Songfacts®:

• This intellectual break-up song showcases Pet Shop Boys' knack of bringing politics into their music. The lyric was inspired by David Lodge's 1988 novel Nice Work, about the relationship between a feminist university teacher and the manager of an engineering firm. He falls in love with the lecturer and she tells him that love is "a bourgeois fallacy." Vocalist Neil Tennant told The Sun: "Putting such a literary phrase into a title for a pop song appealed to me out of bloody-mindedness really."
• The song quotes the melody line from "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds," which is part of Michael Nyman's score for the 1982 film The Draughtsman's Contract. "Chasing Sheep…" itself takes its material from the Prelude to Act III, Scene 2 of English composer Henry Purcell's 1691 opera King Arthur and Purcell, not Nyman, earned the co-writing credit for the song.