The best bit of West End Girls - Pet Shop Boys

Call the police, there's a bangin' tune around!

Overture

It’s sunny!!!!!! Kind of! But despite sporadic rainy intervals, we are officially wearing shorts! Albeit with an emergency jumper! But our washing is drying a little bit quicker! And I am *still* mainlining the Challengers soundtrack!!! We did it, Joe! Sort of!

Before you know it, we’ll have the Olympics, Wimbledon, and other things that make me feel bad for not being good at any sports. But also: the-hopeful-decimation-of-the-Torys-season, festival season, package holiday season, how-much-are-they-charging-for-a-99-ice-cream-these-days?!-season, realising-how-dusty-the-house-is-season... and much, much more. It’s called “summer”. Look it up.

You may think this is all leading up to me talking about some great summer bop of the ages. But it isn’t, really. This is just preamble. Actually, today’s song sounds better on a rainy day IMO - which is just as well, considering this sad, sorry excuse for a British summer so far.

Tbqph, this song sounds good whatever the weather. And it has done for the past 40 years.

Today’s song | West End Girls – Pet Shop Boys  

Today we’re heading back to the mid-80s, visiting two of the best to ever do it: Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, my friends and yours, the Pet Shop Boys. Over the past four or so decades, these two have delivered masterclass after masterclass in synthy symphonies. And they still continue to do so to this very day, churning out regular albums faster than you can say “Rihanna follow-up”.

If you’re a pop fan, you’ll have a favourite Pet Shop Boys song. Probably a meticulously put-together top five/top ten if we’re being honest. Or maybe you’re making a playlist of deep-cuts and B-sides with an interlocking theme as we speak.

But it will always be West End Girls for me, often championed as one of the duo’s best, winning countless awards, always popping up intermittently in ‘best-of’ lists, and generally, just being so fucking great. Whether you were an 80s kid or discovered it 20 years later, the song haunts you.

NB: I have a very specific memory of West End Girls being on an episode of Art Attack in the 90s, but I can’t find any proof of this. Have I Mandela Effected myself? Please get in touch if you have any intel.

Such exquisite pop cuisine usually comes from combining many bold flavours – and this is no exception, culminating in an appetising combo of TS Eliot and Grandmaster Flash. The result was a spoken word disco psalm that perfectly captured existential Thatcher-era 80s Britain. Delicious!

The (whole lotta) history

West End Girls was included in a selection of 12 tracks (alongside other soon-to-be classics, such as Rent and It’s a Sin) that Neil and Chris initially recorded for producer Bobby Orlando – essentially creating the groundwork for the Pet Shop Boys’ sound. For West End Girls, Neil endeavoured to create a dark ode to late-night Soho and ‘the pressure of living in a modern city’, evoking the gothic, urban melancholy of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. (If you read the poem in Neil’s voice, it genuinely works!)

Another big influence for the spoken word sections was Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’, a huge 80s hit across the pond at the time. In turn, Neil rapping about the clandestine activities of London life with his British accent worked to alluring effect.

But despite the song’s suggestive themes and that goddamn sexy trumpet, Neil said of the song:

‘A lot of people assumed the song was about prostitutes and of course, typically, it didn't even enter my head. It was meant to be about class, about rough boys getting a bit of posh. It's opposites - west/east, lower class/upper class, rich/poor, work/play. And it's about the idea of escape. There is a huge thing about escaping in our songs.’

Interestingly, the track was initially way more stripped-back (this was the 1984 version, produced by Bobby Orlando) but when the song passed on to producer Stephen Hague, it was re-recorded to be more atmospheric, with backing vocals and yes, a sexy trumpet. Neil described the new production ‘like a film noir’ and ‘quite sinister’.

Play the Bobby Orlando mix - it is pretty different. Dare we say, a bit funky, even? Perhaps *too* funky, in hindsight. And we wouldn’t have my favourite bit of the song without its murkier evolution.

The perfect moment

This is so painful, because the whole song is a perfect moment. However, this bit is something else.

Yes okay fine, it’s the intro. You knew it would be the intro. But can you blame me for surrendering to this 45 second gift of soulful, eerie bliss? That foreboding drum? The evocative sounds of the city? Those lovely slidey synths? The BOW BOW BOW bit?!?! And one of the most perfect opening lines in pop history: “sometimes you’re better off dead/there’s a gun in your hand/and it’s pointing at your head…”

No song creates a mood in its first minute better than this.

Fun fact - the opening lyrics came to Neil after staying up late one night watching an old James Cagney gangster film. Take note, sleepy writers!

Honourable men-tune

We know the song bops all the way through, but let’s have a shoutout to the trumpet solo (actually created through an emulator by Stephen Hague, playing the wrong notes to make it sound even more jazzy) and vocalist (and frequent Bob Dylan collaborator! Why not!) Helena Spring’s “how faaa-aaar have you beeee-eeen” bit. Fair play, everyone put in a great shift.

Mondegreen alert!

Just admit it, we all did it.

Final pop ponderings

I mean, what else is there to say! West End Girls’ legacy speaks for itself. And when the 1985 version hit the No.1 spot in the UK charts, it paved the path for so many future PSB barnstormers that are also, quite simply, very very good. Sure, I’ll take a Pulitzer for this extremely insightful opinion, thanks!

There is just something about the gritty and desolate West End Girls that continues to stand out - the way it spoke for its time, the now-legendary music video (standing next to a garage door in a long coat is the coolest thing you can possibly do!) and the way the song’s themes continue to echo into our present day: alienation, consumerism, class struggles, sexy trumpets.

The song’s immortality is clear: the boys even created an updated “lockdown version” during the pandemic. They changed the lyrics “from Lake Geneva to the Finland station” during a Glastonbury set to “from Mariupol to Kyiv Station” showing solidarity with Ukraine. The Guardian even went so far as to call it “the greatest British No.1 of all time.” (I’m not arguing!)

Look at it this way: if you’re getting your own Flight of the Conchords pastiche (which is equally a good song in its own right!) you’re doing okay. So I’ll leave you with it.