Cricket Wife

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 2021
Original album - (none)
Producer - Pet Shop Boys
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - (none)

This song, released in May 2021 on a special two-track CD single included with the 2021 edition of the Pet Shop Boys' fan publication Annually (and subsequently available as a downloadable digital single), was written and recorded by Chris and Neil at their respective homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. As they stated on their official website, Chris composed the music as a "classical-style" instrumental at his mother's suggestion, to which Neil then added lyrics drawn from a poem he had previously written. The resulting recordings were then mixed into a final track by their longtime musical associate Pete Gleadall. Described by the Boys as "dramatic," including "orchestral sounds" (presumably samples), and nearly ten minutes in length, it's one of the most unusual songs in the PSB catalogue.

The term "cricket wife" is generally used to refer to the spouses of U.K. cricketers—that is, cricket players. Around the world, the wives and girlfriends of high-profile male (and often quite wealthy) professional sports figures are very often themselves thrust into the public spotlight, becoming the subjects of rumor, gossip, fashion magazines, and tabloid reporting. While in the United States this phenomenon is usually manifested as "basketball wives" and, only a little less often, "baseball wives" and "football wives," in the U.K. it's most frequently associated with the sports of soccer, rugby, and, indeed, cricket. More pertinently to this song, however, the term "cricket wife" doesn't necessarily refer to the spouse of a professional cricketer; it applies to amateurs as well. (It can also be used to refer to the wife of a cricket fan as well, particularly one who may seem even more devoted to the sport than he is to his wife, although the term "cricket widow" would be more appropriate.) As it turns out, here it refers specifically to the wife of an amateur who plays the game with his friends just for the fun of it.

Neil has reportedly said that the lyrics were inspired by his mother, who passed away in 2008. This is not to say that the song's central character is his mother—only that his mother served, in at least some ways, as an inspiration, perhaps a "starting point" from which the character then developed. He elaborated on this in Annually 2021, stating:

"It's really about my parents. My father played cricket for many years—when we were children we used to go on Saturdays in summer and watch him play. My brother Simon and I liked it, because the wives of the players in those days would make this massive tea halfway through the match where you'd get ham sandwiches and cakes and orange squash and cups of tea and stuff. And then they'd be watching the game as well, and chatting."

The lyrics are rather challenging, aptly complementing the challenging, somewhat avant-garde music, at least by PSB standards. (It's worth noting that this may be the most "Mom-influenced" song in the PSB corpus, Chris's mother having inspired the music and Neil's mother inspiring the lyrics.) Both the music and the lyrics seem to be divided into several sections or "movements":

First, a relatively brief scene-setting segment, although that "scene" is highly poetic in nature—not so much a physical scene as a metaphysical one.

Time has stopped
The air is still
Nothing moves
or ever will
Present tense
is future past….

Simply put, we're entering a realm where time has become meaningless. Perhaps we're hovering on the precipice of death, where indeed "nothing moves or ever will."
Second, the longest segment, which is dominated by the spoken words of the person will turn out to be the song's title character, the "cricket wife," signaled as such by the fact that many of the lyrics are (as printed in Annually 2021) set in quotation marks.

"I'm going home
I've had enough
Call a taxi
I want my stuff
Where are my shoes?…."

She's in some sort of institution, almost certainly a hospital, hospice, or nursing home. And she's clearly quite confused and distressed by her presence there: "…Get me out…. Where am I?" She's elderly, perhaps suffering from temporary or even permanent dementia: "I can't remember why or when they brought me here."
Then a transitional section, starting "Another sigh / Then sleep to dream." The lyric begins to shift from her spoken words to an interior monologue expressed by an omniscient narrator privy to the inner workings of her mind. Thus the unpleasant physical scene of the hospital/hospice—or perhaps her own physical body as her spirit departs ("Bones and blood and anxious anger")—is "replaced" by a much, much happier memory marked by the sound of "girlish laughter." She's young again.
The final segment, set in her mind—and in her youth—describes:

A sunny day
His turn to bat
The cricket wives
sip tea and chat

In this quaintly old-fashioned and (as one of my site visitors has put it) quintessentially English scene, she's one of a group of young wives watching their husbands play cricket. As they watch, they comment on the game from time to time, taking vicarious pleasure in the fun the "boyish" young men are having. Focusing on her loving thoughts about her husband, Neil sings, "She understands him / His lack of guile / Her soul demands him." The song's final words describe the end of the game and its aftermath, with this young-again cricket wife and her husband walking away from the field arm in arm.

They're off together
And that was that
and is forever

Is this just another of an ongoing series of dreams? Or is it her final dream as she dies, placing herself in a particularly warm, happy memory with her husband? Perhaps he has preceded her in death and they are now reunited. That wasn't the case for Neil's own mother, who passed away before his father, and isn't necessarily the case in the context of the song, either. But, whatever the case, they are now together, as the song states in its very final word, forever.

One of my site visitors has suggested a slightly different interpretation that has a good deal of merit. What if it's not the wife who is in the hospital dying but rather her husband, who had survived her preceding death? And it's his dream of his youthful days playing cricket as his wife sits and watches with the other women? At the end of the match—which signals the end of his life—her spirit comes to "collect" him and they go off together, now reunited forever in death. This situation would more closely parallel the experience of Neil's own parents in that his father in fact outlived his mother by approximately a year. Probably the only reasons I don't embrace this theory are that (1) I believe it's unlikely Neil that would have titled the song "Cricket Wife" if she weren't the main character, whose words we hear and whose mind we get to inhabit, and (2) I didn't think of it myself. Neil himself clarified the matter quite succinctly when, with regard to this song, he told interviewer Olivia Laing, "It's weird singing about your mother dying. I was crying singing it sometimes."

Though it may not be to every fan's liking, "Cricket Wife" shows the Boys adventurously stretching themselves musically and lyrically. If only everyone could have been so ambitious and creative while in pandemic isolation.

Annotations

"I smell a rat" – An English-language idiomatic expression of suspicion, usually because the speaker believes someone else is guilty of treachery and/or dishonesty, or otherwise has done something wrong or has bad intentions. The idiom "to smell a rat" is of uncertain origin, although it's known to have existed in English at least since the mid-1500s, a time when the presence of rats was a ubiquitous part of everyday life for the vast majority of people.
"Not such a bad innings" – The word "innings" is used both in cricket and in its fairly close American analogue, baseball, to refer to the divisions of the game in which each team takes its successive turns at bat. But American listeners will probably be confused by the phrasing "a bad innings." That's because in cricket the word "innings," with an s, is both singular (one innings) and plural (two innings). By contrast, in baseball the word "innings" is strictly plural (two innings), the singular of course being "inning" without the s (one inning).

A British site visitor has pointed out that in the U.K. people sometimes say, when an elderly person has died (or is about to), that he or she had "good innings"—a metaphorical way, using cricket terminology, of saying that he or she enjoyed a good life. So in the context of the song, the line "Not such a bad innings" could well carry a double meaning broadly hinting that the character of whom it's spoken has died or is about to.
One of my site visitors has observed that this song's first line, "Time has stopped," is reminiscent of the opening ("Stop all the clocks") of the poem "Funeral Blues"—published in its original form in 1936 but revised and republished in various forms afterward—by the Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973). "Funeral Blues" gained renewed popularity following its having been read aloud in its entirety in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral. The words "Stop all the clocks" allude to the feeling of the narrator of the poem that the world might as well cease operations upon the death of his beloved. By the same token, as noted above, the song's "Time has stopped" similarly suggests death.
A number of listeners have noted that the part of the piece beginning with pronounced drumbeats at about the 2:52 mark sounds to them like a funeral march. I agree that the music readily lends itself to that assessment, and it makes sense given the subject matter, but I won't so far to say that a funeral march is necessarily what it is.
As a couple of my site visitors have pointed out (which I had already suspected but didn't yet know for sure), the braided knit fabric depicted in the single's artwork, designed as usual for PSB releases by Mark Farrow, is that of a regulation cricket jumper (or "sweater" as my fellow Americans and I would much more likely refer to it). And another site visitor has observed that the "Cricket Wife" CD itself is colored a deep shade of red, apparently the exact same color as a regulation cricket ball—surely no coincidence! Both are round, after all, even if the CD is essentially in just two dimensions as opposed to the cricket ball's three.

List cross-references

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