptions and values change as they grow older. The title apparently materialised after someone in Japan accused the duo of being boring. The title is also derived from a Zelda Fitzgerald quotation, "she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring".

Rated highly by Pet Shop Boy aficionados, in a 1993 interview Neil Tennant described "Being Boring" as "one of the best songs that we've written", and explained that "For me it is a personal song because it's about a friend of mine who died of AIDS, and so it's about our lives when we were teenagers and how we moved to London, and I suppose me becoming successful and him becoming ill."

The track was originally pieced together in a studio in West Glasgow, where the music for "My October Symphony", "The End of the World" and the unreleased "Love and War" were also done. The track was also played in 1990–1991 Brazilian soap opera Meu Bem, Meu Mal. The track was played in an episode of Top Gear from 2001, during the review of the Mazda 626.

In spite of the track's moderate commercial success, "Being Boring" has been played regularly at concerts and is widely considered amongst the greatest, most beautiful Pet Shop Boys songs by fans. Ironically, due to various factors (including it being hard to sing), it was not initially performed on 1991's Performance tour; leading to many fans, including Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses, complaining about its omission. As a result, it was added as an encore late in the tour with the band commenting that it "invariably got the best reception of the night." It has since become a mainstay of their live performances.

...
Wikipedia