Pet Shop Boys - ‘In The Night’

It's a song with, and about, a curious history. It was, in its original, sombre, almost gothy incarnation, the 1985 b-side of 'Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)'. The brisk, staccato Arthur Baker remix from Disco (1987) provided the instrumental theme for The Clothes Show , and is also a Total Banger. But as so often with Pet Shop Boys, a Total Banger laden with nuance and ambiguity. If one opposes fascism, as did the zazous - the members of a WWII French subculture who lived for fashion, music and hedonism - yet one does not support the resistance against it, what does that make one? George Orwell had no doubt, describing British pacifists as "objectively pro-Nazi". Of the zazous, Neil Tennant puts it thus:

”In this situation
[There's] a thin line between love and crime
and collaboration.”

The zazous had as much to fear from the Resistance as from the German occupiers; it was the former, Tennant hints, who might be sounding that sinister and fatal "knock on the door in the night." It is all very well, when the soldiers strut and the flags are out, to say what you think, and care only about love; but who will protect your freedom to do so? Orwell again comes to mind, with his words on Rudyard Kipling: "He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them." Zazou, what you gonna do? It's not merely a rhetorical question. It is an unavoidable moral choice; because in some circumstances, to take no side is to aid the enemy.
David Bennun