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Delusions of Grandeur

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 1997
Original album - Bilingual 2001 reissue Further Listening 1995-1997 bonus disc
Producer - Pet Shop Boys
Subsequent albums - Format
Other releases - bonus track with single "A Red Letter Day"

"It's about fascism," Neil says of this bonus track on the U.K. "A Red Letter Day" CD single. The song was inspired by the 1904 novel Hadrian VII by British author Frederick William Rolfe, alias "Baron Corvo." The novel is about an Englishman who becomes Pope and sets about exacting revenge on those who had previously earned his enmity. This is essentially what the song is about as well. As Neil has stated, "It's a fantasy about how you hate people because they've treated you badly, and so you want to rule the world and get revenge on them." (In discussing this song, Neil has also confessed that, as a child, he himself harbored playful fantasies of becoming the Pope someday.)

As for other influences, the chord progressions are based on those of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I also wonder whether Neil may have been influenced by a 1976 French film comedy with the same title (when translated) as this song; set in 17th-century Spain, it also has revenge as its central theme.

A very popular "non-album" track with fans, its chief weakness (at least from the perspective of this writer, among others) is the fact that Neil's vocal is curiously buried in the mix. Given contemporary recording technology, it's surely intentional, which makes me wonder what the Boys had in mind in having it mixed that way. One of my site visitors has suggested they were aiming for a sound that suggests hollowness, emptiness, and/or distance, as if the narrator were speaking in the enormous ballroom of a palace, addressing an audience from afar—or perhaps even speaking aloud all by himself in such a place, a lonely figure despite his power and prestige.

Annotations

In the booklet that accompanies the 2001 reissue of Bilingual, Neil notes that this song was inspired (as stated above) by the 1904 novel Hadrian VII by the now relatively obscure late nineteenth/early twentieth-century British author Frederick William Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo. Rolfe/Corvo was a notorious late Victorian/Edwardian eccentric, a convert to Roman Catholicism whose personal desire to become a priest was perpetually frustrated, at least in part on account of his open (for the time), unapologetic homosexuality. Hadrian VII was his most famous novel, its title character based primarily on himself. The novel has thus been described (in Wikipedia) as "an exercise in wish-fulfillment." Could the same be said for "Delusions of Grandeur"?
It has been suggested that since the 1971 French film Les folie des grandeurs—usually translated as Delusions of Grandeur, the title it was given when it was distributed in English-speaking countries—has revenge as its primary theme, it may also have been an influence on this song. But Neil has specifically denied any such influence, noting that he had never even heard of the film until reading about it right here.
"I speak exclusively at length to CNN" – Founded in 1980 by U.S. businessman Ted Turner, the Cable News Network, better known as CNN, was the first 24-hour TV network devoted exclusively to news. Its offshoot CNN International was launched in 1984. The 1991 Gulf War, however, catapulted CNN to a new level of popularity and influence as people around the world tuned in for up-to-the minute reports. So, speaking in the mid-1990s, it's only natural that Neil's character in this song would choose to grant CNN an exclusive. Besides, it rhymes with the preceding line's "when."
"Ring the bells, tell everyone / Revolution can be fun" – Neil has stated that this portion of the song was inspired by the 1929 poem "A Sane Revolution" by the British author D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930). The poem concludes with the line "Let's make a revolution for fun!"
The chord progression is derived from the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's 1802 work Piano Sonata Opus 27 No. 2, better known as the Moonlight Sonata. In fact, the Boys' pre-lyric working title for the track was "Moonlight."

List cross-references

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