PET SHOP BOYS – "West End Girls"

Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station was originally published in 1940 and remains one of the great socialist history texts. Tracing the evolution of socialism through uprisings of varying intensity from Revolutions French to Russian, Wilson made no secret of his Leninist beliefs, but through his slow and scathing deconstruction of the terror and destruction inaugurated by Stalin in the name (rather than the ideology) of Communism – a tricky business in those early war years when Russia were Britain’s allies, but a viewpoint which remained almost singular throughout the history of the Western Left for generations. We recall that the Finland Station, in Leningrad, is where Lenin was smuggled back into Russia by the Germans, under the guise of an ordinary railway worker, in order to set the Revolution in motion – the unassuming-looking Trojan horse intent on changing everything from its foundations upwards.

Neil Tennant read Modern History at university, with a special focus on Russia, so the lyric “from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station” was deliberate and knowing. It remains a miracle that at the precise moment where New Pop had not only been defeated but actively airbrushed out of music history – consider the NME‘s all-time Top 100 Albums list of November 1985 which studiously and consciously avoided anything from 1981-2 – New Pop itself set off on its eleventh-hour Ardennes offensive and delivered perhaps the greatest New Pop act of them all, and certainly the most openly political New Pop act since Heaven 17.

Tennant and Morley seem to have been generals engaged on parallel missions to subvert, at the time unknown to each other; where Morley spread his Baudrillardian gospel in the NME, and then at ZTT, so did Tennant work on a near-identical agenda during his time at Smash Hits, chirpily and ruthlessly deconstructing the notion of the pop idol and the concept of writing about pop itself. The result was that the Smash Hits of 1981-3 constituted some of the funniest and most engaging writing in the music press of the period; the necessary McCartney to NME‘s Lennon. Who was this mysterious Bobby O to whom Tennant inevitably gave his Single Of The Fortnight accolade every time he reviewed the singles?

Bearing in mind that the first wave of New Pop had already begun its dumper-bound descent by late 1982, Tennant, like Morley, realised that more direct action was required to pump fresh oxygen into its arteries. The original “West End Girls” was recorded with Bobby O as producer in 1983 and released in 1984. About a third faster than the more famous subsequent recording, and including extra lines about Stalin – ahem – this more directly Hi-NRG “West End Girls,” utilising all the tropes of Hi-NRG pop which would practically become the lingua franca of 1984’s more worthwhile pop – did well at club level but didn’t cross over.

Eventually, after the first single version of “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)” released on Parlophone in early 1985, made little money, Tennant and Lowe decided to rework “West End Girls” with producer, and Trevor Horn trainee, Stephen Hague. Slowing it down, opening out the misleading lushness of its arrangement, the song becomes both more attractive and more menacing, thus precisely suiting its bipolar dialogue. Opening with footsteps and car horns in the street – as well as one girl remarking “Is that Sting?” (thankfully, not) – the gradual inflow of the tune is like rivulets of blood flowing back into New Pop’s moribund veins. Intoning the verses and singing the choruses, with a rap approach which owes more to Osbert Sitwell than Melle Mel, Tennant carefully draws the battlelines in this “West End town” (which is clearly London), beginning with a portrait of someone going mad less than quietly and fleeing to his underground “dive bar” (there was a gay bar of that name in Soho at the time) and then fleshing out the picture with further comparisons between the poverty-stricken “East End boys” and the flashly opulent “West End girls” – the pros and cons of Thatcherism, though the Pet Shop Boys’ own perspective is fiercely “con”; thence follows a verse decrying advertising, and finally a chilling portent of imminent nothingness – “We’ve got no future, we’ve got no past, here today, build to last.” The emptiness of contemporary “life” as it would turn out to be, described and decried with pitch-perfect detachment.

Musically the record is impeccable – the lonesome (synth?) trumpet in the instrumental break, the distant but agonised female voice who keeps asking uncomfortable questions (“How much do you need?” “How far have you been?”) – and the melody skilfully skits between concord and lowered eyebrows of minor shifts. A deserved UK and US number one, and the earliest of indications that imagination, elegance and subversion had not been banished from British pop music altogether.

More than any other song, this captures the London I met in the winter of 1985-86, a city that captivated me then and still feels like an old friend when I visit it today. Australians have had a close relationship with it, at least if they’re my age. Not only are Cockney accents closest to ours, but we grew up knowing almost as much about London as any of our own cities, thanks to the ubiquitious presence of BBC and Thames productions on 1970s Australian television. Its street-names had a Monopoly-board resonance, and its landmarks were as familiar as the Sydney Opera House. The same couldn’t be said of Birmingham, Manchester or Liverpool.

There I was in London, exploring its wonders – not just record stores, but a Megastore! and affiliated with my favourite label, at that – and this song was everywhere, filtering softly but insistently through speakers in shops and taxis. I could scarcely imagine a better soundtrack. The Pet Shop Boys had taken the sounds of the moment and made them timeless; it’s remarkable how little this has dated, given the potential of some of its elements to do so. They captured the dark of those long London nights, but gave it the warmth of the long black overcoat that you shed at the door of the nightclub. “West End Girls” is an invitation indoors, an invitation to sample the mysteries of this endlessly surprising place, where every space has been overwritten a hundred times by history and is still being inscribed by new generations of West End girls and East End boys, casting off class and the past to come together for just this night to make something mesmerizing.

9.

I like “West End Girls”, agree that it’s a “classic”, but to me it’s the springboard from which PSB would go on to make much superior records; contra my favourite PSB songs (“Rent” and “Being Boring”), I think Tennant holds back a bit too much here. There’s distance used for emotional effect, and then there’s just distance. “West End Girls” is acutely observed, but observation is all it is – and there’s too much fear and contempt in it, you can hear Tennant recoiling almost prissily in the first verse – until the best line in the song, “just you wait ’til I get you home”; then and only then do you feel that he’s inside the narrative himself. Of course, this isn’t a problem at all in most of their later records! So, 7 for this from me.

Loved the nod to “West End Girls” in Kelis’s “Trick Me” a few years back – “call the police, there’s a mad girl in town”.

Interesting that Bobby Orlando has been mentioned already. I only have a best of compilation, but “I’m So Hot For You” is one of my favourite songs EVER and he’s way, way underappreciated – especially given how close he was to the fêted Pet Shop Boys!

On a larger scale – I completely love PSB themselves, until they got shit (1995?), but I absolutely hate what they inspired: all the acts who tried to be them, but mistook archness for intelligence; the philosophy of an idealised Pop, that unnecessary capital letter telling you all you need to know; the idea that they embodied anything beyond what they were. Sadly I’d love to separate them from their imitators, but all PSB have done over the past decade is encourage the very worst aspects of their imitators with ill-advised collaborations etc. It’s fair to say that I have close to zero interest in anything they may or may not do these days.

A #1 in the U.S. as well. One of my wife’s favorite songs of the 80’s, and not because of the lyrics, because of the music. As she always tells me, this is one of those defining “great beat” songs of that decade (like “Relax”). For me, the opening is the hook, but the words then take over. “Smart” or “intelligent” Pop or whatever you want to call it. It couldn’t have gotten to #1 without that beat. An easy 10.

Number five in Australia, by the way, entering the charts at the end of March. I was back home by then, so this must have been a bittersweet reminder of where I wasn’t: on holiday in Europe, rather than slogging through first-year Calculus at uni.

Re #7: I’d argue that the true inheritors of the Pet Shop Boys spirit were Orlando and The Cuban Boys, though this this theory is possibly too idosyncratically personal to ever persuade others of.

I’ve never bought a Pet Shop Boys record, and I’ve never particularly liked them, which I realise places me in a very small minority on here.

The reasons are hard to articulate – had they emerged in 1981/82 as to me they look and sound like they should have – I would probably have lapped them up.

Perhaps some of what Lex describes as the characteristics of PSB’s bad imitators – mistaking “archness for intelligence; the philosophy of an idealised Pop” – is what I instinctively felt about PSB themsleves, if only on a subliminal level.

Although clearly they are intelligent.

Perhaps I just don’t like Neil Tennant’s taste in music. I rarely agreed with his Smash Hits reviews.

“West End Girls” sounded dated to me on its release. I’ve no idea when it was written (Tom’s piece suggests it was written quite a bit before it became a hit) – but it sounded very 1982 at the time.

That said, it’s a very good single, and one of the few PSB singles that I do actively like. A big fat synth sound, good hooks.
Certainly the best number 1 since, well Madonna, or even Chaka Khan.

From the autumn of 1982 to the summer of 1984, I was obsessed by Bobby O – both as solo performer, and producer of acts such as Divine, The Flirts, Roni Griffith and many others – and so the idea of a collaboration with the deputy editor of golden-era Smash Hits and his mate struck me as deeply thrilling. The reality, however, was somewhat underwhelming. I don’t recall hearing the original “West End Girls” played out anywhere – and in 1984, I was pretty much out the whole time – and so I eventually caught up with it on a cheapo mix LP called Dance Mix – Dance Hits Volume 3, where I think it was mixed into from Peter Brown’s “They Only Come Out At Night”. The line “Who do you think you are, Joe Stalin?” stuck in the memory, but other than that, it felt like a damp-squib dilution of Orlando’s brutally effective skills. (Was he Hi-NRG’s equivalent of the Ramones?)

Nevertheless, my curiosity was still sufficient to prompt a bargain-bin purchase of “Opportunities” on 7-inch, in the summer of 1985. I quite liked its Eurobeaty B-side (and future Clothes Show theme tune) “In The Night” – but other than that, the conceptual project seemed to have run its course, and so as Lee suggests above, I mentally filed the PSBs next to Spelt Like This and the Roaring Boys, as expensive failed experiments.

When a re-worked, re-issued “West End Girls” appeared as a discounted cheapo in the new release 12″ racks at Selectadisc, I punted a further 99p – partly because the collector in me wanted to own an unmixed version, and partly because Chris Lowe looked quite hot on the oversized picture label.

From that point, the song started slithering itself into my consciousness: creeping up the Top 75, then gathering steam, then finally emerging as the defining Xmas hit of 1985 (i.e. the one I kept putting on the jukebox in the village pub, while back at the family home for a few days). As sometimes happens with big hit singles, it took the ubiquity of its success to convince me of its greatness – and maybe in this context, its subversion of the dismally grown-up blandness of late 1985 chart pop became a central part of its appeal. (I’d also been to the Dive Bar in Soho, about a year earlier, and had been under the impression that it was a gay venue – a gay Londoner friend took me there, and I’d seen it listed in the gay press – and so there was a slight frisson at hearing it mentioned in the pub I’d known since childhood, in the village where I had yet to come out.)

That said, my attitude to the PSBs remained one of polite respect rather than out-and-out adoration. “Love Comes Quickly” bored me, the re-worked “Opportunities” actively irritated me, “Suburbia” was OK (but “Paninaro” was better), and it wasn’t until their first post-Please release that the penny fully dropped. I suppose that I read the PSBs as a needlessly “coded”, and hence somewheat closeted, yuppification of 80s gay pop, which I preferred coming from its more overtly out-and-proud practitioners. After all, there were battles still to be fought, and barricades to be manned, and so there was a certain sense that the PSBs were shirking their duties. Such polarised times!

Just like Rory in his evocative post at #3, this one conjures up the London I met. Although I’d been a London University student it was out in Egham, next to Windsor Great Park, and London meant the occasional trip into Waterloo, so I wasn’t particularly familiar with the city despite a brief job there in spring ‘85. But January 1986 was the time I definitively moved south, and no longer called Manchester home as I had all my life. In fact the move happened at the start of the month, so really it was while Shaky was still number one – but how much more appropriate to associate it with this particular song, which I have ever since.

I was working at SNCF (French Railways) on Piccadilly, with a bunch of other seasonal workers. It’s between the Royal Academy and the Ritz, so as West End as they come – just down the road was the recently-opened Tower Records, where you thought you’d died and gone to heaven. Funnily enough one of my clearest memories of that period was seeing sensational news on a Standard hoarding outside the office in my first week: yes it was Thatcher’s zenith, Tom, but two days after “West End Girls” reached number one, a seed of her downfall may have been sown – Michael Heseltine’s resignation over Westland, which meant that Thatcher had a powerful and influential enemy seething and waiting for the chance that came four years later.

If work was West End, home was East End (or more properly Sarf End) – a crummy bedsit partway up Telegraph Hill from New Cross Gate. You could see the floodlights of Millwall’s ground from my front steps; just around the corner was Goldsmith’s College where the future members of Blur would gather in a few years’ time; and down the hill was The Montague Arms, which last year deservedly came Number 1 in a list of Britain’s greatest rough pubs – not because it’s the roughest, just because it’s great. You couldn’t beat Sunday afternoon featuring the duo Pete and Pete (a blind keyboard player and a broad-Yorkshire percussionist whose main instrument was a stick with scores of bottle tops nailed to it which he banged on the floor). They attracted coachloads of people and could play just about any song you asked for, and legend had it Paul McCartney had dropped by one Sunday to join in.

As for the song, it’s evocative to begin with, and wonderfully sets its own style and agenda in a pop environment which hadn’t heard anything quite like it. Taken along with what was happening in my life, it’s utterly unforgettable. An absolute beaut.

Loved it then and I love it now. As a boy from London’s suburban fringes West End Girls was the first record in years to make the capital sound like a romantic place full of exciting (and scary) possibilities. It was also the first Number One in ages that I remember actively cheering up the charts as it made its slow ascent to the top that winter.

But…at the time as Tom points out there was a whiff of novelty about it too. PSB could easily have ended up as one hit wonders and when Love Comes Quickly (comparatively) flopped it looked briefly like that would be it for them.

Nobody has focused particularly on Neil Tennant’s voice. It’s northern quality often seems at tension with a received pronunciation so that it embodies a class struggle in it’s very texture. It also helps to emphasise the role of outsider to London played by the singer. For all it’s pop credentials the voice, lyrics and Hague’s arrangements link them to much indie music of the time – whether that be The Smiths or New Order. And for all that it is a dance record there is very little about the record that references soul.

9 or 10 for me

10 – this is my favourite PSB song (not the only one I’d give 10 to though). While at the time it never soundtracked anything more for me than eating Frosties infront of the telly, the atmosphere resonates so well with my sixth form years – I was finally getting to know London on my own terms (all my life I’d regularly visited it from the suburbs but with friends or family or school), wandering around and really LOOKING at things as everyone else rushes past you: standing at the bottom of tower blocks and staring upwards, engaging homeless dudes in conversation (er yes um), figuring out where the hell Carnaby Street actually was, learning how to slip through the commuter crowds and how not to look Lost. Wondering how I’d ever fend for myself in this environment if I didn’t have A-levels and a cosy home in Zone 6 to return to, but instead a job and a flat and freedom. To me, West End Girls signifies independence and the adventures that come with it.

The East 17 cover is AWFUL.

As a point of comparison, the other great eighties song about wandering in the West End is ‘Shaftsbury Avenue’ by Momus.

I actually went in the Dive Bar (its full name was the ..?.. ?… Dive Bar can’t remember what exactly the preceding words were now and it was sort of down some steps hence “dive” bar) after slipping out of an All Dayer at “Upstairs at Ronnie Scotts” one Sunday evening to visit a few other places and ended up with a ticket for the Dive Bar’s New Years Eve party hence me actually remembering its name when the song became a hit a few months or possibly a year later.
I even used to wonder if the 2 youngish blokes I’d got taking to and who’d given me the ticket had been the Pet Shop Boys!

I used to love this track at the time and bought the 12inch straight away but possibly because it now reminds me of a very depressing time in my life it’s taken the gloss of it for me and I wouldn’t really want to listen to it anymore.

I don’t even know where to start with this one.
A masterpiece.

One of my favourite PSB stories. Appearing on Top of the Pops to promote West End Girls reaching number one.
– The song starts.
Chris Lowe whispers to Neil Tennant
” Whatever you do DON’T look triumphant. ”
And thus one of pops most notable anti-images came about.

I’m curious Lex, can you give an example or two of acts you consider to be PSB imitators? I can’t really think of anyone TBH.

An 8 from me. I agree with those above who said that it’s the opening that sells it. In a perfect world for me, the bass line wouldn’t come in for another couple of minutes, it’s such an evocative soundscape…. a soundtrack for an ’80s Alfie perhaps (What’s it all about, Neil?). As usual for me with PSB, I don’t find that the subsequent song quite lives up to the initial, very inviting sound hit.

It’s always interesting what breaks through culturally and what doesn’t. ABC’s How to be a Zillionaire album did very little despite having a bunch of songs all about wandering around London as the big bang approacheth. Here’s them doing ‘Tower of London’ live on The Tube in 1984. Blue Nile’s beautiful walking around the city at night song ‘Tinseltown in the rain’ never really broke out of the confines of college radio, and none of the Smiths classics from around 1986 (thorn, bigmouth, panic, ask, shoplifters) bothered the top of the charts. And don’t even mention The The. PSB more intelligent than these others I’ve mentioned? I don’t see or hear it. More musical chops? Absolutely not. Still, PSB here are a very welcome presence… definitely one of the cooler #1’s.

Not One Night in Bangkok or Rock Me Amadeums, this is closer to Der Kommissar. I was sure this one would be a 10, it’s surpising to me how timeless it sounds.

This is where my general love of chart music became specific. Later than a lot of ppl here I expect, at 15, and even then probably largely in retrospect. But there was a definite difference of opinion between me and my mum on PSBs that marked an ending of sorts of my chart dilletantism.

I’m surprised I don’t begrudge the 9 and I’ll put it down to knowing they got even better. But this is lush and arresting all the same. the sound of high heels and cars up to the first two clicks of the drum pattern SOLD. the canny re-versioning to slow it down to the RIGHT SPEED is part of an acute atmosphere that was a great set up for the PSB schtick

Please may not have been my first album, but it was the first one I knew beat for beat and it was the first time I understood others’ impulses to write out lyrics on pencil cases. Never did that myself. Though i recall doodling some in my notes, bored in lectures a year or so later. Yeah a late bloomer.

Love Comes Quickly totally won me over too. One of my secret favourite PSB tracks

hurry up please it’s time

(that’s not aimed at Tom and the next track to avoid confusion)

Steve (#38) – Speaking of inner city pressure – Goldie’s “Inner City Life” was another song that together with “West End Girls” used to accompany my incessant longing for more metropolitan surroundings in my late teens. Similarly pensive strings, a partially similar theme, and the city is London in both cases. In my mind, they are fairly neatly linked together, but whether there’s any actual connection (besides that FotC number)… well, I wouldn’t know.

#43 ‘Inner City Life’ was a v important record for me too but to the extent where something so of its own time (and my time in terms of how i felt and what i needed) becomes a bit of an albatross as I look back. Hardly something to feel guilty for having loved (and I’ve defended Timeless and Goldie over their many detractors since) but also not something I ever return to. ‘West End Girls’ feels evergreen by comparison but that’s cyclical trends and tastes working in its favour as much as its greater sophistication as a pop song.

STRAIGHT OUTTA OLD COMPTON STREET

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe seem like an unlikely pairing. Smash Hits editor meets architecture student and go off together to create era-defining pop music.
The journey of this song begins in Nottingham as Tennant writes the first line while watching a gangster movie on TV. “Sometimes, you’re better off dead/ when the gun in your hand is pointing at your head”. He raps. Like Ian Dury before him. Unlike Dury, Tennant puts down the first Hip Hop influenced english accent rap to make #1. Tennant, the Godfather of Grime? The song makes vinyl in New York with Bobby Orlando producing a club track on the Jonathan label in 1984. The track resembles little more than a home-made demo at this time. Orlando’s production skills are limited by lack of equipment rather than lack of talent. Successful in the NY gay club scene, spreading across Europe, it gains enough momentum for Chris and Neil to attract the attention of Tom Watkins. He wrests control from Bobby Orlando. EMI sign them and assign the producer Stephen Hague to polish it up for the UK mainstream market. Hague maintains the structure of the song and eschews the sampled grunts of the Orlando mix for doomy pads, “Trevor” horns, backing vocals and the relentless bassline that anchors the song, is placed front and centre in the mix. Hague gives sophisticated sheen to what is essentially a snapshot of 2 particular square miles.

East End Boys
The East End has always been a melting pot of cultures, religion and nationalities. However the East End Boys of this song are the New Blood making their fortunes in the City. Their fathers and Grandfathers were dockers, stevedores and warehousemen, whose jobs have been lost to the new container ports in Tilbury and Felixstowe. So the scrapheap for their progeny, then? Well, no! East End Boys were much more resourceful than that. They lived on their wits. Let’s not tar them all with the same brush, but a good many were getting good jobs in the city with the investment banks, who recognised kindred spirits in their near neighbours and decided to employ these hardworking chancers and risktakers. Thatcher’s children, the Yuppies, big braces and broad pinstripe. Little more than barrow boys generating wealth and prosperity on the trading floors. These are the conspicuous consumers shaping the new prosperous UK plc, barely a decade since Britain was the Sick Man of Europe. Capitalism’s grand illusion, with the benefit of hindsight.

West End Girls
Come and see the sleazy West End! And Neil Tennant knows his West End well; the clippers, the hookers, the pickpockets, the homeless and hopeless as well as the tourists sucked in by the bright lights and neon. Tourist trap clip joints, dodgy casinos, dodgier cinemas, peep shows, anonymous doorways with their “Young Model Upstairs” signs. All are included within Soho’s square mile. By the 80s this part of London is in steep decline, Paul Raymond’s mini empire is crumbling and the dirty mac brigade have all but retreated. Which begs the question “what is Soho for?”. The mods cling to the memory of what Carnaby Street “was” rather than “is”. The movie production suites around Soho Square are turning over a respectable trade, but the 80’s British movie industry is dependent on crumbs from the Hollywood table. Theatreland is doing well with Rice and Lloyd Webber putting bums on seats, but who wants to hang around when the curtain goes down? The revival begins in Soho’s gay quarter, Old Compton Street. Ed’s diner, Boy, Zilli’s, Ronnie Scotts, The Admiral Duncan. Here is Soho’s future, Neil and Chris’ spiritual home.

All this is suggested as arcana and metaphor, but sounds like “The Rough Guide To London”. The vid underlines Tennant’s intentions with montages of London faces and well known sights, but the most intriguing part of the vid is Tennant and Lowe’s relationship. In the performance piece, Lowe is a mere spectre by the shutter doors, and is constantly a pace behind Tennant through Waterloo Station’s concourse. The suggestion must be Lowe as rent boy to Tennant’s indulgent patron, a theme they return to later in their career.
Tennant’s influence is TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, as Tom rightly says. A veritable motherlode of arcana and metaphor.
Whether his noble intentions are successful here are open to debate, but there is no doubting his pop nous. West End Girls comes in after a period of chart mediocrity. The more interesting stuff is happening in clubs and gigs across the country. The ‘burbs are rocking to a Hip Hop beat. The Halls of Residence are awash with “sensitive” Smiths fans, hanging on Mozza’s every word. The States present us the glittering baubles of Prince, Madonna and MJ. The goths have The Sisters Of Mercy, Killing Joke and The Cult. The JAMC and My Bloody Valentine spawn an army of shoegazers. The charts are suddenly losing their relevance after New Pop’s triumphalism fizzles out. Then along comes Tennant and Lowe to reclaim pop and give it back to the people as a belated Christmas present adorned with their own glittering baubles. But this is grown-up pop. All the Ants and Durannies and Spandaus have grown up and gone to University or the JobCentre, feeling as though they have been cheated out of their birthright. They now have The Pet Shop Boys to adore. Perhaps 1986 promises more than we thought. Tom Watkins knows what we want and we consume conspicuously.

It’s a 10 for me too. In fact this is my favorite song of all time!

I also want to second the love for “Little Black Dress” by WEG. I still believe it’s better than anything the Pet Shop Boys have done this decade.