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Domino Dancing

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 1988
Original album - Introspective
Subsequent albums - Discography, PopArt, Pandemonium, Ultimate
Other releases - single (UK #7, US #18, US Dance #5)

Neil says that the title of this song was inspired during a stay on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. "In the evening there was nothing to do except play dominoes; this friend of ours [their personal assistant and Chris's roommate, the late Pete Andreas] always used to beat us, and he used to do this celebratory dance." Despite this prosaic origin, "domino dancing" became Neil's metaphor for a love relationship breaking down because of jealousy. But it has also been widely interpreted as a metaphor for what was going on in the early days of the AIDS crisis: carefree young people dancing (a euphemism for sex; at the very least dancing is, as has been observed, "a vertical expression of a horizontal idea") and subsequently collapsing in succession from illness like rows of dominos ( "Watch them all fall down").. Lending some credence to this interpretation, Neil reportedly said of this song, shortly after its release, that it was their "Numbers," referring to a notorious 1983 track by Soft Cell that is indeed about casual sex.

Neil and Chris had traveled to Miami to work with Exposé producer Lewis Martineé, whose work they admired, and this track, with its strong Latino influence, was the result. It was almost certainly through Martineé that the Latin dance group The Voice in Fashion—who had worked with the producer and who signed with the Boys' label, EMI, in 1988—ended up providing the "all day, all day" backing vocals for this song.

Continuing with the Latino theme, the accompanying video is set in Puerto Rico—at director Eric Watson's suggestion—and became notorious for its thinly veiled homoeroticism, despite a heterosexual veneer. (The final scenes of two shirtless young men—even more obviously posited as "sex objects" than the lovely young woman who served as the ostensible object of their competing desires—tussling among the crashing waves on a beach were frequently cited as evidence by critics.) Since "Domino Dancing" proved to be the Pet Shop Boys' final Top 40 hit in the United States, it has been widely speculated that this video may have had something to do with their declining U.S. popularity thereafter.

Mixes

Officially released

Official but unreleased

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