I love the Pet Shop Boys when they’re glib and bored, but I love them even more when they’re yearning and emotional. Often, they’re both at the same time.

Willie Nelson’s version of this song is so ridiculously heartbreaking, one of the saddest songs ever recorded, the tale of a man who has just realized he has wasted his entire life.

The conductors’ faces, we see, are painted in black-and-white zebra stripes. Chris looks at them, but seems bored.

Word, and the PSBs’ boredom is a big part of their raison d’etre: I went from liking them a lot to loving them the first time I saw Neil’s massive yawn on the cover of Actually. What makes this song so brilliant is that, as their first hit cover, it actually summarizes their entire ouevre: seeming ennui and mild disgust, over frenetic beats–and both the boredom and the beats are masking their actual earnestness and deep feeling. When they came out of the closet a couple of years later, it only made plain what their art was already saying: We look like we don’t care at all. We care more deeply than you ever could.

BTW, I think you’ll have at least one more chance to catch us up on It Couldn’t Happen Here before your ’88 countdown is over. Come to think of it, didn’t the “What Have Done to Deserve This” video also take footage from the movie? (I’m going to need your review, because I’ve never seen it, either.)